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Articles by Ismene Brown
RIP Matz Skoog, ENB director and iconic dancer
Few dancers have the luck to find a permanent place in history through their role in a new creation as Matz Skoog did in 1987. The Swedish star of the then London Festival Ballet, who died last weekend aged 69 from cancer, was one of the mesmerising original trio in a protest ballet that touched a nerve in its own era, and would then travel across four decades to become a classic.
Filumena, Theatre Royal Windsor review - Mozartian marriage comedy with pasta sauce
Of all the ingenues in all the world of golden TV sitcom, Felicity Kendal was the most innocent, the most wicked, the most deceptive, with an amaretto voice that wheedled like a child and seduced like a witch. Half a century on, there must be a heck of a portrait in her attic because at 78 Kendal displays intact all her qualities - including that elfin prettiness - in a glorious star performance as Filumena, the mother-of-three in want of a husband in Eduardo di Filippo's classic comedy.
theartsdesk q&a: Nina Ananiashvili, founder of the State Ballet of Georgia
Great ballet dancers who boldly turn away from a stellar international career to grow a national ballet company in their homelands are few, but legendary. Alicia Alonso did it in Cuba, Ninette de Valois did it in Britain.
Accolade, Theatre Royal Windsor review - orgy-loving knight makes for topical pre-election drama
Times change, people don't. Does a knighthood sit well on a man who shags anonymous strangers in the Blue Lion out of hours?
Accolade, Windsor Theatre Royal review - orgy-loving knight makes for topical pre-election drama
Times change, people don't. Does a knighthood sit well on a man who shags anonymous strangers in the Blue Lion out of hours?
The White Factory, Marylebone Theatre review - what price dignity in hell?
This powerful play’s immediate backstory, with Moscow sentencing its author to eight years’ jail and its director going into forced exile, is not its immediate theme – and all the better for it, for how can anyone yet make any authentic dramatic reflection on Putin’s war on Ukraine?
Patriots, Noël Coward Theatre review - crash-bang brilliant Putin comedy does it again
A year ago, premiering in the first months of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Peter Morgan’s crackling drama about Russia’s rich and powerful felt bang on topic. Now, watching the monstrous oligarch Boris Berezovsky clawing for stability as his grey little ex-KGB mentee appoints himself Vlad the Terrible, your laughter chokes as it rises, and Miriam Buether’s set suddenly looks horribly medieval, a brick dungeon dripping with blood-red light, masquerading as a rich man’s chic modern lounge.
4000 Miles, Minerva Theatre, Chichester review - brilliant Atkins in a tender play
There’s a wrenching moment in Amy Herzog's 4000 Miles when Atkins allows the full weight of her character’s very long life hit her, and her face simply empties of expression, becomes a mask of dispassionate tragedy. The effect is of time freezing for a couple of beats. It could be a moment of senile brain failure, or it might be almost its opposite, a moment of total awareness of the way the sands of time pan out.
4000 Miles, Chichester Minerva Theatre, review - brilliant Atkins in a tender play
There’s a wrenching moment in Amy Herzog's 4000 Miles when Atkins allows the full weight of her character’s very long life hit her, and her face simply empties of expression, becomes a mask of dispassionate tragedy. The effect is of time freezing for a couple of beats. It could be a moment of senile brain failure, or it might be almost its opposite, a moment of total awareness of the way the sands of time pan out.
The Vortex, Chichester Festival Theatre, review - naturalism clogs up Coward's pipes
The catchline for the staging is that a real-life mother and son play the sex-mad mother and drug-addicted son of the drama, the subtle and gamine Lia Williams and the well-regarded Joshua James, but if anything this reality connection stills rather than stirring the hothouse drama Coward intended.
Hunting legendary treasure with ballet's Indiana Jones - Pierre Lacotte 1932-2023
Properly mummified, a human body can yield an extraordinary amount of living information after thousands of years. But ballets vanish far quicker. Stop performing a ballet for a decade and a generation of dancers is lost who knew it. Stop performing it for 25 years, and a generation of audience and new leaders has hardly any idea it had existed.
