Strange goings-on at the Globe. After a Tempest performed by Mark Rylance as a Reduced Shakespeare skit, we now have Pericles directed by Kathryn Hunter. This is a tricky, strange and fascinating dream-work. The text is so complex and elusive that the obvious approach is to play it straight and let the audience’s imagination fill
Performance-makers like to experiment with creative modes and ideas. It is a natural urge in a world in which ‘new’ is synonymous with survival. Jiri Kyli
While the Grand Theatre in Leeds is being refurbished, Opera North is doing concert performances of operas, though in the case of Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle the semi-staging amounts to quite as much action as one needs in this work, while the purely visual side of things is best left to the imagination. Unfortunately, Opera
The human eye is an amazing mechanism, but its vision is limited. We can’t see behind us, we can’t see much to the side, and in front — unless we’re desert tribesmen or Eskimos — our view is almost always obstructed by something. So some of what we see is actually ‘seen’, the rest is
Frida Kahlo (1907–54) is apparently the most famous female artist in history (who is the nearest competitor, I wonder — Grandma Moses or Paula Rego? Probably not Artemisia Gentileschi), and as such, with a recent feature film dedicated to her legend, a hot commercial property. The merchandising angle alone is substantial. There’s never been a
I answered the door the other day and a cheerful, rangy Afro-Caribbean youth stood on the step with a remote control. I suddenly recalled the appointment. ‘You’re the cable guy,’ I said. He looked affronted. ‘Cable guy, eh? No, I’m the television engineer!’ Half an hour later, the engineer had installed digital TV, and we
So much for equality! More subtly than in mediaeval, Tudor, baroque times, the musician is placed below the salt if not literally below stairs. (I mean the composer, of course; not the diva, the glitzy pianist, the star conductor.) You’d imagine the whole raison d’
