19th century
A Doll's House, Lyric Hammersmith review - Ibsen tellingly transposed to colonial IndiaThursday, 12 September 2019
Newly arrived from a much-lauded stint at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, Rachel O'Riordan has undertaken to make "work of scale by women" during her time as artistic director of the Lyric. What better place to start than with Ibsen's once-shocking... Read more... |
A. N. Wilson: Prince Albert review - entertaining bio is a total treatSunday, 01 September 2019
Albertopolis! The Royal Albert Hall, the Albert Memorial and countless Albert Squares, Roads and Streets all commemorate Britain’s uncrowned king. In this mesmerising biography, novelist and historian A. N. Wilson’s admiration and affection for... Read more... |
Prince Albert: A Victorian Hero Revealed, Channel 4 review - dramatic documentary filled with intelligent detailSaturday, 24 August 2019
It may sound perverse to say it, but Albert was the perfect twenty-first century prince. Thrust into the heart of the British monarchy he was simultaneously an oppressed outsider who – despite his reputation as the most handsome prince in Europe (... Read more... |
The Gondoliers, National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company review - charm where it mattersMonday, 29 July 2019
Once more, gondolieri! Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers leaps into life to the sound of a saltarello: a blaze of Mediterranean sunshine and good natured exuberance that sweeps you some 20 minutes into Act One on the same unbroken surge of... Read more... |
L'Arlesiana, Opera Holland Park review - at last, a rare Italian gemFriday, 26 July 2019
So many second-rate Italian operas with good bits have been served up by Opera Holland Park and glitzier UK companies; despite best intentions and fine execution, none of the works by Mascagni, Zandonai, Alfano, Leoni, Ponchielli or Giordano has... Read more... |
Peter Gynt, National Theatre review - towering protagonist, middle-way productionThursday, 11 July 2019
Like Hamlet and both parts of Goethe's Faust, with which it shares the highest peak of poetic drama, Ibsen's Peer Gynt is very long, timeless enough to resonate in a contemporary setting and sufficiently ambiguous in its mythic treatment of the... Read more... |
Eugene Onegin/Georgiana, Buxton Festival review - poetry and pantomimeThursday, 11 July 2019
It’s the saddest music in the world: the quiet heartbeat and falling melody with which Tchaikovsky opens his opera Eugene Onegin. Imagine a whole society, a whole lifetime of solitude, longing and disillusion, evoked in a single bass note and a few... Read more... |
La Fille du Régiment, Royal Opera review - enjoyable but questionable revivalTuesday, 09 July 2019
On paper, this might seem like a revival too far, a production clearly intended as a vehicle for world-class singers being tacked on the end of the Covent Garden season, and without any big names in sight. But it turns out that Laurent Pelly’s... Read more... |
Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet, Royal Academy review – strange and intriguingSaturday, 29 June 2019
Félix Vallotton is best known for his satirical woodcuts, printed in the radical newspapers and journals of turn-of-the-century Paris. He earned a steady income, for instance, as chief illustrator for La Revue blanche, which carried articles and... Read more... |
Anna Bolena, Longborough Festival Opera review - Henry VIII's court becomes a sexualised death cultMonday, 24 June 2019
Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived. Anne Boleyn is number two on the list, so anyone who can remember even that much Tudor history can guess that Donizetti’s Anna Bolena is not going to end well. The overture has hardly ended... Read more... |
Boris Godunov, Royal Opera review - cool and surgical, with periodic chillsThursday, 20 June 2019
Suppose you're seeing Musorgsky's selective historical opera for the first time in Richard Jones's production, without any prior knowledge of the action. That child's spinning-top on the dropcloth: why? Then the curtain rises and we see Bryn Terfel'... Read more... |
Edouard Vuillard: The Poetry of the Everyday, Holburne Museum, Bath review - dizzying pattern and colourTuesday, 11 June 2019
A beguiling collection of small paintings by Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) forms an exhibition from his early career. It is a vanished world of domesticity in a Parisian flat, where Vuillard lived with his mother, a seamstress, for almost all his... Read more... |
