An “absurdly normal” love story and it admits the appalling truth that all love stories, not just the high romance of Romeo and Juliet, are essentially tragic: they end in loss and when Alzheimer’s strikes, the cruelty is exaggerated because a once charismatic personality disintegrates.
Barbara Lewis
A study of political murders that destroyed Gladstone’s efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Irish problem.
The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo. By Paul Strathern, Published April 1, Atlantic Books. Review by Barbara Lewis.
L’Heure Espagnole, Grange Park Opera – an hour of escape into Maurice Ravel’s gloriously light opera bouffe that allows a woman to juggle three lovers with impunity.
St Michael and All Angels Church, Berwick: Should we be in need of a reminder, lockdown has provided it: our appreciation of a work of art can depend on experiencing it in the context for which it was created; the vacuum of an online viewing is no substitute.
The Rome Plague Diaries, Lockdown Life in the Eternal City: In times when many of us have been wondering why we didn’t get ourselves stranded near a Caribbean beach, Matthew Kneale decided there was nowhere on the planet he would rather be locked down than where he was in his adoptive city of Rome.
At the start of 2020, Southwark Playhouse commissioned a group of playwrights to write short plays. The aim was for them to be performed on stage by the Elders Company, the playhouse’s drama group for anyone aged 65 and over, but then lockdown came along.
A fellow pupil of Leipzig master Bernhard Heisig is the artist ANTOINETTE, who uses only her first name written in capitals. In common with Rauch and other Leipzig artists, she combines meticulous representation with the fantastic or surreal.
In a time of bitter, divisive politics, the positive, as well as the negative aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it is truly global: people everywhere feel the same fear, sorrow and frustration at the same time.
Every Christmas, London’s Old Vic delivers a production of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. This year is no exception – except that it comes to us via Zoom.
C.J. Cooke, also known as Carolyn Jess-Cooke, is formidable in her achievements. An award-winning poet, novelist, academic and mother of four, her latest work is a text-book example for her creative writing students of how to write a tense page-turner that presses all the right buttons.
by Barbara Lewis • art, exhibitions, painting, photography, sculpture, year 2021 • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, exhibitions, painting, photography, sculpture •
Both artists celebrate the regenerative forces of nature to which we have been sensitised by months of lockdown and both exhibitions are a joyful celebration of a cautious reopening after a period of painful reflection.