'You want to cry from loving to do it so much' - Lynn Seymour 1939-2023
Lynn Seymour’s death last Wednesday undammed an outpouring of truly wrenching sadness from those whom this extraordinary ballerina injected with her poison - as the choreographer Frederick Ashton memorably said about his enslavement to Anna Pavlova. The Royal Ballet issued beautiful words about their prodigal daughter whose career was shadowed by her popular reputation as the rebel against the system, the ballerina who stayed out in the cold.
Dogs of Europe, Belarus Free Theatre, Barbican Theatre review - doom art with doom reality
Hindsight is everything. In the light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, political intrigues have suddenly taken on a far more menacing face, disbelief has been pulverised by reality – and theatre has become actuality.
The unexpurgated Clement Crisp - in memoriam
To the international world of ballet, Clement Crisp was the British critic to fear for half a century. Crisp's dance reviews for the Financial Times – "the pink 'un" – from 1970 until 2020 were legendary for their passionate fastidiousness about ballerinas and high style, their acuity about rising talents and the difficulties of creativity, and – often – their ferocity, when he saw something he thought a blight.
Ava: The Secret Conversations, Riverside Studios, Hammersmith review - about Ava Gardner's effing
“The penis. Have you or have you not discussed the penis?” The question that haunts every journalist commissioned to ghost the memoirs of a Hollywood legend (female). Get the dirt on the boyfriend and forget the childhood stuff. To be sure, we all want to know about Frank Sinatra’s penis – 10 pounds man, 110 pounds meat, it was thought. And Ava Gardner would know more about that than anybody.
Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker!, Sadler's Wells Theatre review - new candy, but the nuts are off
The legendary quip of a sophisticated ballet critic that we are all one Nutcracker nearer death never rang so true as now. One goes to the theatre with one’s heart in one’s mouth, behind the partypooping mask. Matthew Bourne’s dance panto Nutcracker! had its very fresh charms in 1992 – the classical skit that launched a path to a knighthood, naughtiness nicely bedecked in every shade of pink, on stage and in innuendo.
The Seven Pomegranate Seeds, Kingston Rose Theatre review - misogynist Euripides stands corrected
The resurrection of female voices from ancient Greek myth is so common now that one might imagine a grand panjandrum behind the scenes had set down a long-range mission – rather as they do in the fashion industry – which makers and producers scurried to fulfil.
The Seven Pomegranate Seeds, Rose Theatre, Kingston review - misogynist Euripides stands corrected
The resurrection of female voices from ancient Greek myth is so common now that one might imagine a grand panjandrum behind the scenes had set down a long-range mission – rather as they do in the fashion industry – which makers and producers scurried to fulfil.
The Cherry Orchard, Windsor Theatre Royal review - Tolstoy meets Mrs Two Soups
The cherry orchard in Anton Chekhov’s eponymous play is a classic MacGuffin, its existence a reason to stir the sorts of resentments, fancies and identity causes that start wars and revolutions. The orchard’s beautiful, and that’s all – a cultivated but natural ornament upon the great land of Russia, where need and want hold sway over millions of wretched and enslaved people. Have those breathtaking horizons of white blossoms any use other than that?
The Mirror and the Light, Gielgud Theatre review - nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition
The first two stage adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies – written by Mike Poulton, way back in 2014 - were a very different beast from the novels, but they were at least eyecatching plastinations of her unruly human characters, made attractive to those who had not read the novels.
RIP dancer and photographer Colin Jones - obituary
In the ballet world, Colin Jones, who died on 22 September aged 85, was famous for being married, for a while, to the great Royal Ballet ballerina Lynn Seymour, during his brief career as a dancer with the company. In the wider world, however, Jones was renowned as a photographer of unusual empathy and social conscience, as well as a striking eye. A Sunday Times critic once described him as "the George Orwell of photojournalism".
