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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