Wilde
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... |
Prom 58: Salome, Deutsche Oper Berlin, RunniclesSunday, 31 August 2014
So here’s where I join the ranks of Old Opera Bores by declaring this Salome, Nina Stemme, the best I’ve seen since Hildegard Behrens in 1978, and this Salome as in Richard Strauss’s Wilde opera from Donald Runnicles and his Deutsche Oper Berlin... Read more... |
Lady Windermere's Fan, King's Head TheatreMonday, 11 August 2014
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” declares Lord Darlington in Act II of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. He’s the classic Wildean cad - unprincipled, facetiously witty and in this production, possessed of the... Read more... |
The Importance of Being Earnest, Harold Pinter TheatreFriday, 18 July 2014
“Some might say we’re getting too old for this sort of thing,” declares Martin Jarvis’s Jack Worthing, going off Wlldean piste. Well, we did wonder whether the reunion of Jarvis with Nigel Havers’s Algernon after 32 years might not be some sort of... Read more... |
Dorian Gray, Riverside StudiosWednesday, 23 April 2014
Adapted by Linnie Reedman and with music by Joe Evans, Oscar Wilde’s only novel – the more scandalous original version serialised in 1890, which Wilde himself later expurgated – finds a new lease of life narrated by one of its minor characters:... Read more... |
The Importance of Being Earnest, Linbury Studio TheatreSaturday, 15 June 2013
If you were new to contemporary opera, you might think it was forbidden for modern works to be funny. Tragedy is still the default setting for major commissions. You only get serious money if you have serious thoughts and serious music, it seems. At... Read more... |
The Judas Kiss, Duke of York's TheatreTuesday, 22 January 2013
David Hare's 1998 play wasn't terribly well received when it was first produced by the Almeida; several critics regarded it as a thin work, weakly directed by Richard Eyre, and opined that Liam Neeson was miscast in the role of Oscar Wilde. Now... Read more... |
Lady Windermere’s Fan, Royal Exchange, ManchesterTuesday, 22 May 2012
It’s ironic that Oscar Wilde should escape to the Lake District in 1891 to write a play satirising London society, his first success in the theatre. He took such a shine to the region’s place names that he used them for some of the characters –... Read more... |
The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900, V&ASaturday, 02 April 2011
A cult suggests unhealthy worship, and there’s more than a whiff of that in the heady decadence of the V&A’s latest art and design blockbuster, The Cult of Beauty. This is an exhibition which examines how the influence of a small clique of... Read more... |
An Ideal Husband, Vaudeville TheatreThursday, 11 November 2010
Directing an Oscar Wilde play is rather like being a chaperone at a party: at best you are invisible, at worst actively intrusive. Marshalling Wilde’s politicos, dandies and duchesses through this latest ball of An Ideal Husband, Lindsay Posner is... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Actor Simon CallowSaturday, 02 October 2010
Simon Callow is on the phone when I arrive at his five-star digs, booming his apparently considerable misgivings vis-a-vis appearing in some reality TV exercise in which he will be asked to tutor disadvantaged kids in the mysterious arts of... Read more... |
Salome, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 24 June 2010
The last time I saw Oscar Wilde’s biblical tale it was performed by dancer Lindsay Kemp at the Roundhouse in London, back in the 1970s, in a production that was high on dope, incense, strange vocal drawling - and which transported you very quickly... Read more... |
