fairytales
The Golden Cockerel, Diaghilev Festival, London ColiseumThursday, 10 July 2014
Rimsky-Korsakov’s bizarre final fantasy, puffing up Pushkin's short verse-tale to unorthodox proportions, has done better in Britain than any of his other operatic fairy-tales. That probably has something to do with its appearance in Paris, six... Read more... |
MaleficentWednesday, 28 May 2014
For the latest in a seemingly endless line of misunderstood cultural icons, meet Maleficent, the preternaturally smooth-cheeked anti-hero (or maybe not ) of the new celluloid blockbuster of the same name. As played by Angelina Jolie like some sort... Read more... |
Child Of LightFriday, 02 May 2014
There are many admirable things about Child Of Light. It's the game that the core team behind Far Cry 3 – the mega-action, gnarly dude first-person shooter ‑ went on to work on next. Yet, it's difficult to imagine two games further from each other.... Read more... |
Die Frau ohne Schatten, Royal OperaSaturday, 15 March 2014
The big message of The Woman Without a Shadow, brushing aside the narrower, moral majority preaching that you’re incomplete without children, seems clear: fulfillment can’t be bought at the cost of another’s suffering. Yet the path towards that... Read more... |
The Banner SagaFriday, 17 January 2014
Set in an icy, fantasy Norse-influenced world, with an art style based on the 1950s work of Disney artist Eyvind Earle, The Banner Saga is immediately, aesthetically, vastly different from most videogame fare. But it's not just in visuals that it... Read more... |
theartsdesk's Top 13 Films of 2013: 13 - 6Monday, 30 December 2013
There are some that will tell you that they don't make movies like they used to. But even if that's true, film is an art-form that continues to thrive by moving with the times - reflecting change, reinventing itself and each year we're supplied with... Read more... |
Beauty and the Beast, Young VicTuesday, 10 December 2013
"My mum was given this new wonder-drug for morning sickness when she was pregnant with me," explains Mat Fraser at the start of Beauty and the Beast. "It was called Thalidomide. That's why I was born with arms like this."This is the simple,... Read more... |
BlancanievesThursday, 11 July 2013
Although Blancanieves seems to come on the back of the world-conquering The Artist, it was actually conceived before the French tribute to silent-era cinema. Rather than being about silent cinema, Blancanieves is a silent Spanish take on Snow White... Read more... |
Mangan, Royal Academy Opera Students, BBCSO, Denève, Barbican HallSaturday, 27 April 2013
Highly sexed cockerels and cats, a lovesick lion and a ballet of frogs might not seem like a recipe, or rather a menagerie, for profundity. Yet in two ravishing French man (or child)-meets-beast fables for the stage, Poulenc and Ravel are quite... Read more... |
Jack the Giant SlayerThursday, 21 March 2013
This is a fairy tale which may send children to sleep before the good bits, then wake them up screaming at the first glimpse of loping, bestial giants. Splicing Jack the Giant-Killer (subject of a 1962 kids’ monster movie which gave me nightmares)... Read more... |
Mare Rider, Arcola TheatreMonday, 28 January 2013
It’s like waiting for a number 19 bus. You hang around for half an hour then two come along at once. So it is just now with plays either written by women or featuring women’s lives. While Amelia Bullimore’s sparky three-hander Di and Viv and Rose is... Read more... |
Midnight's Pumpkin, Battersea Arts CentreFriday, 21 December 2012
If you have any young siblings, friends or relatives in need of burning off a little energy, send them directly to BAC. With their open-hearted style of rough, circusy-type theatre, Kneehigh are ideally suited to this circular barn of a room. Taking... Read more... |
