| | | Alcina review – Handel's enchanting opera glitters with retro glamour | | by Tim Ashley Jul 3, 2022 | | Glyndebourne, Sussex
Jane Archibald rises to the challenge as nightclub proprietor Alcina, as this lavish, campy production – with punchy playing by the OAE – transports the action to a 1960s Italian metropolis Theatrical illusion and offstage reality are the dominant metaphors in Francesco Micheli’s new Glyndebourne staging of Alcina. Lavish, unsettling and, at times, teetering on camp, it’s a finely crafted piece of work, though whether it ideally serves Handel’s great 1735 examination of the mutable nature of desire and the transience of beauty is, perhaps, debatable. Micheli relocates the opera from the Renaissance to a 1960s Italian metropolis in the process of reconstruction, its skyline dominated by multiple cranes and a concrete skyscraper modelled on the Torre Velasca in Milan. Alcina’s enchanted island is now a nightclub-cum-variety-theatre (called Isola di Alcina) in the skyscraper’s shadow, with Alcina herself (Jane Archibald) both its proprietor and one of its principal stars, alongside Soraya Mafi’s Morgana. Continue reading... | | | | | In the Black Fantastic review – spectacular from first to last | | by Laura Cumming Jul 3, 2022 | | Hayward Gallery, London
Wild imagination unites 11 artists from the African diaspora, including Nick Cave and Kara Walker, as they address racial injustice through myth and fantasy in this never less than magnificent show An extraordinary sight opens this show: giant chains cascading all the way down from the double-height ceiling, vast as the links behind Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the famous photograph. But these are black and cast from human forearms. Each hand is propping up the next elbow – or so it seems. Look up and they appear to be rising, helping each other forge upwards. Look down, however, and they are clinging to each other and falling, lying like manacles on the ground. The nuances of striving and suffering are endless, and irreducible. Chain Reaction invokes black history more powerfully than any sculpture I have ever seen. It is by the American artist Nick Cave, born in Missouri in 1959, a visionary of dazzling versatility. Continue reading... | | | | | Peter Brook's legacy is everywhere in today's theatre | | by Andrew Dickson Jul 3, 2022 | | Restlessly creative, the great director – who has died aged 97 – had an unparalleled ability to conjure a gleaming theatrical image Never meet your heroes, the saying goes. When I first encountered Peter Brook, in 2010, he was not so much hero as legend: guru, shaman, magus, maestro. He was frail – tiny, too, shuffling into the theatre in enormous, thick-soled white shoes. But the moment he trained his famous ice-water-blue gaze on you, it was clear his mind was made of steel. Reputation does funny things to people; especially in theatre, an artform given to myth-making, where stories about famous shows you didn’t happen to see expand with the telling. I’m decades too young, for instance, to have witnessed seen any of Brook’s early or middle-period work, the sprawling spectacles of La Conférence des Oiseaux or The Mahabharata. The director I encountered was the late minimalist, the polisher of parable-like pieces that gleamed like pebbles beneath the surface of a river. Often they were cryptic, sometimes downright puzzling. But Brook’s ability to conjure a gleaming theatrical image – collaborating since the mid-1970s with his trusted lieutenant, Marie-Hélène Estienne – was unparalleled. I recall the actor William Nadylam in The Suit whisking a handkerchief from a pocket and turning it into a tablecloth, voilà, just like that. Then there was an evening of Beckett shorts with Marcello Magni, Khalifa Natour and Kathryn Hunter. I’m able not just to picture it in my mind but to almost replay it, so piercing was its clarity. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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