Advance booking for the theatre can backfire. I saw Medea at London's Almeida Theatre yesterday, so missed the UK’s major television event – the final of the Great British Bake Off. Medea was, yeah, interesting and all – but it didn’t produce the swirls of joy and empathetic tears provoked by Nadiya Hussain’s three-tiered victory. I have only just left BBC i-player, my cheeks a lemon drizzle of … [Read more...]
Universal mother
Medea is back, and it grips like a mastiff. No ancient tragedy feels more modern, despite its extremity: maternal infanticide and divine reclamation. NT Live sends its tightly-wound new production into cinemas this evening. How to account for a classic that clings? On the Paris Review website recently, Joseph Luzzi contrasted the currency of two 19th century Italian novels: Manzoni’s The … [Read more...]
The M word
Misogyny, hanging round our culture like a bad smell, has floated past my theatrical radar recently. From London, the critic Andrew Haydon boggled that Medea ('pretty anti-woman propaganda, saying that they’re well nuts and a more than a bit witchy?') and A Streetcar Named Desire ('intensely woman-hating') still received major revivals, calling out both plays as misogynist, with their protagonists … [Read more...]