ancient Greece
Antigone, BarbicanFriday, 06 March 2015
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,... Read more... |
Witches and Wicked Bodies, British MuseumTuesday, 21 October 2014
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... Read more... |
HerculesWednesday, 23 July 2014
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... Read more... |
Medea, National TheatreTuesday, 22 July 2014
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... Read more... |
The Last Days of Troy, Royal Exchange, ManchesterWednesday, 14 May 2014
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... Read more... |
Thebans, English National OperaSunday, 04 May 2014
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-... Read more... |
300: Rise of an EmpireFriday, 07 March 2014
300: Rise of an Empire is the follow-up to perhaps the most homoerotic film of all time, 300 - a film whose obsession with the well-lubricated muscularity of the male form was matched only by its unabashed exaltation of ultra-violence (rendered... Read more... |
Atlantis, BBC OneSaturday, 28 September 2013
Ancient Greece has been having a bit of a run lately what with Dr Michael Scott’s recent primers on Greek culture and society and the like. There are, however, certain parts of the television audience a Hellenistic scholar cannot reach, and they are... Read more... |
The Lightning Child, Shakespeare's GlobeThursday, 19 September 2013
Having boundaries actually sets us free. So Neil Armstrong's wife argues. She is dogmatically keen to stop her husband rocketing off to the moon in the first scene of The Lightning Child – a groundbreaking show in so far as it's the first musical to... Read more... |
Total War: Rome IIFriday, 13 September 2013
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... Read more... |
Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth, BBC FourWednesday, 28 August 2013
Brush up your geography and dust down your history – Dr Michael Scott is investigating the sources of Greek drama and their influence on all theatre to the present day. But he isn’t going to make it easy. The opening instalment of Ancient... Read more... |
Who Were the Greeks?, BBC Two/Eye Spy, Channel 4Friday, 28 June 2013
When television goes off exploring classical civilisation, you can hear those lines from The Life of Brian chiming in your head. “Apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater... Read more... |
