ancient Greece
emma.simmonds
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 endlessly and often tediously in slow-mo). It was hardly high art or sound history, but it had aesthetic bravado and a certain logic, with the strangely sexy battles effectively evoking the Spartan idea of a glorious death. 300 was less swords and sandals, more pants and posturing and its sequel delivers (too) much of the same.The original's director Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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 to be found on a sofa looking for something to watch between Strictly and Casualty. In the event that such viewers choose not to gorge on The X Factor, they can now opt to spend time in Atlantis. Or should that be "Atlantis"?Atlantis has come along to occupy the fantasy slot previously occupied by Merlin. It opens in the present day as a buff Read more ...
kate.bassett
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 premiere at Shakespeare's reconstructed wooden "O", opening last night. Armstrong (Harry Hepple in a space suit) does not agree with his spouse's imposed limits, however. A lunar voyage is, he says, his chance to become sublime.Next thing you know, the 1960s astronaut of Apollo 11 fame has gone peculiarly spacey. Climbing a steel ladder, he 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 ...
Claudia Pritchard
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 Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth, a three-parter, was a giddying ride out of Athens to the farthest-flung regions of Google. So it’s off to the amphitheatre of Thorikos for a trot through the birth of drama in the sixth century BC, on through the siege of Mytilene, and over the water to Melos, for an atrocity that would prompt Euripides’ Trojan Women Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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 system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?” Such has been the glut of Roman TV in recent times that no couch potato is in any further doubt. The Romans have kept the plebs royally entertained. But what of the Greeks?The ancient ones, that is. (Of their modern descendants we know quite enough from the financial pages.) What Read more ...
David Nice
There are Handel operas where you wait impatiently for the handful of truly original set-pieces to light up the action, hoping the singers are equal to their challenges. One such is surely Siroe, Re di Persia, bravely staged at the Göttingen Handel Festival the other week. Others like Imeneo sparkle with genius and personality in virtually every number, musically if not dramatically the equal of a Shakespeare late romance.It’s a pleasure to sit through a reasonably animated concert performance like this, cast regardless, when the strings of an unshowy orchestra dart like little cupids around Read more ...
David Nice
Backed up by reasonably adventurous orchestral programming, lucky conductors can forge a strong Stravinsky evening by picking and mixing from his five ancient Greek rituals. Sir John Eliot Gardiner, unintentionally homaging the late Sir Colin Davis who at least in earlier days would have jumped to such a pairing, chose to celebrate his 70th birthday with the extremes of white balletic lyric poem Apollon musagète and hard-hitting blackest tragedy Oedipus Rex.Apollo’s celestial strings and the acerbic mix of brass with woodwind in Oedipus, all superbly aligned, guaranteed further contrasts. But Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Flesh-tearing, woman-raping, body-goring brute he may be, but he's misunderstood, that Minotaur. It's a bold argument to make, but this is the contention of Harrison Birtwistle and David Harsent's 2008 opera. They are aided by a surprisingly cuddly performance from John Tomlinson. Head trapped in a prosthetic bull's cranium, hairy belly flopping out, a small stick-on penis standing to attention, Tomlinson is a reluctant and eloquent (if still pretty hideous) half-man, half-beast, soliloquising soulfully on his existential crisis (that of being treated as all-beast when he sees himself as Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Not even a cameo by Tamsin Greig can redeem this painful adaptation of Euripides' The Trojan Women. For an hour and a half it screams with anguish, verging at times on the parodic. The production is a puzzle. Caroline Bird has updated the language, stripping the original of much of its poetry and adding expletives. Jason Southgate has designed a brilliantly claustrophobic modern hospital ward as the set, and Noelle Claude has chosen simple, if sometimes bland costumes that could pass for modern outfits (those worn by Helen of Troy are designed by Sonia Rykiel). Yet these are Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Pity the A-level English student: for them the “rarely seen masterpieces” that creep onto the curriculum and into the theatres. Judging from the frequently giggling reaction of the audience last night of around 100 17- and 18-year-olds, Eugene O’Neill’s tricky tragedy Desire Under the Elms isn’t going to be winning too many A*s among them next summer. Which is a pity, because this is a tough, gnarled play which strips human instincts to their bones. Hatred is its key emotion, loneliness its key condition.David Attenborough in his unputdownable book The Life of Birds tells of the female Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Les Troyens is one of music's mythical beasts. The greatest opera that few will have ever seen. Until recently the epic was considered so demanding that it was thought unstageable. David McVicar's new production for the Royal Opera House is only the second in its history. So for most of us last night will have been the first chance to witness the five-hour masterpiece in its original French. It is amid the murmuring woodwinds that the most memorable musical truth of Troyens is to be foundBeyond the fact that the cast is huge, however, (the opera house were fielding the largest Read more ...