Paris
Marianka Swain
A year after premiering acclaimed French playwright Florian Zeller’s The Truth, the Menier Chocolate Factory now hosts The Lie – which, as the name suggests, acts as a companion piece of sorts. Once again, we’re in a slippery Pinteresque realm, the seemingly conventional domestic set-up teasingly deconstructed as Zeller challenges our conception of honesty and morality.This latest Lindsay Posner-directed import is similarly light-hearted – compared with the weightier Zeller double of The Mother and The Father – and once again features two affluent couples, with the same names, plus Read more ...
graham.rickson
Guy Johnston: Tecchler’s Cello - From Cambridge to Rome (King’s College Cambridge)Acquiring a second-hand instrument always leads one to wonder what sort of a life it led before. Did said instrument enjoy a flourishing professional career, or was it abandoned in an attic for decades? Cherished by a master or mistreated by a bumbling amateur? Guy Johnston’s enjoyable anthology celebrates his recent acquisition of a 300-year-old cello made by one David Tecchler. He was a Bavarian-born craftsman who pitched up in Rome towards the end of the 17th century, one of his workshops being situated Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A decade after his masterpiece, The Tree of Wooden Clogs, won the 1978 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Italian director Ermanno Olmi took Venice’s 1988 Golden Lion for The Legend of the Holy Drinker (La leggenda del santo bevitore). Festival victories aside, at first sight the two films could hardly seem more different.In the second film Olmi moved into distinctly new territory for him: Legend was an adaptation (of the 1939 novella by the Austrian writer Joseph Roth), featured professional actors (Rutger Hauer in the lead role), was made in English, and counts as a fable, very different in style from Read more ...
Blake Morrison
Is there anything more terrifying for a playwright than the first day of rehearsals? For months, even years, you’ve been working and reworking the text, saying the words aloud to yourself in an empty room and imagining the actors saying them to a packed auditorium. Now at last you’re here, for the read-through, with the cast, director, costume designer, choreographer, lighting man, deputy stage manager, etc, arranged round a big table. It ought to be exciting. It is exciting. But also scary. The dialogue, in others’ mouths, sounds different from how it sounded in your head. Less crisp, less Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Anyone who likes playing “Spot the weirdo” will find themselves instantly at home in Howard Brenton’s new play, which has its world premiere in this West End fringe venue, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus. Its subject is Swedish playwright and writer August Strindberg, and the psychological crisis which he suffered while he was living in Paris in 1896. He documented this experience of breakdown and hallucination in his autobiographical novel, Inferno, written in fury while he was experiencing paranoia and other delusions. Helping Brenton make sense of Strindberg’s plight is Jasper Read more ...
David Nice
“I’m not in the mood” – “non sono in vena” – sings aspiring poet Rodolfo as he settles down to write a lead article. Was it me, or had the mood not settled by the premiere of the Royal Opera’s first new production of Puccini's structurally perfect favourite for 43 years? The singing was good to occasionally glorious, Antonio Pappano’s conducting predictably idiomatic and supportive. So was it wrong to expect our most imaginative opera director, Richard Jones, to have found his own idiosyncratic angle on a fairly unsinkable masterpiece?At the time of directing Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Jean Gabin’s gangster’s paradise says more about him than the bullets he later lets fly. France’s greatest male star made a barnstorming comeback to pre-eminence as sharp-suited, drolly masterful Max in Jacques Becker’s Touchez Pas au Grisbi (1954), after wartime exile and post-war doldrums. But his most memorable scene is when he takes his fellow middle-aged gangster friend Riton (René Dary, pictured below with Lino Ventura) to a rarely used Paris bolthole. In a surprising, self-sufficient domestic interlude, he opens one of the Champagne bottles that fill his fridge, and carves foie gras Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I hate biopics about artists in which the portrayal of “genius” is hyped to the point where it becomes a ludicrous cliché. Although I appreciate that, as far as entertainment goes, seeing pigment brushed onto canvas is on a par with watching paint dry, I still can’t forgive directors who resort to dramatic extremes in the hope of evoking the tribulations of the creative process.Stanley Tucci’s Final Portrait, his first film in 10 years, is in a class of its own, though. In place of melodrama he gives us detailed observation of Alberto Giacometti grappling with his inability to translate what Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The two haunting series of crime novels by Fred Vargas, the writing pseudonym of a French archaeologist and historian, have acquired a worldwide following: quirky, idiosyncratic, eccentric and beautifully written, they are highly individual and, for some perhaps, an acquired taste. But once hooked, you cannot help but follow through. The first series – eight novels translated into English so far – has the Paris-based Inspector Adamsberg as its chief protagonist, and contains, perhaps not for purists, elements which go well beyond the intuitive and towards the borders of the paranormal and Read more ...
David Nice
Unless you're an undiscriminating fan of bel canto, the lesser Italian and French operas of the 1830s and '40s - that's to say, not Verdi's Nabucco and Macbeth or Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini - need to be approached with caution. Once you've lowered expectations to a simpler level of compositional style, you then have to hope for stylists of the first order to make it work. That doesn't happen too often these days, but the inspirational company Opera Rara, responsible for this often spectacular programme of operatic excerpts, knows where to find them. In soprano Joyce El-Khoury, tenor Michael Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For viewers not familiar with the background story of Cézanne et moi – which surely includes most of us without specialist knowledge of late 19th century French artistic and literary culture – the moi of this lavish yet curiously uninvolving double biopic is Emile Zola. Danièle Thompson’s film tells the story of the friendship between the eminent realist writer and the genius of Post-Impressionism – to whom acclaim came only late in life – that lasted, despite their differences, for almost half a century.They first encountered one another as schoolboys in Aix-en-Provence in the early 1850s, Read more ...
Matthew Dunster
When you are adapting a novel like A Tale of Two Cities, it's a privilege to sit with a great piece of writing for a considerable amount of time. You also feel secure (and a bit cheeky) in the knowledge that another writer has already done most of the work.I always have an eye on the final production, whether I'm directing it or not. I want to always be thinking about what theatre and theatre artists can achieve on behalf of the novel. So the adaptations hopefully aren't like dialogue-led plays, more like scores for the theatre. Tim Sheader, the director, and I, love Dickens. We re-read Read more ...