Leopards, Rose Theatre, Kingston review - a no-thrill thriller about sex and power
Leopards, Rose Theatre, Kingston review - a no-thrill thriller about sex and power | reviews, news & interviews Leopards, Rose Theatre, Kingston review - a no-thrill thriller about sex and power When the trousers come off and the handcuffs go on, the climax is the sexual politics lecture by Ismene BrownThursday, 09 September 2021 Thundering agenda: Martin Marquez's Ben meets Saffron Coomber's Niala Iona Firouzabadi Is it a thriller? Is it a character study?
Constellations, Vaudeville Theatre review - multiple casts continue to shine
This week is peak time to test out Nick Payne’s hypothesis of life as a series of accidents, narrow squeaks and near misses. While the Perseids are doing their August explosive thing, go home after the show and look in the night sky with a lover, and see whether both of you see the same shooting star – what are the chances?
Hamlet, Windsor Theatre Royal review - the age is out of joint
So it wasn’t Cinderella but Hamlet who was first out of the post-lockdown starting blocks – Andrew Lloyd Webber’s much trumpeted musical premiere being foiled by a ping at the weekend.
The Magic of Vaslav Nijinsky and His Iconic Spectre de la Rose
Soulève ta paupière close, qu'effleure un songe virginal, Je suis le spectre d'une rose que tu portais hier au bal. T héophile Gautier’s marvellously erotic poem of 1840, Le Spectre de la rose, imagines the dream of a girl who has returned from her first ball, and falls asleep clutching a rose from her corsage.
'She was Paris': RIP Zizi Jeanmaire (1924-2020)
"You talk like Marlene Dietrich, you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire, your clothes are all made by Balmain, and there’s diamonds and pearls in your hair…" . Peter Sarstedt may have been a one-hit wonder, but his 1969 pop song, "Where do you go to (my lovely)?" passed into British popular culture in a flash, even if many of its chic references were lost on future generations. Zizi Jeanmaire, who died last Friday aged 96, personified the Paris of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and beyond.
Agony & Ecstasy: A Year With the English National Ballet, BBC Four
You thought Black Swan was a nightmare depiction of the ballet world? Now watch Agony & Ecstasy: A Year With English National Ballet, Part 1 and squirm. Compare Natalie Portman’s tormenting balletmaster with ENB’s Derek Deane, as each of them stages Swan Lake. One tells his ballerina she’ll need to masturbate to discover her inner black swan; the other one contemptuously dismisses his ballerina as too old, too knackered, past hope.
Giselle, Royal Ballet/ Swan Lake, Russian State Ballet of Siberia
The chasm between the top-class ballet available to London-area ballet-goers and the low-grade stuff peddled in the regions is the field where the battle to save ballet’s soul is nightly won or lost.
The deathless Alicia Alonso, in person
The magnificent, controversial Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso, who asserted that she would live to 200, died yesterday in Havana, aged nearly 99. Legends are always well protected by their own mythology, yet in 2004, when attending the Havana Ballet Festival, I had a long interview with her, finding her surprisingly open and genial for such an autocratic icon.
Q&A Special: Pianist Lucas Debargue
Last week the 15th International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow was rung down with a sigh of relief for the home team, with once again a Russian pianist in possession of the gold medal, Dmitry Masleev following 2011’s Daniil Trifonov. It was all very satisfactory for President Putin as he delivered his speech at the winners’ gala, being Tchaikovsky’s 175th anniversary year, but it was not a result that many disputed.
Elisabeth Leonskaja, Wigmore Hall review - Mozart and Webern, anyone?
“What is it about Mozart?” wondered the legendary pianist Sviatoslav Richter, pointing out the composer's frightening demands of accuracy and lucidity. Even though many pianists today command technique to spare, a Mozart fear factor tends to keep his sonatas off recital programmes.
Macbeth, National Theatre
Fair is foul and foul is drab, gory and tricksy in Rufus Norris’s first stab at Shakespeare direction at the National Theatre, Macbeth. It embodies the play's most clichéd quotation (the one about sound, fury, and nada), though whether that's intended as a joke is hard to work out. Lovely Rory Kinnear plays Macbeth like a third Mitchell brother from EastEnders, bullheaded and thick-necked, all short jabbing breaths, strapped into his jerkin with parcel tape.
