Greece
fisun.guner
We think we know it when we see it. But how, pray, do we define beauty? The ancient Greeks thought they had the measure of it. In the 4th century BC, the “chief forms of beauty,” according to Aristotle, were “order, symmetry and clear delineation.” A century earlier, during the golden age of Athens, Polykleitos, one of the ancient world’s greatest sculptors, set out the precise ratios for the ideal male form in a treatise he called The Canon. And a century before him, Pythagoras instructed that it was numbers that revealed the hidden order of the world – a perfection revealed through an Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Jacobean playwright John Ford is flavour of the season at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. His better-known, and simply better, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, opened the venue’s new programme last autumn and is followed now by that work’s younger sibling, The Broken Heart, in a production that rather gloriously surprises.Director Caroline Steinbeis has talked of the elements of soap opera she found in the play, and overlays the traditional business of revenge tragedy with lashings of humour, moving the action on speedily and taking it briskly around the theatre’s auditorium to boot. It’s an Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Russia’s national gallery, the Tretyakov, bears the name of its founder Pavel Tretyakov, the 19th-century merchant who bequeathed his huge collection of Russian art to the city of Moscow in 1892. His bust stands proudly overseeing the entrance to the gallery’s old building, a fine, purpose-built example of early Russian 20th-century architecture.But the Tretyakov has a new wing, dating from the mid-1980s and less architecturally august, that is far less known (and much less visited), which houses its collection of Russian and Soviet art of the 20th century. If any figure deserved a memorial Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Hugely underrated, The Two Faces of January packs more filmmaking power than, at least, its poster would ever suggest. Based on the Patricia Highsmith novel, which puts it streets ahead of most films, Two Faces... has a superb ensemble cast: Viggo Mortensen is the alluring Chester MacFarland, travelling with his equally alluring wife Colette (Kirsten Dunst) and their accidental tour guide, the charming Greek-American Rydal Keener (Oscar Isaac). Set in 1962, the couple are sightseeing and become entangled with Rydal, a small-time crook. Coming to their hotel quite innocently, Rydal sees Read more ...
edward.seckerson
How much familial dysfunction and lust - whether for sexual gratification or revenge - can one take in a single weekend? Salome and Elektra back-to back may on paper seem like a feast of divine decadence but no sooner had one become accustomed to the sickly sweet air of the former when the putrefaction of the latter (I always think that Strauss’ orchestra is in the final stages of decay with Elektra) filled one’s nostrils - and ears. Then there was the little matter of inevitable comparisons, of Salome - with Stemme, Runnicles and his fabulous Deutsche Oper Berlin Orchestra - being one of the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The sign of a good film is one that lingers, one that you return to after days, months or even years – a snapshot of an image, a feeling that struck a chord within you, a memorable character that inspired or excited, or a line that you just can’t shake. But what of one that does the total opposite, that makes you appalled and apathetic in equal measure so that you to want to forget it immediately and never return to it?An 11-year-old girl jumps to her death from the balcony of her family’s apartment on the day of her birthday. To begin with, every line of Miss Violence could be misconstrued Read more ...
Naima Khan
Let's say Greek tragedies exist in a multiverse where the same stories play out simultaneously in thousands of ways. And let's say we're given free rein to argue over those stories, debate their morals and characters and disagree fundamentally over the story arc itself. This is what the German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig explores in his take on the Greek general Idomeneus, who led the Cretan armies to Troy and also inspired a Mozart opera (Idomeneo). His 70-minute play embraces the possibilities of story-telling rather more than the story itself. Translated by David Tushingham and Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Miss Violence opens with an 11th birthday party whose brightly coloured balloons, pointed party hats and forced family jollity might seem unremarkable if a little girl hadn't chosen to stick Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love" on the stereo - not only Cohen at his most sinisterly sensual but a song inspired by the Holocaust. He wrote it after learning orchestras were a feature of some concentration camps, and that they were sometimes pressed into playing through brutality, so that their music became horribly anomalous accompaniments to punishments or violent death. Given the Read more ...
David Nice
Tippett’s selective, often compelling and mostly well-structured take on Trojan War myths will never capture the wider public’s imagination as much as even the least of Britten’s operas. His ideas sometimes pierce the soul but don’t stick there in the same way, and the human interest level never goes so deep. The sounds, though, are something else: a splintering of interest groups, or even a single instrument, to flank each character.We ought to be gripped by the selective clusters from the opening trumpet fanfares – “heralds before the curtain” – and yowling offstage chorus. James Conway’s Read more ...
David Nice
“Strike again,” cries Elektra as her brother stabs their mother to death. It’s third strike lucky for this Covent Garden production of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s singular mythic horror. In previous manifestations of designer-director Charles Edwards’ rather over-freighted but ever improving staging, conductors Semyon Bychkov and Mark Elder, as well as top-less soprano Lisa Gasteen and the more nuanced but sometimes underpowered Susan Bullock, missed the heart of the matter. Known sensation Andris Nelsons and the much-anticipated Christina Goerke were much more likely to hit 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 ...
emma.simmonds
Before Midnight is the third part in Richard Linklater's romantic series starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as star-crossed lovers Jesse and Celine. It's a sequence of films that began in 1995 with Before Sunrise (pictured below right), where the two spent a night wandering Vienna, falling in love. That was followed nine years later by 2004's equally delightful and even more insightful Before Sunset, which followed them on an afternoon rendezvous through Paris. Although they had become somewhat jaded in the intervening years apart and despite complications, the end of that second movie was Read more ...