Léon Spilliaert was an insomniac. He walked a great deal in the dead of night and developed an appreciation of all the shades of darkness that establish the still, silent, brooding atmosphere of his work displayed in a long overdue first British monograph exhibition at the Royal Academy.
Barbara Lewis
The risk for any exhibition at Two Temple Place – a glorious late Victorian mansion at Temple, central London – is that the wood carving and stained-glass beauty of the building will steal the show.
Theatre blogger Jonathan Baz, who rates this show as unmissable, writes in the note at the front of the programme that an audience can only fully grasp its craftsmanship on re-listening or revisiting.
The theatrical brilliance of Endgame is thrown into relief by Jones’ decision to precede it with the rarely performed Rough for Theatre II, which Beckett is believed to have written around the same time as Endgame in the late 50s.
Tomar and the Knights Templar, Portugal. Under vows of holiness, poverty and chivalry, the Order of the Knights Templar, founded around 1120 to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land, achieved much else besides.
#WeAreArrested
Venue: Arcola Theatre, London
Dates of run: Until Dec 7
Co-production with Royal Shakespeare Company
Rigoletto,
Composer: Verdi
Producer: Welsh National Opera
William Blake
Venue: Tate Britain, London, until February 2
Curated by Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon
Funny, reassuring and irrepressibly warm, the West End version of Only Fools and Horses is proving to be the right musical at the right time.
In his final decade, the Czech nationalist Janacek, found a new love interest and produced five major operas. The most accessible and refreshing is The Cunning Little Vixen (premiered in 1924), with its comic acceptance – like late Shakespeare – of the redemptive power of love and renewal, and its tragic awareness of the forces of raw nature and of life’s disappointments.
In 1894, Edouard Michelin, the fine artist of a gifted family, looked at a pile of tyres and said to his engineer brother André: “With arms and legs, that would look like a man.”
Rachel Donohue’s ambitious young journalist protagonist, driven by a hunger to get to the bottom of a 25-year-old mystery, observes from the sidelines of a meeting of editorial egos: “The stories we told were ancient. But we acted like they were new.”
By Barbara Lewis • books, writing, year 2020 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, books, writing