THEATRE
Emperor and Galilean
Directed by Jonathan Kent, National Theatre, from 9th June, Tel: 020 7452 3000
The great Ibsen biographer Michael Meyer once planned to present his translation of Emperor and Galilean, the playwright’s farewell to epic drama, at the Old Vic. But his hopes were dashed when the theatre was turned into the base for the new National Theatre Company, under the direction of Laurence Olivier, in 1963. As if to make amends, the National is now offering the British premiere of this unwieldy, ironic story of how the tyrannical Emperor Julian decided to abolish Christianity and restore the old gods. This new version, by young dramaturg Ben Power, reunites the brilliant former Almeida Theatre team of director Jonathan Kent, designer Paul Brown and leading actor Ian McDiarmid.
The play remains one of the most difficult ever written. The NT, which rarely goes out on such a risky limb, promises a cast of 50, creating a cathedral of sound and ritual as the action sweeps across Greece and the Middle East in the mid-4th century AD. While working on the play, Ibsen wrote two verse dramas—Brand and Peer Gynt—that he never intended for performance in the theatre. But Emperor is written in prose, and its theme, the search for a religion that combines Christian ethics with sensual joy, reveals, he said, “more of my own personal experience than I would publicly admit.” Ibsen is best known for his 12 great prose dramas, from The Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken, yet this surprising and outlandish early work could prove to be his lost masterpiece.
Michael Coveney
ART
Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters
Dulwich Picture Gallery, 29th June-25th September, Tel: 020 8299 8717
Nicolas Poussin (born 1594) and Cy Twombly (born 1928) are separated by over 300 years. Poussin is the pioneer of neo-classicism whose work is admired for its clarity, balance and restraint; Twombly is the American expressionist whose exuberantly calligraphic work defies traditional notions of pictorial representation. Hanging their work side by side reveals surprising affinities, acknowledged by Twombly, who has co-operated with this show.
Both artists arrived in Rome as young men, full of creative energy, to be dazzled by its light, ruins and myths. Both were seduced by classical visions of Arcadia, while also exploring eroticism, darkness and fear—as in Poussin’s The Triumph of Pan, or Twombly’s Aristaeus Mourning the Loss of His Bees. In their later years each turned to the archetypal theme of the four seasons: Poussin drew characteristically on Biblical imagery to soothe fear of passing time, while Twombly’s canvases became openly romantic and elegiac.
On display will be the gallery’s own Poussins, including the sensuous Rinaldo and Armida and the heroic Triumph of David, with loans from, among others, the Prado, National Gallery and Art Institute of Chicago. Alongside are paintings and sculptures by Twombly, including his anguished, baroque Hero and Leander (To Christopher Marlowe). The success of the show will lie in the shock of recognition followed by the acute perception of difference.
Emma Crichton-Miller
FESTIVAL
Meltdown
Southbank Centre, 10th-19th June, Tel: 0844 875 0073
“Some ideas are too mad to be feasible, but I did them anyway,” said Ray Davies of his decision to guest direct this year’s Meltdown Festival at the Southbank Centre. Part of the 60th anniversary celebrations of the Festival of Britain (see Andrew Roberts’s article), the former Kinks frontman has an eclectic line-up to follow his opening gig on 10th June. Highlights include the Alan Price Set, the blues group fronted by the former Animals keyboardist.
Anna Calvi and Ron Sexsmith will be fronting a double-bill: listen out for Calvi’s operatic voice and screeching guitars as she plays material from her debut album, while Sexsmith offers melancholy lyrics and lilting tunes from his new album Long Player Late Bloomer. The TV pop show Ready Steady Go!, which gave the Kinks their break in the 1960s, will be revived for a one-off episode. Davies will round everything off on Sunday 19th, performing songs from The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, the final album by the original Kinks quartet, released in 1968, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Laura Silverman
FILM
Senna
On general release from 3rd June
Six years in the making, crafted from 15,000 hours of footage, and winner of an audience prize at Sundance, Senna is a film about the legendary Brazilian Formula One racing driver. Petrol-heads will be wowed by the racing footage. Fans of documentary filmmaking will be impressed with its use of unseen archive. The rest of us will be moved by the epic tale of a man who died on a quest for perfection at 175mph.
In a thrilling early sequence, we watch Ayrton Senna slide through the streets of Monaco in the blistering rain, his fearless driving allowing him to pass faster cars and more established drivers. He crosses the finish line first, but his victory is taken from him on a technicality, a pattern that repeats itself throughout the film.
Director Asif Kapadia’s background is in feature films, and it shows. He eschews conventional documentary techniques such as talking head interviews and instead exploits the huge range of archive footage to show us Senna’s life chronologically. This is a documentary that feels like a three-act drama about a young man from nowhere who overcomes his obstacles and dies a star.