Tamara Rojo, prima ballerina, becomes English National Ballet's director
Royal Ballet prima ballerina Tamara Rojo has been appointed the new artistic director of English National Ballet. Though the announcement was officially dated for tomorrow, the press release was issued by the company this morning and the news has been widely sent out over the internet and social media since then.
Long Day's Journey Into Night, Wyndham's Theatre review
Eugene O’Neill’s 1945 play Long Day’s Journey Into Night is famously a portrayal of the hellish damage that a sick person can wreak on their family, closely based on his own family. Mary and James Tyrone are images of his own parents, down to details like the father’s compromised acting career, the mother’s post-natal suffering from her last childbirth and subsequent addiction to morphine, and of course the emotional havoc for the small sons when they discover their mother’s affliction.
Q&A Special: The Late Merce Cunningham
Tonight the company dedicated to the greatest radical of modern dance, Merce Cunningham, opens its farewell tour to London, a valedictory odyssey that will end next year. Last year Cunningham died, aged 90. He had just premiered a work called Nearly Ninety, and this is fittingly the last thing we will see of his company as it blazes one final circuit before closing down in December 2011.
Dance reviews, news & interviews
Britain's reputation as one of the world's great ballet nations has been swiftly won, as home-grown classical ballet started here only in the 1930s. Yet within 30 years the Royal Ballet was recognised as the equal of the greatest and oldest companies in France, Russia or Italy.
Bolshoi's controversial Nureyev ballet opens - to ovations and bans
Nureyev, the most notorious new production at the Bolshoi Ballet’s modern history, premiered last night in Moscow to a 15-minute standing ovation and exclamations of official approval even by Putin’s press secretary – but the ballet’s creator and director languished under house arrest, refused permission to see his own ballet.
Sue Steward 1946-2017: She came, she saw, she salsa'd
Sue Steward, who died suddenly last week from a brain haemorrhage, was one of theartsdesk’s most loved members, her free spirit and her double specialism in world music and photography making her an intrinsic asset to this pioneering critics’ site in 2009. Her unfussy eye for colour and composition also influenced the early design of The Arts Desk and traces remain today.
Otello, Royal Opera review - Kaufmann makes a pretty Moor
Recorded on disc, this cast would be extraordinary for much of the time — to look at, not so much. Royal Opera House conductor Antonio Pappano lured Jonas Kaufmann to London for his first attempt on the Everest of tenor roles, and with so many recent uncertainties about his vocal condition, last night the German took his debut cautiously but beautifully — his astonishing good looks enhanced with a spritz of Mediterranean bronzing rather than the full-on Moorish blackening of yesteryear.
Sergei Vikharev, master ballet-reconstructor, 1962-2017
Just as the 200th anniversary is about to be celebrated of the great genius of 19th century classical ballets, Marius Petipa, the creator of The Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, La Bayadère, half of Swan Lake, and many other masterpieces, his oeuvre's most remarkable reconstructor has died suddenly, aged only 55.
Hipermestra/ La Traviata, Glyndebourne
A Saudi princess in her white wedding dress digs her own grave as men pile up stones to hurl at her head — next, an Isis fighter is stabbing a knife at her neck to decapitate her. Ah, the fate of the heroine of the average baroque opera about the appalling ways of men and gods. Add in the bearded lady in a burqa, and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry on the opening day of the new Glyndebourne season.
Shows & Events
“Dance” and “museum” are concepts with an uneasy relationship. Museums—with their freight of the past, of historical artefacts and traditions to be collected rather than questioned—have a purpose that cuts against the imaginative, creative, time-sensitive grain of dance performance.
Elgar's Enigma - A Love Child Named Pearl?
UPDATE 2015: Four years ago, in January 2011, I wrote this article about the music critic and biographer Michael Kennedy's search for the missing portion of Elgar's life. It identified a Mrs Dora Nelson as the composer's mistress and mother of a lovechild, who might have influenced some legendarily enigmatic aspects of Elgar's compositional output. A new development opened when an Arts Desk reader contacted me, who had taken up Kennedy's and my requests for others to pick up this unsolved mystery.
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