1940s
Kiss Me Kate, Old Vic TheatreWednesday, 28 November 2012
Cole Porter’s musical spin on Shakespeare demands the fluidity, fizz and acidity of champagne. In Trevor Nunn’s revival, which transfers to London after a successful run in Chichester, it’s more like gelato. It has sweetness, and a rich abundance of... Read more... |
It Always Rains on SundayFriday, 26 October 2012
As the title suggests, It Always Rains on Sunday wasn’t one of Ealing Studios' famous comedies, but a film suffused with resignation and realism. That’s not to say the 1947 classic is monotonous: how could it be when it’s a bickering domestic... Read more... |
Swan Lake, Royal BalletThursday, 11 October 2012
The Royal Ballet’s autumn season began on Monday, but this was the eagerly awaited Swan Lake. Natalia Osipova, ex-Bolshoi, now principal with American Ballet Theater and the Mikhailovsky in St Petersburg, was making her debut as a guest with the... Read more... |
On The RoadTuesday, 09 October 2012
This week a holy relic has gone on show in the British Library. The continuous scroll of the original manuscript of On the Road is a kind of ur-artefact of the Beat Generation. Typed up by Jack Kerouac in three weeks in April 1951, and 120 feet long... Read more... |
Room at the Top, BBC FourThursday, 27 September 2012
Do we really needed to hear more from Joe Lampton, the anti-hero of John Braine’s Room at the Top? His battle for social advancement and sexual self-expression has long since stopped holding up a mirror to society, you'd think. In fact we nearly... Read more... |
DVD: Leave Her to HeavenTuesday, 25 September 2012
Five million dollars: in the 1940s that was enough profit to make this Technicolor melodrama 20th Century Fox’s biggest box-office hit of the decade. Reaching cinemas in January 1946 on the heels of World War Two, John M. Stahl’s film didn’t offer... Read more... |
Jephtha, Welsh National OperaSunday, 23 September 2012
Reviewing the Buxton Festival production of Handel’s Jephtha on theartsdesk a couple of months ago, Philip Radcliffe complained that the director, Frederic Wake-Walker, had done too little to justify the staging of this, the composer’s last oratorio... Read more... |
DVD: Les Enfants du paradisFriday, 21 September 2012
Begun in 1943 and released in 1945, Les Enfants du paradis, which unfolds in two acts – the first frantic, the second slow – in Paris’s theatre quarter in the 1820s and ’30s, is regarded as the crowning glory of director Marcel Carné and... Read more... |
Cecil Beaton: Theatre of War, Imperial War MuseumFriday, 07 September 2012
The wide eyed little girl is sitting bolt upright in her hospital bed, clutching her large soft toy, her head encased in a voluminous bandage. Eileen Dunne, aged three, was injured by shrapnel during the London bombing in 1940, and Cecil Beaton’s... Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Hume Cronyn, Shadow of a DoubtTuesday, 28 August 2012
Shadow of a Doubt was reputedly Hitchcock’s personal favourite among his films. Joseph Cotten was cast against type as the glamorous, homicidal uncle, fleeing from the police and pitching up unexpectedly in his sister’s household in a sleepy... Read more... |
The Best of Men, BBC TwoFriday, 17 August 2012
Lucy Gannon is the doyenne of drama-lite. Anyone who has seen Bramwell or Soldier, Soldier or Peak Practice will know her scripts, no matter how much suffering the characters undergo, will leave the viewer feeling better.... Read more... |
DVD: LauraSunday, 08 July 2012
If not as ensnaring as Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, or Out of the Past, Otto Preminger’s urbane police procedural Laura is one of the best film noirs because it transcends the genre. It is an inverted women’s... Read more... |
