ancient Egypt
David Nice
No gods, ancient Egyptian or otherwise; no sinister priest along the lines of Russia’s antichrist Patriarch Kiriil, sending soldiers to their deaths with the promise of heaven. Military ritual under what looks like a Russian/Chinese flag prevails in Robert Carsen’s severe take on Aida, more rigid than Verdi’s surprisingly unified late score - a musical masterpiece if not a dramatic one.With no Schiller or Shakespeare as base, only the Egyptians and international dignitaries to please for the opening of the Cairo Opera House, Verdi’s librettist Ghislanzoni and scenario deviser Auguste Mariette Read more ...
Charlie Stone
It is near impossible to imagine what the world would look like today if slavery and colonialism had never existed, let alone to write a book on the subject. Courttia Newland sets himself this daunting task in his latest novel, A River Called Time. Imaginative fiction rubs shoulders with a naturalistic impulse to create the world of the Ark, an alternate reality in which African cultural influences represent the status quo. Rooted in a decolonised narrative style where every turn of phrase brings forth the weight of its cultural implications, A River Called Time is a deeply thoughtful, Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Zeina Durra’s sophomore feature arrives on our screens a decade on from her debut, The Imperialists Are Still Alive! It was worth the wait. Luxor is a subtle, low-key drama that possesses an atmosphere of meditative calm, exploring a life that has seen too much pain and is desperate to find a way to heal. “Do you ever worry about opening up places that have been laid to rest?” asks Hana (Andrea Riseborough) to her one-time lover and archaeologist, Sultan (Karim Saleh). It goes without saying that it’s a loaded question. Until recently, Hana has been working as a doctor on the Jordanian- Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The theatre gods rained down not fire and pestilence, but a 45-minute technical delay on opening night of this substantially revised musical – a stage adaptation of the 1998 DreamWorks animated movie. But nothing could entirely halt this juggernaut; fittingly, for a show that earnestly values persistence and the unstoppable power of the epic.The story remains essentially faithful to its Biblical source, following Moses (Luke Brady, pictured below with Christine Allado) – child of a Hebrew slave family – from his fortunate adoption by Queen Tuya (Debbie Kurup), who finds him floating Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In 1922 Hussein Abdel-Rassoul, a water boy with Howard Carter’s archaeological dig in the Valley of the Kings, accidentally uncovered a step in the sand. It proved to be the breakthrough for which Carter, on the hunt for the final resting place of King Tutankhamun, was looking. The tomb they uncovered showed signs of having been robbed in ancient times but inside thousands of items remained, selected for a journey to the afterlife, which had lain undisturbed for millennia. The survival of some was almost inconceivable: wooden boxes, linen gloves, unguents and cases packed with food. Others Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Before we consign this miserable year to history, there are a few good bits to be salvaged; in fact, for the visual arts 2016 has been marked by renewal and regeneration, with a clutch of newish museum directors getting into their stride, and spectacular events like Lumiere London, and London’s Burning bringing light in dark times. 2016 leaves an impressive legacy of museum-building, too: Tate Modern opened its much needed extension in the summer, and the new Harley Gallery at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire provides a fittingly magnificent home for the treasures of the Portland Collection.The Read more ...
theartsdesk
In a gallery darkened to evoke the seabed that was its resting place for over a thousand years, the colossal figure of Hapy, the Egyptian god of the Nile flood, greets visitors just as it met sailors entering the busy trading port of Thonis-Heracleion some 2,000 years ago. One of the largest objects ever loaned to the British Museum, Hapy symbolises the prosperity bestowed upon Egypt by the river Nile, but whose waters ultimately brought about the destruction of the ancient cities of Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion, which subsided into the sea in the 8th century AD.They were known about through Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Modigliani’s short life was a template for countless aspiring artists who, in the period after his death in 1920, were only too willing to believe that a garret in Montmartre and a liking for absinthe held the secret to creative brilliance. While Modigliani certainly compounded poor health with a ruinous drink and drug addiction, this exhibition plays down his reputation as a hellraiser, suggesting instead an altogether quieter, although no less romantic character. Even relatively unembellished, the artist’s life has been so comprehensively mythologised that it feels as contrived as a film Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ridley Scott’s Biblical epic is dark in every way; couched in shadows, even before the hand of God rolls blackness over Egypt as He slays its first-born. Christian Bale’s Moses is indeed baleful, typically for this often wearisome star, a brooding, barking warrior-prophet. And the Old Testament’s huge capacity for slaughter is rightly seen by Pharaoh Ramesses (Joel Edgerton) as a contest to find whose deity is “better at killing”. It’s a long way from Chuck Heston, as Scott attempts a realist religious film, except when God speaks to Moses in the form of a sinister, petulant child with more Read more ...
Simon Munk
The greatest strategy videogames deliver a balance of time to think and pressure to act. The greatest strategy videogames deliver the thrill of battle mixed with clear strategic choice. Several entries in the Total War series count as great strategy games. But not this one. The eighth in the series fails on two distinct fronts, both in terms of execution – vital to keep its hardcore of fans engaged – and in terms of engaging content for new players.Like most of the rest of the series, Total War: Rome II has two separate but linked main modes. A gigantic Risk-style top-down map of most of Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Ashmolean Museum opens the doors to its Egyptian and Nubian galleries tomorrow and in these six refurbished rooms you’ll be able to see one of the greatest collections (among some 40,000 antiquities) outside Cairo. Designed by the architect Rick Mather, the galleries cover 5,000 years of human history, including objects that have been part of the museum’s collection since it opened in 1683. These have been gathered from more than 100 archaeological sites in Egypt and what is now Sudan (Nubia).Highlights include the Shrine of Taharqa (c 680 BC), built at Kawa in Sudan. The intricately Read more ...
judith.flanders
David Nixon has been artistic director of Northern Ballet for a decade, and it’s probably safe to say he is the king of the story ballet: Wuthering Heights, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Madame Butterfly, Dracula – if it’s got a story, he is, seemingly, willing to tell it. As Christopher Wheeldon’s recent Alice in Wonderland for the Royal Ballet showed, this is not as easy as might first appear. Nixon shoots straight from the hip: he is interested in narrative, he loves answering the question, “What happened then?”In Cleopatra, of course, it’s more a question of what didn’t happen to her: in Read more ...