thu 28/03/2024

Wilde

The Importance of Being Earnest online review - Oscar Wilde updated for the Nando's generation

Oscar Wilde's fabulous play satirised Victorian England and contained a shedload of quotable quips. Now Yasmeen Khan has written an updated and uprooted version, set in the North of England, which takes aim at any number of class and ethnic...

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The Picture of Dorian Gray, Barn Theatre online review - a dazzling adaptation

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...

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DVD/Blu-ray: Freak Show

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’...

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The Importance of Being Earnest, Vaudeville Theatre review - Sophie Thompson triumphantly tackles the handbag challenge

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?",...

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The Happy Prince review - Wilde at heart

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...

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An Ideal Husband, Vaudeville Theatre review - unsettled evening leaves blood on Wilde's drawing-room furniture

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...

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Lady Windermere's Fan, Vaudeville Theatre review - Wilde abandoned

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...

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A Woman of No Importance, Vaudeville - Eve Best is superb as a woman scorned

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...

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Queer British Art 1861-1967, Tate Britain

"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...

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Travesties, Menier Chocolate Factory

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...

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Blu-ray: The Glass Key/The Blue Dahlia

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...

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The Importance of Being Earnest, Royal Opera, Barbican

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...

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