ancient Greece
David Nice
You don’t know Homer’s Iliad until you’ve heard it read aloud, all 24 books – not quite every line, but almost – and 16 hours of it. Yesterday's marathon was surely something like the events in which the Athenians kept the oral tradition going during their great Dionysiac festivals - in most things, at least, except the original feats of memory.For “you don’t” above, read “I didn’t”, since despite having studied several of the later books for ancient Greek A-level, then the first 12 over one university year, it wasn’t until Simon Russell Beale started invoking the muse in the Read more ...
David Nice
This is the real Greek, bloody-fantastical thing. After the fascinating but flawed attempt to bring Aeschylus’s Oresteia into the 21st century, the Almeida has turned to a more tradition-conscious kind of experiment with Euripides’ last and greatest masterpiece. James Macdonald’s production daringly fuses operatic settings of the essential Bacchic choruses by Orlando Gough, stunningly executed by 10 women, a mostly faithful translation rather than a “new version” by Anne Carson blending irony with pure poetry, and a central performance by Ben Whishaw surpassing expectations as an ideally Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How do you live a good life? Is wealth a good thing? How do you create a just society? The United Kingdom's electorate recently pondered such questions in the polling booth, and made their decision. The Labour Party is agonising over them as it chooses its next leader. And yet while these anxieties may feel very now, they have deep roots. According to the historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes, such questions first crystallised in the minds of three thinkers, born within a century of one another 2,500 years ago, who are the subject of her new series. Across three episodes, Genius of the 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 ...
Tom Birchenough
I’ve got no idea what the opposite of dumbing down might be. Swatting up? Whatever it is, it’s surely going to set the tone for the next couple of Friday nights on BBC Two, where Sex and the Church is as erudite a piece of television as we’re going to get in a long time. The fact that it’s on Two, which was home to presenter Diarmaid MacCulloch’s previous series A History of Christianity and How God Made the English, further encourages: this new one would certainly have fitted in on BBC Four, so it must have been past ratings that have kept MacCulloch on the senior channel.I confess I’d never Read more ...
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 ...
Demetrios Matheou
Last year the London stage was treated to an electrifying Medea and an intelligent, refreshing Electra, at The National and the Old Vic respectively. Now it’s the turn of the Barbican to unleash the formidable force of Greek tragedy upon us, switching from Euripedes to Sophocles and a heroine who, compared to those others, is a pure-hearted innocent.And how does the production compare? Favourably. In fact, Belgian director Ivo van Hove has offered a modern-dress interpretation as thrilling as his take on Miller’s A View From The Bridge, currently playing across town. It’s elegantly staged, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Wicked women have always sold well, but more than that, they have fired the artistic imagination in a quite exceptional way. Exploring the depiction of the witch from the 15th to the 19th century, this exhibition is packed with images that must number amongst the most dramatic, atmospheric and gripping ever made, proof if it were needed of the energising effects of a truly inspiring subject. From wizened hags to beautiful seductresses, witches could embody every sin and vice associated with women, and long after the fear of witchcraft itself had subsided, witches served as repositories for Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A Grecian palace on a studio lot. Gods wander about among the plywood and polystyrene looking deific. As a child is raised to the heavens a voice(over) is heard to intone the following legend.Oracle: You don’t want to believe those myths you’ve read in boys’ own books about the heroes of ancient times. That Roger Lancelyn Green is so tediously on-message. Take the dozen labours of the demi-god Hercules…Young mother of Hercules (from the pages of Playboy): Wait up while I flash a 3D breast at everyone's goggles, but just once or we'll never get our PG rating. Now let’s get on with the retarded Read more ...
Heather Neill
We know how the story ends, but then so did Euripides' first audience in Athens in 431 BC. Medea was already a familiar character of myth, a sorceress whose ungovernable passion for Jason led her to commit horrible murders when he abandoned her for another woman. Now, as in the Golden Age of Greek drama, the chief interest is in the way the tale is told. And the National Theatre has assembled quite a team for the purpose.Ben Power, writer of this version, and Carrie Cracknell, director, have both dealt with the classics in innovative ways before. Power's A Tender Thing retold Romeo and Juliet Read more ...
philip radcliffe
By picking his way through Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid - written 600 years later - Simon Armitage has it all, including the horse and Helen, each of whom in their way enable the hordes to breach Troy’s gates. What with that and the mingling of mortals and gods, not to mention the 100,000 troops that Agamemnon leads across the Aegean to rescue Helen, there’s a lot to attempt to pack into this theatre’s intimate space in three hours. Rather too much as it turns out.In order to accommodate the action, director Nick Bagnall has moved slightly away from the usual in-the-round Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s been a bloody week on the London stage. First Titus Andronicus maims and mutilates at the Globe, and now at English National Opera Frank McGuinness and Julian Anderson bring us a distillation of Sophocles’ three Theban plays, complete with eye-gouging and assorted hangings. But while Lucy Bailey found eloquent meaning in Shakespeare’s brutality, could Anderson do the same in this, his first opera?This is thoughtful, hard-fought art that resists immediate assimilation. Thebans is the considered response to recent ENO premieres – the baffling Sunken Garden and insubstantial Two Boys – Read more ...