Victorian
Richard Dadd: The Art of Bedlam, Watts GalleryFriday, 26 June 2015
The Watts Gallery in rural Surrey is a very genteel setting for a show by a figure who for most of his life was denied polite society. Richard Dadd spent 42 years in mental hospitals, first at Bethlem, then Broadmoor. As one can infer, he was... Read more... |
BloodborneFriday, 03 April 2015
Should games be challenging? One of the perennial design challenges of videogames. Make a game too tough and you'll put people off; make it too easy and you'll offer no interest. And then there's the tricky issue of individuals having vastly... Read more... |
Sculpture Victorious, Tate BritainFriday, 27 February 2015
Recent attitudes to Victorian Britain have changed radically. The popular view used to be of a period filled with a kind of smug imperial confidence, underwritten by the increasing wealth of the industrial age. This ingrained assumption was perhaps... Read more... |
Sunless SeaFriday, 20 February 2015
The gloom of Victorian London might be shared with The Order: 1886, also reviewed this week, but the games couldn't be further apart. In Sunless Sea, you play a nautical captain, navigating the "Unterzee" of the waters surrounding a fallen,... Read more... |
The Order: 1886Thursday, 19 February 2015
In terms of atmosphere, The Order: 1886 wins out in spades. It's just everywhere else that it falls down, unfortunately.Sneaking through the Ripper-stalked streets of an alternative Victorian Whitechapel, you can almost smell the stink of the slums... Read more... |
Whitworth Art Gallery Reopens with a Meteoric BangWednesday, 18 February 2015
The Whitworth Art Gallery was showered with meteors in a spectacle devised by the artist Cornelia Parker on its reopening weekend – appropriately Valentine’s Day. The £15m project (architects MUMA) has doubled the exhibition spaces, reclaimed the... Read more... |
The Art of Gothic: Britain's Midnight Hour, BBC FourMonday, 27 October 2014
Andrew Graham-Dixon’s villainous alter ego got a second airing tonight in his exploration of 19th-century Britain’s love of all things Gothic. Last week we saw him hanging about in decaying graveyards, or appearing, wraithlike in a dank corner of a... Read more... |
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Opera Holland ParkSunday, 03 August 2014
“What does opera have to say to the under-30s?” asked Alexandra Coghlan on theartsdesk yesterday. The question “what does opera have to say to the under-10s?” has had to wait until today. For although yesterday afternoon’s performance of Will Todd’s... Read more... |
Shopgirls: the True Story of Life Behind the Counter, BBC TwoWednesday, 25 June 2014
We last saw Dr Pamela Cox presenting BBC Two's Servants: the True Story of Life Below Stairs. Having done the academic's-eye-view of Upstairs Downstairs, she has now moved on to the world of Mr Selfridge in this three-part survey of the rise of the... Read more... |
HMS Pinafore, Hackney EmpireMonday, 17 February 2014
Showboys will be boys – gym-bunny sailors, in this instance – as well as sisters, cousins, aunts, captain’s daughters and bumboat women. We know the ropes by now for Sasha Regan’s all-male Gilbert and Sullivan: a loving attempt to recreate, she says... Read more... |
The Victorian in the Wall, Royal Court Theatre UpstairsFriday, 17 May 2013
The past: it’s etched into the fabric not just of our lives, but of the architecture that surrounds us – the streets we tread, the buildings where we work or make our homes. In this whimsical, winning 90-minute piece by Will Adamsdale, the past has... Read more... |
Ayahs, lascars and munshis: staging The EmpressWednesday, 17 April 2013
It was over four years ago that I was commissioned by Michael Boyd, then artistic director of the RSC, to write a play which I had vaguely pitched to him as “a costume drama set in the nineteenth century with Asians running around in it”. And... Read more... |
