Cornwall
stephen.walsh
It’s well-known that Wagner shelved The Ring two thirds of the way through in favour of Tristan with the aim of producing something that could be put on quickly in a conventional theatre. Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way. Yet Tristan, for all its technical difficulties, does lend itself to a relatively small stage. Its ensemble scenes are few and manageable, and for the rest it’s basically a conversation piece. For the barn theatre at Longborough it presents no insuperable problems, and it’s no surprise that the summer festival there has come up with a wonderful performance to add Read more ...
David Nice
When ENO announced its return to Gilbert and Sullivan, rapture at the news that Mike Leigh, genius Topsy-Turvy director, would be the master of wonderland ceremonies was modified by its choice, The Pirates of Penzance. Last staged at the Coliseum – and unmemorably – as recently as 2004, the fifth Savoy opera seemed less in need of revisiting than several larger-scale successors. By the end of last night, though, it was clear not only that Leigh and his musical team had been the best possible choice to tackle this work of classical perfection, but also that if operatic schedules could be Read more ...
David Nice
When does a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus make you laugh, cry and cheer as much as any of the famous set pieces? In this case when Major-General Stanley’s daughters “climbing over rocky mountain” wear pretty white dresses but turn out to be gym-trained showboys from the waist up, with their very own hair. That’s already one extra dimension to an operetta gem, but there’s so much more to enjoy around the crisp delivery of Gilbert’s undimmed lyrics.After plentiful touring, not least to Cate Blanchett’s Sydney Theatre, the business of Sasha Regan’s All-Male The Pirates of Penzance, to give this Read more ...
mark.hudson
Remember when festivals were only about what they were ostensibly about? When, say, Reading offered nothing beyond hard rock bar disgusting toilets, overpriced hamburgers and the prospect of a punch-up. When literary festivals dealt only in, well, literature. Nowadays, the average music festival offers all the amenities of a small city, not just music, but shopping, comedy, ballet and every form of spiritual and bodily therapy. But even in these times of festival as free-form lifestyle experience Port Eliot is something else.Arriving at the festival site, in the grounds of a neo-gothic Read more ...
David Nice
Of all the Savoy operas, this merry clash of pirates, policemen and a Major-General flanked by an entire chorus of loving daughters finds Sullivan most in tune with the mid-19th century Italian opera he so lovingly spoofs. So why can’t Martin Lloyd-Evans’s production be similarly fleet-footed with Gilbert’s resourceful, literate lyrics and whimsical plotting? Lloyd-Evans has at his disposal high-quality operatic soloists, a brilliant young chorus and a witty designer. All are squandered. The problem isn’t any clever uprooting into another time and place; after all, Scottish Opera, in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Many an English actor has found himself playing a suave and supercilious Hollywood villain, but none has done it with the exquisite finesse of George Sanders. His performance as Jack Favell in Rebecca only brought him a handful of scenes in a movie running over two hours, but he's not just one of the major pivots of the drama, but perhaps the most memorable character in a film teeming with splendid turns.Favell is the would-be nemesis of Larry Olivier's self-indulgently morbid Maxim de Winter, a short-tempered aristocrat severely burned by his marriage to the ravishing, charismatic but bad-to Read more ...
mark.hudson
Standing in Tate St Ives with the sun gleaming on the Atlantic, you wonder who they are, all these chilled, nonchalantly now people. Through the great curved window, the sun is setting over the barren headland of the Land’s End peninsular, the landscape that inspired Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson et al. But in here, in the Alex Katz private view, white-haired survivors of the town’s Fifties and Sixties heyday are outnumbered by people who look like they’ve stepped through a door from Hoxton and points further east in London’s underground art hinterland.There are a few Mayfair-on- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
As this remake’s director Rod Lurie, a former film journalist, well knows, competing with Sam Peckinpah is a loser’s game. His films are no more replicable than a Fred Astaire musical, inseparable from their demonic creator. Straw Dogs was his lone, 1971 excursion to Britain, with Dustin Hoffman as a mousey American mathematician who accompanies new wife Susan George’s return to her rustic Cornish home, which in Peckinpah’s hands is as hostile as the badlands his western heroes rode through. Hoffman’s civilised veneer cracks along with his marriage, and he becomes an atavistic killing machine Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Based in a collection of barns on a cliff top near Mevagissey on the south Cornish coast, Kneehigh theatre company has always looked defiantly away from London and out towards the sea and the wider world. This streak of independence runs right through the heart of the company, which produces extraordinarily inventive, highly visual and sometimes surreal work that has been seen all over the world, from Australia to Colombia to Broadway and, yes, the West End. It has also made Emma Rice, who has directed some of Kneehigh’s most successful shows, including The Red Shoes (2002 and 2010) and Brief Read more ...
mark.hudson
A retrospective at Tate St Ives can be a poisoned chalice for the major artist. It postpones his or her prospect of a showing at Tate Britain by a couple of decades, and can appear to consign them to the comfort zone of "Cornish Art": the heritage Modernism of Barbara and Ben, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron et al, stuff we love (well, most of us) because it reminds us of being on holiday, but may feel, in our heart of hearts, to be more than a touch minor. On the positive side, Peter Lanyon, who was killed in a gliding accident in 1964, isn’t around to mind, and there’s something to be said Read more ...
mark.hudson
As Tate St Ives gears itself up for a major exhibition on the iconic Cornish painter Peter Lanyon – a show that will reinforce St Ives’s claims as a modern art Mecca – the artist’s son is responding with an exhibition that gently sends up the whole St Ives art mythology, while revealing a fascinating, but little known aspect of the town’s history.Born in 1918, Peter Lanyon created exhilaratingly airy abstract paintings, underpinned by a sense of something dark and primal beneath the surface of things – images that may have influenced the abstract expressionism of Pollock and de Kooning Read more ...