Word: royalities
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Saved (1965) and The War Plays (1985), has for two decades been described as one of Britain's most promising playwrights. Yet his work has remained too didactic, too unyielding in its politics, to allow sufficient poetry in his vision. Restoration, first performed in 1981 by London's Royal Court Theater, and The War Plays show little mellowing of that hortatory urge. But as offered by Washington's Arena Stage in what amounts to its U.S. premiere, Restoration proves an urgent, at times overpowering coup de theatre...
Earlier Serban opera productions, notably a misbegotten Turandot for London's Royal Opera House, have been willful. But in The Juniper Tree he has had the good sense to emulate the haunting imagery and striking tableaux that are Wilson's hallmarks. The tree, whose branches agonizingly split apart as the father dines lustily on his unholy supper, is pure Wilson; so is the unexpected apparition of the first wife, aboard what appears to be a rhinoceros, as the guilty stepmother's conscience afflicts...
...German Art in the 20th Century," the huge show of some 300 works by 52 artists that has been the talk of London since it opened at the Royal Academy in October, has a clear agenda. It wants to prove something, and that something is continuity, from...
...persuasively does "German Art in the 20th Century" support this argument? As conceived by Norman Rosenthal, the exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy, the first part of the show--painting and sculpture between 1905 and 1933--makes a brilliant case. (It especially needed to be made in London, which has not had a major survey of German expressionism since 1938.) Admittedly, there are some weak patches at the beginning. For some reason, the curators did not include any of the triptychs that were Beckmann's crowning achievement as a pictorial fabulist; and so, despite the presence of two or three...
Avedon's ambition is to be, like Goya, both the royal chronicler and the social critic. But unflattering shots of the glamorous and privileged are one thing. How to cast that incinerating gaze upon ordinary people? Not one to swaddle his Western subjects in the gentle conventions of "concerned photography," he has persisted in his relentless inspection of bad skin, weak chins and glassy-eyed expressions. He also has resorted in places to cliched potshots, as in one picture of a nine-year-old cradling a gun. Yet he has given most of the people in these pictures ample means...