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 »
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.
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 »
Two Brexit links and a clutch pointing to pieces about Pokémon GO, plus other things 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.
• England’s last gasp of empire: Ben Judah for The New York Times nails the idea that this is the way the Empire ends, most certainly not with a bang but with the nastiest of whimpers…
• Liberalism after Brexit: … and Will Davies extends his detailed, rigorous analysis of the fundamental ideas behind Brexit – this is another essential article by him. read more »
Academic open access publishing is a complex issue but developments in the field mean that an increasing number of titles are available as freely downloadable e-books. I think one of the services that this blog can provide is highlighting a different volume each week, beginning today with the collection The British monarchy on screen, edited by Mandy Merck. Manchester University Press published this as a hardback in February at the eye-watering price (sadly, quite usual now for academic volumes) of £70. But now thanks to Oapen online library and MUP it can be legitimately accessed here as a free downloadable .pdf. read more »
In the medieval streets of the French town of Cahors yesterday, son Nick and daughter Kate were delighted to teach their grandmother Beryl how to catch a zubat. Of course Pokémon GO hasn’t been released in Europe yet but any self-respecting owner of a smartphone already has a grey-market app. The pesky Pokémons also seem to have been widely released across the continent. Like much of the rest of the world, I’m modestly fascinated by this vivid variant of augmented reality. And oddly enough, one of the things it immediately reminded me of was the recent arts event ‘we’re here because we’re here’ (more simply, #wearehere), commissioned by 14-18 NOW to mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme.
One of the many things that surprises me about the loose critical consensus about contemporary cinema is that Andrew Dominik’s 2007 film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is not widely hailed as one of the masterpieces of the twenty-first century. Sumptuous, complex, richly involving, thrilling and graced by career-best performances from Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, this is one truly great film. As can perhaps be glimpsed from the US trailer:
Let’s do without any Brexit-linked links this week, shall we? Pretend that nothing’s happened, and then perhaps this catastrophe will go away. And in the meantime take a look at these bits and pieces that I have found interesting 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.
Lots of post-referendum reading this week, but – with two exceptions – not here. These are links to other bits and pieces that I have found interesting 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 name-checks.
• What sort of crisis is this?: again, I’m trying to avoid Brexit links, but this thoughtful, subtle and far-reaching analysis by Will Davies (I linked to his earlier post last week) is entirely exceptional. Be afraid, be very afraid.
When Trump says “I will build a wall and Mexico will pay for it” or Boris Johnson and Michael Gove say “We send the EU £350 million a week – let’s fund our NHS instead”, they are actually saying “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.” Their claims have the form and grammar of traditional political promises, but they bear no relation to anything they actually intend to do.
The problem with pure nonsense is that is cannot be contradicted…
A nation split in two, bitter struggles over national identity and the country’s relationship with Europe, factional fighting for control of the ruling party, roiling discontent barely suppressed in the streets… This is England in 2016, perhaps, and most certainly England in the mid-15th century. For it is the background to William Shakespeare’s great cycle of history plays that culminates with the Henry VI trilogy and Richard III. In 1963 Peter Hall and John Barton triumphantly adapted these plays as The Wars of the Roses for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the following year BBC Television recorded them on the stage in Stratford-upon-Avon. read more »
