Photo: Catherine Ashmore for ENO [contextly_auto_sidebar] In the round of summer opera festivals (I am so lucky as to have two world-class local ones, Garsington and Longborough) the first to come up as Garsington’s Rossini, L’italiana in Algeri. It was most notable for its striking sets, by George Souglides. But not entirely in a good way. The gilded columns and Moorish … [Read more...]
What’s Happening Here? The Enigmatic Bhupen Khakhar
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All Tate Modern until 6 November 2016 Tate Modern is holding the first international retrospective of the interesting Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003). Their publicity says something that is obviously true, that this painter “played a central role in modern Indian art,” but also makes the larger claims that … [Read more...]
Country House Opera: Music and the Love of Food
[contextly_auto_sidebar] With its large orchestra and very large chorus, Eugene Onegin is Garsington Opera’s most ambitious production in its twenty-eight seasons. Conducted by the company’s artistic director, Douglas Boyd, and directed by Michael Boyd (no relation), artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 2002-2012, and with large-scale sets by Tom Piper, also a veteran of the … [Read more...]
Despite AA – Don’t Avoid People, Places & Things
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...]
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...]
The Sun Shines (not so) Bright on My Old Kentucky Home
Photograph of Ann Rice O'Hanlon Mural by Tim Webb, courtesy University of Kentucky When I was a kid in Lexington, KY, the town was known for two things: being the centre of the Bluegrass thoroughbred horse-breeding industry, and the University of Kentucky. When I was born in 1941 it was a small college town with a population of 45,000. My father was a graduate of UK. (BSc in … [Read more...]
How do you solve a problem like Leontes?
Kenneth Branagh fits the mould of one of the famous actor managers, so it is a happy accident that his new rep company is being housed at London’s Garrick Theatre. We were treated to a double bill on the formal first night of the new venture, with The Winter’s Tale rounded off by a Terence Rattigan double header: the dramatic monologue. All on Her Own serving as curtain-raiser … [Read more...]
The Sadly Unintelligible Hirsute Primate
There is so much to admire about the Old Vic’s production of The Hairy Ape – new Artistic Director Matthew Warchus’s selection of Richard Jones to direct the youthful playwright Eugene O’Neill’s searing drama; Stewart Lang’s genuinely imaginative designs; Mimi Jordan Sherin’s lighting vivid, sometimes shocking lighting; and Aletta Collins’s choreography that makes an expressionist ballet of … [Read more...]