Tom Streithorst
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Aldeburgh Festival
10th-26th June, Tel: 01728 687 110
In recent years the Aldeburgh Festival has been invigorated by a blast of European high modernism, thanks to its director, the great French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. This year continues the trend. There are numerous homages to Hungarian modernist György Ligeti, creator of musical mechanisms that blur the divide between texture and line, order and chaos.
The fifth anniversary of his death on 12th June is marked by five events, including performances by Aimard of Ligeti’s fabulously ingenious Études and the surprisingly romantic Horn Trio. Alongside the modernism is more traditional fare. A stellar cast headed by Ian Bostridge and Angelika Kirchschlager takes on Britten’s Rape of Lucretia. Schubert’s three great song-cycles are performed by Aimard and German baritone Matthias Goerne, and there’s a feast of chamber music from Haydn to Birtwistle. Talented young performers of the Britten-Pears foundation will be much in evidence. And lending a magical flavour to everything will be the mysterious landscape of the Suffolk coast, which is worth the trip in itself.
Ivan Hewett
TELEVISION
The Hour
BBC2, from late June
Having had its cultural clothes stolen by BBC4, BBC2 is trying to shake off an identity crisis and prove it’s the home of classy drama. A new fast-cutting promotion includes a tantalising shot of Ben Whishaw from The Hour, a new six-part series written by Abi Morgan. Her credits include previous TV dramas (Sex Traffic), film (Birdsong) and theatre (an Afghanistan-themed play at the Tricycle Theatre).
The Hour is set in the mid-1950s, the era in which the BBC launched its most celebrated current affairs shows: Panorama and Tonight. Morgan takes the launch of a news programme as her canvas, into which she places Whishaw as a radical journalist. His boss is played by Romola Garai (shades of Grace Wyndham Goldie) and the presenter is played by Prospect’s favourite actor from The Wire, Dominic West (shades of Richard Dimbleby). The Hour also has a dream support cast with Tim Pigott-Smith, Juliet Stevenson, Anna Chancellor and Julian Rhind-Tutt. Let’s hope Morgan has not over-egged the pudding by throwing in a murder subplot. Now, repeat after me: “BBC2 is the home of classy drama.”
Peter Bazalgette
Emperor and Galilean
Directed by Jonathan Kent, National Theatre, from 9th June, Tel: 020 7452 3000
The great Ibsen biographer Michael Meyer once planned to present his translation of Emperor and Galilean, the playwright’s farewell to epic drama, at the Old Vic. But his hopes were dashed when the theatre was turned into the base for the new National Theatre Company, under the direction of Laurence Olivier, in 1963. As if to make amends, the National is now offering the British premiere of this unwieldy, ironic story of how the tyrannical Emperor Julian decided to abolish Christianity and restore the old gods. This new version, by young dramaturg Ben Power, reunites the brilliant former Almeida Theatre team of director Jonathan Kent, designer Paul Brown and leading actor Ian McDiarmid.
The play remains one of the most difficult ever written. The NT, which rarely goes out on such a risky limb, promises a cast of 50, creating a cathedral of sound and ritual as the action sweeps across Greece and the Middle East in the mid-4th century AD. While working on the play, Ibsen wrote two verse dramas—Brand and Peer Gynt—that he never intended for performance in the theatre. But Emperor is written in prose, and its theme, the search for a religion that combines Christian ethics with sensual joy, reveals, he said, “more of my own personal experience than I would publicly admit.” Ibsen is best known for his 12 great prose dramas, from The Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken, yet this surprising and outlandish early work could prove to be his lost masterpiece.
Michael Coveney
ART
Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters
Dulwich Picture Gallery, 29th June-25th September, Tel: 020 8299 8717
Nicolas Poussin (born 1594) and Cy Twombly (born 1928) are separated by over 300 years. Poussin is the pioneer of neo-classicism whose work is admired for its clarity, balance and restraint; Twombly is the American expressionist whose exuberantly calligraphic work defies traditional notions of pictorial representation. Hanging their work side by side reveals surprising affinities, acknowledged by Twombly, who has co-operated with this show.
Both artists arrived in Rome as young men, full of creative energy, to be dazzled by its light, ruins and myths. Both were seduced by classical visions of Arcadia, while also exploring eroticism, darkness and fear—as in Poussin’s The Triumph of Pan, or Twombly’s Aristaeus Mourning the Loss of His Bees. In their later years each turned to the archetypal theme of the four seasons: Poussin drew characteristically on Biblical imagery to soothe fear of passing time, while Twombly’s canvases became openly romantic and elegiac.
