This epic work dates from 2000 and 18 years later it still has moments that beguile. Körper means Bodies and the 13 international dancers nearly all wear white underpants as a uniform that unerotically emphasises flesh, bones and blood.
theatre
Isabel Dixon of Burn Bright Theatre has dramatised Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein two hundred years after its first publication, with two women as its protagonists, Elizabeth Frankenstein and the creature, played by Danielle Winter and Elizabeth Schenk.
La Forza del Destino was first performed in 1862. Not satisfied, Verdi carried on revising it for years, adding in 1869 the famous sinfonia overture that announces so many of the work’s overwhelming musical themes.
Human relationships boil down to trust and betrayal; power and powerlessness. It’s the story of Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein and it’s the gruelling plot of Tosca.
Lanie Robertson’s fine one-woman play on Peggy Guggenheim is a feast for intelligent audiences wanting to celebrate Guggenheim’s extraordinary life.
A deft revival in the play’s centenary year is a welcome chance to shed fresh light on Barrie’s fixation with the mismatch between the human potential and idealism represented by a child and the failed adult mess all around us.
Tchaikovsky said his aim in creating an opera from Pushkin’s supremely Russian yet universal drama of ill-fated love was to relay “ordinary, simple human feelings” as opposed to lavishly theatrical action.
Low-tech, unforced and innocent, the Chipping Norton panto lives up to the programme note’s promise to provide “an escape from the disposable pop culture that surrounds our children”.
This is a brave production by Hannah Chissick as Brecht’s epic drama is meant for the large scale and, squeezing such a huge concept in to the Southwark Playhouse, takes guts.
London gained a new theatre space on 18th October 2017 with the opening of The Bridge. The man behind the project is former director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, whose earlier hits include Miss Saigon and The History Boys.
To most Britons, P.G. Wodehouse is known as the creator of quaint, comic novels starring the blundering upper class twit Bertie Wooster and his astute valet Jeeves. He also contributed lyrics and stories to a wealth of musicals and his step great grandson, the opera singer Hal Cazalet, who as a child slept in a room beneath the Wodehouse archive, tells us he only got to know P.G. Wodehouse’s prose through the song lyrics.
When Christopher Marlowe wrote Doctor Faustus at the end of the 16th century, he was already drawing on German accounts of a medieval legend with eternal and universal reach. Two centuries later, the epic struggle of good and evil was translated back into German in Goethe’s towering tragedy.
By Barbara Lewis • plays, theatre, year 2018 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, plays, theatre