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.
theatre
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.
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.
The play’s full title is ‘East. Elegy for the East End and its energetic waste.’ It is a vulgar, visceral evocation of London’s East End working class, white culture. This is a wicked piece of theatre in all senses of that word.
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.
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.
By Barbara Lewis • plays, theatre, year 2018 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, plays, theatre