Advance booking for the theatre can backfire. I saw Medea at London's Almeida Theatre yesterday, so missed the UK’s major television event – the final of the Great British Bake Off. Medea was, yeah, interesting and all – but it didn’t produce the swirls of joy and empathetic tears provoked by Nadiya Hussain’s three-tiered victory. I have only just left BBC i-player, my cheeks a lemon drizzle of … [Read more...]
Universal mother
Medea is back, and it grips like a mastiff. No ancient tragedy feels more modern, despite its extremity: maternal infanticide and divine reclamation. NT Live sends its tightly-wound new production into cinemas this evening. How to account for a classic that clings? On the Paris Review website recently, Joseph Luzzi contrasted the currency of two 19th century Italian novels: Manzoni’s The … [Read more...]
Survivor stories
I’ve been fretting about memory this summer. How fragile it is. A snapped synapse, a broken connection, and it’s as if a shelf of books and photo albums has fallen away, leaving only a phantom sense of loss. Cultural memory is equally vulnerable. There is something so haunting in the notion of what survives. Wisps of endurance swirling through the tempest of history. It's mind boggling to … [Read more...]
Laughter in the dark
A comment on the Guardian’s review of The Testament of Mary, currently at London's Barbican, described Fiona Shaw’s performance as ‘19th century’ in style. I’m not sure the term fits such an arrestingly contemporary performer – I suspect they just meant ‘big’. Which it no doubt is. Shaw, like Simon Russell Beale, whose King Lear in London was recently broadcast in the NT Live series, is a singular … [Read more...]