Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Barn Theatre online review - a dazzling adaptationTuesday, 23 March 2021![]() Let’s face it, most adaptations of classic novels are disappointingly pedestrian. They are so middle-of-the-road – fancy-dress characters speaking fancy-dress dialogue in fancy-dress plots. But there are memorable exceptions: Amy Heckerling’s film... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Freak ShowFriday, 08 March 2019![]() You might think an American high school comedy an unlikely place to locate a love letter to Oscar Wilde – even if there’s a flamboyantly gay story behind it. But Freak Show screenwriters Beth Rigazio and Patrick J Clifton, adapting James St James’... Read more... |
The Importance of Being Earnest, Vaudeville Theatre review - Sophie Thompson triumphantly tackles the handbag challengeFriday, 03 August 2018![]() Any actor playing Lady Bracknell must dread the moment when she (or, indeed, he) has to deliver that unforgettable line about a significant piece of hand luggage. Since Edith Evans's wavering, vibrato, multi-syllable version of "a handbag?",... Read more... |
The Happy Prince review - Wilde at heartFriday, 15 June 2018![]() Oscar Wilde did not have a dignified departure. As soon as he died, his body began to emit a river of fluids from various orifices. At the graveside in Père Lachaise there were unseemly scenes which no witness was indiscreet enough to describe, but... Read more... |
An Ideal Husband, Vaudeville Theatre review - unsettled evening leaves blood on Wilde's drawing-room furnitureFriday, 04 May 2018![]() Across London last night politicians waited anxiously to hear their fates, and things were no different at the Vaudeville Theatre, where the ongoing Oscar Wilde season took a topical turn with An Ideal Husband.Colliding drawing-room comedy and... Read more... |
Lady Windermere's Fan, Vaudeville Theatre review - Wilde abandonedTuesday, 23 January 2018![]() Imagine, if you will, discovering a ninth-rate old melodrama about upper-class nonsense, hiring a bunch of actors including a couple of starry friends big in comedy and putting it on stage. And then realising there’s a paying audience so, to make it... Read more... |
A Woman of No Importance, Vaudeville - Eve Best is superb as a woman scornedTuesday, 17 October 2017![]() In a rather clever wheeze, Dominic Dromgoole, former artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe – who therefore knows a thing or two about historically accurate stagings – has established Classic Spring, a new company dedicated to celebrating work by... Read more... |
Queer British Art 1861-1967, Tate BritainThursday, 20 April 2017![]() "Good for the history of music, but not for music," one of Prokofiev's professors at the St Petersburg Conservatoire used to say of artistically dubious works which created a splash, according to the composer's diaries. I'm not even sure that this... Read more... |
Travesties, Menier Chocolate FactoryWednesday, 05 October 2016![]() Is this the most dazzling play of a dazzling playwright? First staged in 1974, Travesties is the one which manages to squeeze avant-garde novelist James Joyce, Dada godfather Tristan Tzara and communist revolutionary Lenin into a story which... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Glass Key/The Blue DahliaFriday, 23 September 2016![]() In popular accounts of Hollywood history, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the insolent real-life first couple of Warner Bros film noirs, have traditionally overshadowed Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Paramount's fallen angels were quieter... Read more... |
The Importance of Being Earnest, Royal Opera, BarbicanWednesday, 30 March 2016![]() Some new operas worth their salt work a slow, sophisticated charm, but the handful that holler "masterpiece" grab you from the start and don't let go. Gerald Barry's shorn, explosive Wilde – more comedy of madness than manners – was so obviously in... Read more... |
The Importance of Being Earnest, Vaudeville TheatreThursday, 02 July 2015![]() Geoffrey Rush has done it, Gyles Brandreth has done it, Stephen Fry came close to doing it, and now David Suchet is giving it a go – donning drag and a perpetually disgusted expression to play everyone’s favourite drawing-room gorgon, Lady Bracknell... Read more... |
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