15th August 2016
You have just six days left to visit the most beautiful exhibition I’ve seen all year: Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures at the Whitechapel Gallery, which closes next Sunday. And if you can’t get there, take at look at the Art21 DVD titled Fantasy that features the artist – and that you can purchase from us here.
I recognise I haven’t been to nearly as many exhibitions recently as I would have liked. Nor have I seen too many movies, read the books that I should have – or indeed written the blog posts that I intended. Blame Richard III, article deadlines, prep for the next two RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon shows, or a host of other things. But with a little lull across August I have started to get out more – and I am happy to report that Mary Heilmann’s retrospective is simply sensational. read more »
14th August 2016
Links as usual to articles that I have found interesting or stimulating over the past seven days. Thanks as ever to those who have pointed me towards some of them, via Twitter and in other ways, and apologies for the absence of appropriate name-checks.
• Donald Trump and the long history of white men claiming fraud: Rebecca Traister with a long view, at The Cut.
• Make America Austria again – how Robert Musil predicted the rise of Donald Trump: an engaging essay about Robert Musil’s novel by David Auerbach for Los Angeles Review of Books. read more »
7th August 2016
Today’s links to articles that I have found interesting or stimulating over the past seven days. Thanks as always to those who have pointed me towards some of them, via Twitter and in other ways, and apologies for the absence of appropriate name-checks.
• When and why nationalism beats globalism: Jonathan Haidt for The American Interest builds towards this question:
How do we reap the gains of global cooperation in trade, culture, education, human rights, and environmental protection while respecting—rather than diluting or crushing—the world’s many local, national, and other “parochial” identities, each with its own traditions and moral order?
• War and peace in Asia: the Financial Times‘ Gideon Rachman on the ‘easternisation’ of economic and political power.
• The truth about Jeremy Corbyn: fascinating analysis at Byline by Alex Andreou.
• The Hillary haters: Michelle Goldberg for Slate, with exceptional images too.
read more »
3rd August 2016
Just under a fortnight ago we produced for Picturehouse Entertainment and the Almeida Theatre the cinema broadcast of the latter’s production of Richard III. Directed on stage by Rupert Goold, this featured Ralph Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave and a truly exceptional cast. The theatre show has only a few performances left but there are encore screenings of the cinema presentation – and full details of those can be found here. The broadcast has prompted some stimulating online discussion, and this post contains pointers to three pieces that are well worth reading. read more »
1st August 2016
To Stratford-upon-Avon this week for the World Shakespeare Congress 2016, an international gathering of academics held only once every five years in a different location each time. This being the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death, the eminent Shakespeareans have come to Britain for a week split between the birth place and the city where he worked. A full programme of lectures, panels, seminars and drinking lies ahead.
This morning RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran got things off to a splendid start with a plenary lecture about screen adaptations of previous RSC productions, and showed a range of clips including fragments from The Wars of the Roses, 1965, and his 2000 Macbeth film with Tony Sher and Harriet Walter, both of which we publish on DVD. He also included part of the RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon cinema broadcast of Hamlet that came from here just under two months ago. Indeed the rather fuzzy picture above is of Paapa Essiedu performing ‘To be or not to be…’ on a screen mounted on the stage exactly where he gave the speech for the broadcast. read more »
31st July 2016
Today’s links to articles that I have found interesting or stimulating over the past seven days. Thanks as always to those who have pointed me towards some of them, via Twitter and in other ways, and apologies for the absence of appropriate name-checks.
• Clinging sixties: D.J. Taylor for the TLS on British literary culture in 1966…
• BG (before Granta…): … and in a complementary post, here is Michael Caines on the TLS blog introducing the latest volume of the Oxford History of the Novel in English; edited by Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette, this takes on ‘British and Irish Fiction since 1940’…
• ‘Introduction: The Life and Death of the Post-war Novel’: … and the introduction to the Oxford volume is freely available here. read more »
30th July 2016
As you may have noticed I am fascinated by the developing forms of ‘event cinema’. I even have a go at producing some from time to time, including the recent Almeida Theatre Live: Richard III. Live theatre, operas, concerts and the like is often compelling on a large screen and is invariably enhanced when watched with an engaged audience. So I’m always intrigued to experience experiments with the form, like this afternoon’s WorldCup66 Live. As you read what follows, remember that I dabble with similar projects, so I may be unfairly biased. But I feel fairly certain that you too would think that this was a muddled and shambolic farrago. (Incidentally the BBC photograph above has nothing to do with the WorldCup66 event, but is just a glorious production shot from the television operation in 1966, and comes from here.) read more »
29th July 2016
On Wednesday the Guardian reported that the Edinburgh Festival was offering a refund to opera lovers who had purchased tickets for Christophe Honoré’s production of Così fan tutte (above). First seen at Aix-en-Provence earlier this month, the production is apparently a “provocative and sexually explicit take on Mozart’s opera” that “contains adult themes and nudity”. Moreover, Honoré has set Mozart’s tale of amorous couples in Eritrea in the late 1930s, when the east African country was colonised by Mussolini’s Italy. At the Festival’s website is an informative page with full credits, more information and further photographs.
In a New York Times review (which the Edinburgh Festival has also sent to ticket holders), Zachary Woolfe described the production as ‘a dark, demanding staging that speaks all too clearly to our time’; and he wrote
Honoré’s staging is, for whites – that is, for almost everyone watching here – often a brutal, shaming experience, as the black Africans onstage are shoved, dragged, ground against and used as avatars, fantasies and objects, encountered as spurs for white imaginations rather than as people.
Which makes it sound deeply intriguing. All the more welcome then that, for those of us who can’t get to Edinburgh, an excellent three-hour recording made in Aix by the French television channel ARTE is available online. read more »
25th July 2016
A day late, I know, but here’s this week’s list of links to articles that I’ve found interesting or stimulating over the past seven days. Thanks as always to those who have pointed me towards some of them, via Twitter and in other ways, and apologies for the absence of appropriate name-checks.
• Brexit blues: John Lanchester for LRB: thoughtful, not totally gloomy and completely essential.
• Fences – a Brexit diary: Zadie Smith similarly has to be read, from the New York Review of Books.
• The English revolt: and in a third vital contribution to the debate, the distinguished historian Robert Tombs takes the long view on Brexit, Euroscepticism and the future of the United Kingdom, for New Statesman – I don’t agree with all of this, but he makes a strong case.
read more »
18th July 2016
Tonight at 9pm Sky Arts premieres our production Natalia Osipova at Sadler’s Wells. Recorded just over a fortnight ago, this features three contemporary dances newly commissioned from Russell Maliphant, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Arthur Pita, details of which are here. The great Royal Ballet Principal performs in each one, and in the first and the last she is partnered by the remarkable Sergei Polunin, with whom she has had a complex and highly public relationship.
The convention is that you don’t write in detail about productions with which you have been involved. But I’m going to do so here, even though I am executive producer on the programme. I feel justified because this adaptation is entirely the creative achievement of screen director Ross MacGibbon, producer Lucie Conrad and a really great team of collaborators.
Moreover, I doubt that anyone else will notice the production in print, and if they do it will most likely be regarded as simply a ‘capture’ of the theatre event. But it is more, considerably more, than that, and I want to tease out a little of why this is so. I also want to assert that the experience of watching these dances on the screen in this interpretation is, straightforwardly and objectively, better than having been at Sadler’s Wells. read more »
