Art
Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, from 18th July
In May, horrified students looked on as Glasgow School of Art’s famous library went up in flames. Its architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, was only 28 when he designed this seminal building in 1896. Completed 12 years later, its idiosyncratic re-imagining of art nouveau has become one of Glasgow’s emblems.
This summer, by poignant chance, the Hunterian Art Gallery opens a major exhibition looking at the architectural work of this iconic figure. Mackintosh furniture, design and decoration is familiar to many, but this exhibition will look at his work, from 1889 until 1913, in the architectural practice of Honeyman, Keppie and Mackintosh. Unusually, the show will focus on the smaller domestic projects—Hill House, Windyhill, Auchinibert and Mossyde—as well as the landmarks.
Over 80 architectural drawings, gathered from the Hunterian’s own and other rarely-seen collections, will be on display alongside a specially commissioned film, architectural models and other archive materials. Rather than a lone genius, the exhibition places Mackintosh at the heart of a concerted project—alongside colleagues, clients and contractors—to make Glasgow splendid.
Emma Crichton-Miller
Opera
Glyndebourne, 9th to 24th August
Flying bicycles, schoolboy fantasies and lacrosse sticks—Robert Carsen’s Rinaldo is everything that summer opera should be. First seen in 2011, the production takes a convoluted Crusades story, and transforms it into something contemporary, playful and absorbing.
It helps that Rinaldo has a score stuffed with more of Handel’s finest tunes than almost any other opera. The (in)famous aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” is just the start of a musical evening that unfolds in endless melody, from the charming instrumental birdcalls and lyricism of Almirena’s “Augelletti” to Rinaldo’s passionate lament “Cara Sposa.”
The talented cast is led by Iestyn Davies, most recently seen as an outstanding Bertarido in English National Opera’s Rodelinda. But if there’s one thing that sets this Rinaldo above any other Handel you’re likely to hear this year, it’s conductor Ottavio Dantone. Under his direction the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment will deliver a performance so vivid, so rhetorical, that you could strip away all the singers and still have a thrilling musical drama.
Alexandra Coghlan
Theatre
The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from 30th July
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Roaring Girls” season has so far re-positioned The Roaring Girl (1611), by Middleton and Dekker, in the Victorian era, and the anonymously written Arden of Faversham (1592), a true story of domestic betrayal, in the present. So it will be fascinating to see how hotshot director Maria Aberg treats one of the most glorious, tragic and complex plays in all British drama, John Webster’s The White Devil, last performed by the RSC nearly 20 years ago.
For a start, she’s cast an actress, the talented Laura Elphinstone, as Flamineo, an incestuous pimp at the Renaissance court of the Medici, whose married sister, Vittoria, responds to an indecent proposal from the Duke of Brachiano.
What follows is death and disaster in a dark, glittering tunnel of intrigue, madness, dumb shows and a poisoned helmet, with Vittoria brought to a famous trial, a prime example of Webster’s brilliant dialectical technique. British playwright Edward Bond once edited his own version of the play for Glenda Jackson and Jonathan Pryce. And last year, the Lyric Hammersmith staged a radically reinvented version.
Time, perhaps, for the RSC to get back to first principles—but unlikely this time round.
Michael Coveney
Dance
London Coliseum, 29th July to 3rd August
The number of works of dance that alter the choreographic landscape overnight can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. PUSH—the programme of work created by Russell Maliphant and premiered in 2005—is one of them. The combination of Maliphant’s ground-breaking choreography and dancer Sylvie Guillem’s desire to establish herself as more than just a traditional ballerina made the work into an instant classic of modern dance. Maliphant’s regular collaborators, lighting genius Michael Hulls and electronic music maestro Andy Cowton, forged a dynamic synthesis of movement, light and sound across three solos and a duet. The box of golden light in the solo “Two” has caged several dancers, including Carlos Acosta and Carys Staton, though Guillem remains its most spectacular prisoner. With her hands, feet, arms and shoulder blades flickering in and out of the light, she becomes an ecstatic blur of sculptural movement. “Solo” is a heady collision between Guillem’s classical movement and flamenco guitar and “Shift” has Maliphant dancing with his own shadows. In “PUSH,” the two come together in a duet of astonishing dexterity, mixing techniques of martial arts and the spiritual balance of yoga. Push for a ticket. Push hard.
Neil Norman
Film
On release from 15th August
The Congress is another film about the movie business—but it features smart ideas given fevered life by director Ari Folman, creator of the animated documentary Waltz with Bashir. Partly inspired by the 1971 novel The Futurological Congress by Polish sci-fi sage Stanislaw Lem, Folman’s film is an unusual mixture of live action and animation. Robin Wright plays “Robin Wright”: a single-mother actress past 50 waiting for good roles and motivated by the need to support a sick child. Her agent (Harvey Keitel) brings her a deal—a major film studio want to digitally record her every expression. She must then retire and disappear while her virtual self plays to the masses, performing in sci-fi films which, ironically, she abhors. Fast forward a decade or so and things gets far stranger. The real Robin Wright arrives at a congress where psychotropic drugs allow citizens of a dystopian utopia to become cartoon avatars—Tom Cruise, Jon Hamm or Grace Jones. Once the cartoons take over, the film careers into total mayhem—eye-popping, occasionally illuminating, but more often bamboozling. Yet for the early satire—and sheer crazy ambition—give it a try.
Francine Stock
