The National Theatre and Headlong’s production of Duncan Macmillan’s new play, People, Places & Things, has got a well-merited transfer to the West End at Wyndham’s Theatre, with a stunning central performance by Denise Gough that has got the never superlative-shy London critics over-excited. It is a gruelling role, with Ms Gough scarcely off stage for two and a half hours and even, … [Read more...]
Archives for March 2016
Towards the Perfect Identification of Matter and Form, but More Myth than Man?
"He is typical of that aspiration of all the arts towards music," wrote Pater of Giorgione. “In the Age of Giorgione” at the upstairs Sackler Gallery of the Royal Academy (until 5 June) is a specific view of Venetian Renaissance painting and drawing (excepting one relief sculpture) in the first decade of the sixteenth century, limited (mostly) to works that have sometimes been … [Read more...]
Juggling with monotheism – Akhnaten makes a spectacle of himself
For all the thunder that surrounds his productions, Philip Glass is undersung and underpraised. His superb memoir, Words without Music, recounts how he entered the University of Chicago, aged 16, without having finished high school. He left, I think, in 1956, three years before I entered U of C as a first-year undergraduate. He left a few traces of himself behind, and much later I discovered that … [Read more...]
Don lovable (but three-quarters mad)
By a coincidence that is actually no such thing, but accidents of calendar-changing and record-keeping, on April 23rd this year we mark the 400th anniversary of the deaths of two giants of literature, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes. It is both wonderful and somehow generous of the Royal Shakespeare Company to have marked the occasion by commissioning a new adaptation of Don … [Read more...]