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.
Barbara Lewis
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.
South Africa’s oldest working harbour in Cape Town has a new addition. Since September, 2017, its recently-developed Silo District has been home to the Zeitz Museum of Contemporay Art Africa, MOCAA for short, a giant silo of post 2000 art by the artists of Africa and its disapora, assembled by German entrepreneur Jochen Zeitz.
Stroll through the streets of Turin or look out from the city’s rattling trams and you’re confronted with wall after wall of windows framed by whatever architectural embellishments were fashionable at the time of construction, from the standard shutters of residential apartment blocks to ornate neo-classical gods and gargoyles on civic buildings.
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”.
These dark winter months, when accounts of inappropriate advances are rocking Westminster and Hollywood, are the perfect time for seeking light and sanity in the clean-cut, calm glamour of fashion photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe.
For an artist whose career is based on confronting the spaces we either ignore or deliberately avoid, the now-demolished BBC office that reputedly inspired Room 101 in George Orwell’s 1984 is perfect subject-matter.
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.
by Barbara Lewis • plays, theatre, year 2018 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, plays, theatre •
Women bosses who bully their ambitious young rivals are one aspect of female careerism that is under-explored. Bella Barlow and A.C. Smith at least start to redress the balance with a miniature musical played out underneath Waterloo’s railway arches as part of London’s vibrant Vault festival.