Jobs
Laura de Lisle
Robert Icke is an expert in corporate tragedy. I don’t mean that in a bad way - just that he has a penchant for taking classics (Hamlet, The Oresteia, Mary Stuart) and transporting them, with the help of designer Hildegard Bechtler, to the frosted-glass doors and pale wood of the boardroom. The Doctor, his 2019 swan song at the Almeida Theatre now transferred to the Duke of York’s Theatre, is an adaptation of a 1912 play by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. It’s a sharp-tongued vivisection of identity politics, anchored by an astonishing lead performance from Juliet Stevenson.Like all good Read more ...
David Nice
Eternal love is in the air, not seasonal fluff, at the Royal Opera this December. Later in the month Verdi’s most ecstatic duet, in Un ballo in maschera, will find his Riccardo and Amelia briefly playing Tristan and Isolde, very much in the shadow of not so much the greatest as the strangest love story ever told. Director Christof Loy underlines that strangeness and Wagner’s open questions at every point, never more heart-flippingly than when a big, middle-aged man lies full out on the floor singing “Let Tristan die” and his lover, on her knees behind him, leans over and declares tenderly but Read more ...