Romeo and juliet
From apprentice to master playwright: Shakespeare learns his craft
The Theatre itself, and the works staged at England’s first purpose-built playhouse in Shoreditch, all emerged from the guilds that formed the bedrock of the urban economy
Devastating: WNO’s Peter Grimes reviewed
Britten’s Peter Grimes turns 80 this June, and it’s still hard to credit it. The whole phenomenon, that is –…
What Shakespeare meant to the Bloomsbury Group
Virginia Woolf’s mind was ‘agape & red & hot’ when reading him, and he was an everyday companion to most of the Group – but what they couldn’t bear was to see the plays acted
Formal, but fluid
When Romeo and Juliet first meet at a party, their words to one another fall into the form of a…
Star-crossed lovers: Sweet Sorrow, by David Nicholls, reviewed
The 16-year-old hero of David Nicholls’s fifth novel is ostensibly Everyboy. It is June 1997, the last day at dreary…
A masterclass of menace and magnificence: Romeo and Juliet reviewed
Two households, both alike in dignity. Capulets in red tights, Montagues in green. Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet opens in…
A Lithuanian Romeo and Juliet: Pan Tadeusz, by Adam Mickiewicz, reviewed
It’s hard, in Britain, to imagine a popular museum devoted to a single poem. The Polish city of Wrocław hosts…
Sexy hints of affluence with top notes of fascism: Grange Park’s Roméo et Juliette reviewed
Patrick Mason’s new production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette reminded me of something, but it took a while to work…
Nostalgia and nihilism
‘Gilded doorknobs,’ spits a Party diehard as she contemplates the blessings of the Soviet Union’s collapse. ‘Is this freedom?’ Dozens…
Wish upon a star
Out come the stars in Kenneth Branagh’s Romeo and Juliet. He musters a well-drilled, celebrity-ridden crew but they can’t quite…
Shakespeare400
The feeding frenzy over the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death has reached its peak. Recently we’ve had Shakespeare’s complete…
Wherefore art thou Romeo?
You always remember your first time, don’t you? And in ballet one imagines that Juliet wants to remember her first…
Gutted!
There was blood on the walls and floor at the birth of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in 1965. The…
50 shades of beige
My moment of the week was stumbling into the shocking, fantastical Cabinet of Curiosities in the Alexander McQueen show at…
Simple pleasures
According to some textbooks, one thing the fathers of Soviet choreography hastened to remove from ballet was that awkward-looking language…
Balanchinian ideal
George Balanchine’s Serenade, the manifesto of 20th-century neoclassical choreography, requires a deep understanding of both its complex stylistic nuances and…
