16th century
Bruegel in Black and White: Three Grisailles Reunited, Courtauld GalleryMonday, 08 February 2016
Now that Renaissance altarpieces live for the most part in museums and not churches, our experience of them is, quite literally, flat. Once, the winged altarpieces so popular in northern Europe, comprising a central panel flanked by two moveable “... Read more... |
The Winter's Tale, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseFriday, 05 February 2016
For a play about silence – its uncanny ability to tell the truth, to “persuade when speaking fails” – The Winter’s Tale is remarkably wordy. Of the sequence of late romances only Cymbeline comes close to the dense and elliptical verbal patterning we... Read more... |
Elizabeth, Royal BalletSunday, 10 January 2016
Please, sir, I want some more. Will Tuckett and Alasdair Middleton's Elizabeth is soul food for the hungry dance fan; an ingenious blend of words, music and dance that beguiles and entertains in equal measure. The shame is that it will be seen by so... Read more... |
La Dama d'Aragó, L'Arpeggiata, Wigmore HallTuesday, 22 December 2015
L'Arpeggiata seem to revel in being L'Anachronista. The baroque-jazz group led by the Graz-born theorbo player Christina Pluhar has been proudly and brazenly flouting the dictates of those who set the rules of Historically Informed Performance (HIP... Read more... |
A Wondrous Mystery, Stile Antico, Temple ChurchWednesday, 16 December 2015
It’s boasting, but surely true, to claim that London offers the biggest number of classy Christmas concerts in the world. How could it be otherwise with established seasonal festivals based around Spitalfields, St John’s Smith Square and the over-... Read more... |
Cymbeline, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseWednesday, 09 December 2015
There’s a happy, cyclical logic to this first production of Cymbeline – Shakespeare’s late tragicomedy of love and jealousy – at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The first play Shakespeare wrote for the candle-lit, indoor Blackfriars Playhouse,... Read more... |
Pericles, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseThursday, 26 November 2015
Pericles is a play of voyages. Lands and landscapes crowd in, one after the other – Tyre, Tarsus, Ephesus, Antioch, Mitylene – until our dramatic sea-legs are decidedly unsteady. The demands are great for any theatre, but for the Globe’s tiny... Read more... |
Thomas Tallis, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseSunday, 08 November 2015
Jessica Swale’s Thomas Tallis is the first new play commissioned for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – the beginning, hopefully, of the same relationship the Globe itself has always had with new writing. In concept, it’s everything this unique space... Read more... |
The Image of Melancholy, Eike, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseMonday, 21 September 2015
“Sounds a bit depressing,” said several friends when I urged them to attend the theatrical incarnation of The Image of Melancholy, inspirational violinist Bjarte Eike’s award-winning CD with his stunning Norwegian-based group Barokksolistene.... Read more... |
Anne Boleyn's Songbook, Alamire, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseMonday, 14 September 2015
Later this week David Skinner’s Alamire ensemble will collect the Early Music Gramophone Award for The Spy’s Choirbook, but last night it was the group’s follow-up album that was in the spotlight (or rather the candlelight) in a performance at the... Read more... |
Extract: The Time Traveller’s Guide to British TheatreThursday, 23 July 2015
Theatre is one of the glories of British culture, a melting pot of creativity and innovation. Beginning with the coronation of Elizabeth I and ending with the televised crowning of the current Queen Elizabeth, our The Time Traveller’s Guide to... Read more... |
Measure for Measure, Shakespeare's GlobeFriday, 03 July 2015
If Simon McBurney’s Measure for Measure for the National Theatre and Declan Donnellan’s recent Cheek By Jowl production mined deep for darkness, Dominic Dromgoole’s for the Globe is content to skim the play’s sunny surface – the comedy manqué that... Read more... |
