ancient Greece
mark.kidel
Greek tragedy provides an unending source of material for the stage: in no other theatrical form have the labyrinths of human nature been so deeply explored: the rich tapestry of archetypal family conflicts, driven by instincts that force helpless characters into inescapable constellations of behavior that have resonated through several millennia.The Greeks understood, perhaps better than anyone, the perpetual ambiguity of human character. The divinities they imagined were never one thing or another, good or evil. Christianity and other religions of the book brought us a more rigid set of Read more ...
Ramin Gray
I’m sitting in a rehearsal room in Manchester preparing an Actors Touring Company’s new version of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women, listening to a group of young women raise their voices in praise of “untameable Artemis”. She’s the goddess of virginity among many other things. In this play she’s pitted against Aphrodite, the goddess of union, love and sex. The competing claims are complex: retaining one’s virginity implies choice, control, autonomy.But, as Benedick notes in Much Ado About Nothing, “the world must be peopled”, and when we understand that these women have travelled across the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
When a leading fringe theatre starts the year with a production whose gender ratio is 8:1 in favour of men, it had better have a good reason. When seven of those eight are wearing prosthetic penises, it had better have a very good reason. And a plan in place for a glut of women on its stage next season.Yet the sheer enjoyment to be had from Tony Harrison’s muscular rhyming verse is almost reason enough to revive The Trackers of Oxyrynchus after nearly 30 years. There’s also rarity value in its subject matter: the satyr play. Where a good handful of the many thousand tragedies that once played 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 ...
Peter Forbes
Scientists today tend to patronise the early Greek philosophers who, 2500 years ago, inaugurated enquiry into the nature of things. The Atomic Theory? A lucky guess, they allege. But Carlo Rovelli accords them, and especially Democritus, the key atomist, pride of place in his narrative: a see-saw battle between notions that the world consist of discrete units, beyond which we cannot go, and the idea of continuum without beginning or end.Rovelli gives these abstractions a local habitation and a name, using the insights of the Greek philosophers and the Latin poet Lucretius, who wove the atomic 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 ...
Marina Vaizey
The world of antiquity, from Greece to Rome, is both so familiar and so unknown. So it was more than welcome when the immensely knowledgable Professor Mary Beard – the role of the academic, she announced, is to make everything less simple – enthusiastically embarked on this four-part televisual history of Rome and its empire’s rise and fall. Inviting us to share her passionate interest in Roman history, she was almost obsessively determined to ensure that we too can understand why the subject is so compelling and important.The first instalment included examinations of the city of Rome, Read more ...
Alison Cole
This exhibition – the UK's first major exploration of the history of Sicily – highlights two astonishing epochs in the cultural history of the island, with a small bridging section in between. Spanning 4,000 years and bringing together over 200 objects, it aims to "reveal the richness of the architectural, archaeological and artist legacies of Sicily", focusing on the latter half of the seventh century BC and the period of Norman enlightenment, from AD1000 to 1250.For anyone who has visited Sicily’s ancient archaeological sites of Segesta, Agrigento and Selinunte, which still boast some of Read more ...
David Nice
With her strong, often fierce features and her convincing simulations of rage, Kate Fleetwood might have been born to play Medea. Unfortunately this isn’t Euripides’ Medea but Rachel Cusk’s free variations on the myth rather than the play. Many of her observations on marriage, motherhood and divorce are as penetrating and harsh as much of what we find in Greek tragedy, but they don’t join up to form the great dramatic arc you get in the original. Even director Rupert Goold, going way beyond the safe boundaries of so much British theatre as ever, can’t transcend the obstacles.In this last Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Iliad is the third collaboration between National Theatre Wales and “the two Mikes”, directorial duo Pearson and Brookes. The pair have been responsible for two previous highlights of the still young company’s back catalogue, The Persians (2010) and Coriolan/us (2012). Aeschylus was re-imagined on a Brecon Beacons military range and Shakespeare recast in an RAF aircraft hangar, so it is perhaps surprising that the ultimate epic drama of war is staged in an actual theatre, the compact and modern Ffwrnes in Llanelli.“War Music” is the generic title of Christopher Logue’s Homer, five full-length Read more ...
Heather Neill
The Trojan War has been going on for nine years when Homer's account begins in The Iliad. Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes have been developing their version of the story, using Christopher Logue's War Music, for nearly half as long. True, when they staged The Persians by Aeschylus for National Theatre Wales in 2010, The Iliad was not yet on the agenda, but now they say that a through-line is clear from that production to their present National Theatre Wales project."We couldn't have done Coriolan/us in 2012 without The Persians or this one without Coriolan/us," says Pearson. The link is their Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Heaven, or a lot of pagan gods at least, may know what was in the air 2500 years ago. Bettany Hughes has just finished her trilogy of philosophers from that millennium, and now we have Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill taking us genially around Athens, founded – you guessed – 2500 years ago and providing the template for cities ever since.The televisual essay is now an integral part of popularising ancient history. And what could be more persuasive (and helpful to the tourist industry) than visits to two great ancient cities – Rome follows next week – with a pat on our heads to remind us of Read more ...