Once in a while you come across a production that makes you scratch your head - why did the company do this? How could anyone ever have thought this worked? But it is rare that you see something that makes you wonder why the institution is in receipt of a public subsidy to present a piece that fails not because it's daring or experimental, but just because it's so bad it should never have been … [Read more...]
Archives for 2013
What’s Inside Wagner’s Head?
There have been some ups and some downs among the events of this Wagner bicentenary year. There was the reportedly naff new Ring at Bayreuth - so bad, some of the press said, that the German state must now think again about its support for the Wagner family management of the Festival. But there have been some high points, too. … [Read more...]
Don Impeccable (mostly)
Donizetti's Don Pasquale has a dramaturgical problem. The 70-something Pasquale wants to marry and produce heirs, as his young heir-apparent nephew, Ernesto, has refused the arranged marriage proposed for him by his uncle. Pasquale's doctor, Malatesta has nominated himself as Pasquale's marriage-broker, but the woman he proposes is Norina, the young widow who is the secret squeeze of Ernesto. … [Read more...]
Open Minds about Closed Borders
Very recently the UK Border Agency refused visas to visit Britain to one of the curators of the Shubbak festival, an annual celebration in London of modern Arab arts. Also vetoed were visas for two authors from Gaza. Earlier this year, said Boyd Tonkin of The Independent (on 29 June), "a deal-hungry literary agent from Turkey, guest of honour at the London Book Fair" was denied entry to … [Read more...]
Dazzled by “Gloriana”
Have you ever been assaulted by the stage lighting of a production? In the sixty-plus years since I saw my first play and opera (Carmen at the Cincinnati Zoo!), this is the first time I have felt physically threatened by a lighting designer, Mimi Jordan Sherin, who has lit Richard Jones's otherwise imaginative, rewarding revival of Benjamin Britten's Gloriana, at the Royal Opera House, Covent … [Read more...]
Better than Bayreuth?
The last "Ring" I saw was last autumn's revival of the Keith Warner production at Covent Garden. As in 2005/6 I had intended to write a book about seeing every Ring cycle produced in a single year, I not only saw the Bayreuth Ring in summer, 2006, but the earlier Manaus and Adelaide Rings. I've seen at least three different Bayreuth productions (each more than once) over the years, and have … [Read more...]
A Day in Valhalla
In a former henhouse, at Longborough, deep in the Cotswold countryside, a very ambitious Ring cycle is shaping up. What, I asked myself, would its bombastic, luxury-loving author and composer make of it? How would Wagner, who ordered his undergarments from a maker of bespoke women's lingerie, feel about designer Kjell Torriset's simple, effective, but hardly elegant costumes - … [Read more...]
Longborough’s golden D.I.Y. “Ring”
It's a far cry from the Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney Hollywood movie where the two kids say "Let's put on a show," but the start of the 2013 Ring Cycle just outside the Cotswold village of Longborough has the same defiant D.I.Y. attitude. Martin and Lizzie Graham have been thinking about Wagner's operas for 30 years, and in 1998 they mounted - in a converted hen-house on their farm - their … [Read more...]
London theatre: Are the cuts bleeding?
Though you'd never know it from the freezing weather, the London theatre is embarking upon its spring season. I haven't yet seen the most promising flower,<em> The Book of Mormon</em>, because I didn't go to the press night, and the lead actor got laryngitis the night I was scheduled, so the management politely asked me to come another time, rather than see the understudy's first … [Read more...]