On display will be the gallery’s own Poussins, including the sensuous Rinaldo and Armida and the heroic Triumph of David, with loans from, among others, the Prado, National Gallery and Art Institute of Chicago. Alongside are paintings and sculptures by Twombly, including his anguished, baroque Hero and Leander (To Christopher Marlowe). The success of the show will lie in the shock of recognition followed by the acute perception of difference.
Emma Crichton-Miller
FESTIVAL
Meltdown
Southbank Centre, 10th-19th June, Tel: 0844 875 0073
“Some ideas are too mad to be feasible, but I did them anyway,” said Ray Davies of his decision to guest direct this year’s Meltdown Festival at the Southbank Centre. Part of the 60th anniversary celebrations of the Festival of Britain (see Andrew Roberts’s article), the former Kinks frontman has an eclectic line-up to follow his opening gig on 10th June. Highlights include the Alan Price Set, the blues group fronted by the former Animals keyboardist.
Anna Calvi and Ron Sexsmith will be fronting a double-bill: listen out for Calvi’s operatic voice and screeching guitars as she plays material from her debut album, while Sexsmith offers melancholy lyrics and lilting tunes from his new album Long Player Late Bloomer. The TV pop show Ready Steady Go!, which gave the Kinks their break in the 1960s, will be revived for a one-off episode. Davies will round everything off on Sunday 19th, performing songs from The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, the final album by the original Kinks quartet, released in 1968, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Laura Silverman
FILM
Senna
On general release from 3rd June
Six years in the making, crafted from 15,000 hours of footage, and winner of an audience prize at Sundance, Senna is a film about the legendary Brazilian Formula One racing driver. Petrol-heads will be wowed by the racing footage. Fans of documentary filmmaking will be impressed with its use of unseen archive. The rest of us will be moved by the epic tale of a man who died on a quest for perfection at 175mph.
In a thrilling early sequence, we watch Ayrton Senna slide through the streets of Monaco in the blistering rain, his fearless driving allowing him to pass faster cars and more established drivers. He crosses the finish line first, but his victory is taken from him on a technicality, a pattern that repeats itself throughout the film.
Director Asif Kapadia’s background is in feature films, and it shows. He eschews conventional documentary techniques such as talking head interviews and instead exploits the huge range of archive footage to show us Senna’s life chronologically. This is a documentary that feels like a three-act drama about a young man from nowhere who overcomes his obstacles and dies a star.
Tom Streithorst
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Aldeburgh Festival
10th-26th June, Tel: 01728 687 110
In recent years the Aldeburgh Festival has been invigorated by a blast of European high modernism, thanks to its director, the great French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. This year continues the trend. There are numerous homages to Hungarian modernist György Ligeti, creator of musical mechanisms that blur the divide between texture and line, order and chaos.
The fifth anniversary of his death on 12th June is marked by five events, including performances by Aimard of Ligeti’s fabulously ingenious Études and the surprisingly romantic Horn Trio. Alongside the modernism is more traditional fare. A stellar cast headed by Ian Bostridge and Angelika Kirchschlager takes on Britten’s Rape of Lucretia. Schubert’s three great song-cycles are performed by Aimard and German baritone Matthias Goerne, and there’s a feast of chamber music from Haydn to Birtwistle. Talented young performers of the Britten-Pears foundation will be much in evidence. And lending a magical flavour to everything will be the mysterious landscape of the Suffolk coast, which is worth the trip in itself.
Ivan Hewett
TELEVISION
The Hour
BBC2, from late June
Having had its cultural clothes stolen by BBC4, BBC2 is trying to shake off an identity crisis and prove it’s the home of classy drama. A new fast-cutting promotion includes a tantalising shot of Ben Whishaw from The Hour, a new six-part series written by Abi Morgan. Her credits include previous TV dramas (Sex Traffic), film (Birdsong) and theatre (an Afghanistan-themed play at the Tricycle Theatre).
The Hour is set in the mid-1950s, the era in which the BBC launched its most celebrated current affairs shows: Panorama and Tonight. Morgan takes the launch of a news programme as her canvas, into which she places Whishaw as a radical journalist. His boss is played by Romola Garai (shades of Grace Wyndham Goldie) and the presenter is played by Prospect’s favourite actor from The Wire, Dominic West (shades of Richard Dimbleby). The Hour also has a dream support cast with Tim Pigott-Smith, Juliet Stevenson, Anna Chancellor and Julian Rhind-Tutt. Let’s hope Morgan has not over-egged the pudding by throwing in a murder subplot. Now, repeat after me: “BBC2 is the home of classy drama.”
Peter Bazalgette
