The Colour Violet, Etcetera Theatre, Camden. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Chilean singer-songwriter, poet, cult figure Violeta Parra’s most famous work “Gracias a la vida” can be viewed as an outpouring of gratitude – or as a suicide note.
Barbara Lewis
Plastic: A never-ending story. Review by Barbara Lewis.
One million plastic bottles are bought every minute and most of them are not recycled. It’s a stark reality Claire Davenport and Grioghair McCord were moved to explore after a trip to a Shetland beach littered with plastic bottles.
Henry Moore: The Helmet Heads, The Wallace Collection. Review by Barbara Lewis.
In the first exhibition to explore the evolution of Moore’s artistic obsession, the Wallace Collection brings together more than sixty sketches, drawings, maquettes and full-sized sculptures in plaster, lead and bronze, culminating in his seven Helmet Heads.
Edvard Munch ‘Love and Angst’. Review by Barbara Lewis.
We’ve all seen it a hundred times, identified with it and even messaged using an emoticon version of Edvard Munch’s skull-like face, clutched by hands raised in horror in a distorted, nightmarish world.
Swinging London: A Lifestyle Revolution. Review by Barbara Lewis.
If Brexit is the result of a backward-looking nostalgia, the Swinging London of the Chelsea Set was the opposite: it marked a determination to move on from the devastation and austerity left by World War II.
Othello, Union Theatre. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Almost exactly 100 years ago on April 13, in Amritsar, the British Indian Army fired into a crowd of unarmed Punjabis, killing and harming hundreds. Director Phil Wilmott marks this appalling example of man’s inhumanity to man by transporting Othello from Venice and Cyprus to the India of the British Raj.
The Swan Princess: Russian Art, Munch Museum, Oslo. Review by Barbara Lewis
Edvard Munch from next year will be displayed in a new aluminium tower that has divided local opinion as it changes the skyline near Oslo’s iceberg-like opera house on the waterfront.
Only Fools and Horses, the musical. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Five hundred years ago, Peckham was green and pleasant. By the 1980s and 1990s, when two of its most famous fictional characters Del Boy and Rodney Trotter were plying their dodgy wares, even the pigeons wanted to be elsewhere, or so Rodney tells us.
Puccini Museum, Lucca, Italy. By Barbara Lewis.
Lucca, Italy, was the birthplace of Giacomo Puccini in 1858 in an apartment that is now a museum to the last and most famous of generations of Puccini maestros, restored to its Second Empire glory, down to a bed, surrounded by columns, that replicates the one in which Puccini was born.
Time is Love, Finborough Theatre. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Just as Keats’ elliptic “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is comprehensible in context, the meaning of Che Walker’s “Time is Love/Tiempo es Amor” is made apparent by this superbly acted and eloquent 90 minutes of drama.
War and Peace, WNO. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Tolstoy’s great, complex, genre-busting sprawl “War and Peace” is about many things, including Russian nationalism to the extent that when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin reached for the work to promote a patriotic defence of the Motherland.
Don Carlo. Grange Park Opera. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Don Carlo – or Don Carlos – in history was the mentally unstable son of Philip II of Spain whose brief betrothal to the woman his father later married and contacts with Protestant rebels in the Low Countries provided ammunition for the “black legend” propaganda whipped up by the opponents of his father’s rule.