Royal opera house
Proper tutus, gorgeous designs, first-rate dancing: Royal Ballet’s new Swan Lake reviewed
The Royal Ballet’s 2016 Frankenstein was a masterclass in how not to make narrative dance and the news that Liam…
Grief-conjurors, space-mincers and earth-shovellers: performance roundup
They enter two by two. Grannies, mainly. Headscarved, mainly. Some locking arms. A bit glum. Like rejects from Noah’s ark.…
A delicious operatic ragout of horror: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk reviewed
There is famously no door into the late-night diner of Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’. Its three silent patrons are trapped behind…
Reducing the lead to an demented rape victim is just what ballet needs: The Wind reviewed
A kindly cowboy, an East Coast bride, adultery, murder and madness. The Wind, Dorothy Scarborough’s 1925 Texas gothic novel (and…
Not vintage Mariinsky
Not really a vintage Mariinsky season — an odd choice of repertoire and some hit-and-miss male casting — but the…
Mad about the boy
Tall, handsome boys with long legs and beautifully arched feet do not grow on trees (if only). Every ballet director…
Not a repertory piece but in its dignity it earns respect: Royal Opera’s Oedipe reviewed
For years I have been telling people that they should listen to, in the absence of staged performances, Enescu’s opera…
The Royal Ballet is literally losing the plot
If a football manager produces a string of losses, the writing is on the wall and out he goes. He’s…
Predictably meh: Scottish Ballet’s new Swan Lake reviewed
Every ballet company wants a box-office earner. But why Scottish Ballet’s leader Christopher Hampson kept on at David Dawson until…
A new dance piece in which race definitely matters: Ballet Black’s Triple Bill reviewed
Ballet’s romantic mantra could be summed up by John Keats’s ballad ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, in which a young…
ENO must go
Last week Darren Henley, chief executive of Arts Council England, revealed that opera receives just under a fifth of the…
Is Twitter now in charge of the Royal Ballet’s artistic programming?
For all the billing and cooing on public forums about the Royal Ballet’s The Two Pigeons revival, there’s a silent…
Morgen und Abend: the kind of opera that gives opera a bad name
The Royal Opera House seemed nervous about Georg Friedrich Haas’s world première Morgen und Abend. They sent out a pdf…
Carlos Acosta’s incoherent Carmen is a disaster
The love that asks no questions, the love that pays the price… The amount of unconditional love sloshing about at…
This Juliet needs a new Romeo
You always remember your first time, don’t you? And in ballet one imagines that Juliet wants to remember her first…
The best ballerinas in Britain at the moment are hairy and male
There was blood on the walls and floor at the birth of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in 1965. The…
Sylvie Guillem’s better than ever in her final, final Coliseum farewell
The blackness that sweeps along the stage behind Sylvie Guillem’s disappearing figure in the Russell Maliphant piece on her farewell…
The band that nearly saved the Cuban revolution
By chance, my first night in Havana in 1987 was the night the clubs went dark to mark the death…
‘Bewitching’: Krol Roger at the Royal Opera reviewed
‘What gives your lies such power?’ asks the bewildered Sicilian leader in Szymanowski’s opera Krol Roger. The question is addressed…
Il turco in Italia, Royal Opera House, reviewed: bring sunglasses
Big slats of orange, burning yellows, an Adriatic in electric blue: I wish I’d bought my sunglasses to the Royal…
La Fille mal gardee at the Royal Opera House reviewed: light, lithe and tender
The current talking-point at the Royal Ballet is the Russians milling around. One can sound unfortunately as if one’s starting…
Tippett’s triumphant failure: Birmingham Opera Company’s The Ice Break reviewed
The Ice Break is Michael Tippett’s fourth opera, first produced at Covent Garden in 1977 and rarely produced anywhere since,…