Director Meg Taintor’s fine staging of Howard Barker’s play focuses on the complex script’s affecting personal through line: the growing love between reluctant war hero and disgraced victim, and their struggle to fashion something real amid the growing artificiality around them. The Europeans by Howard Barker. Directed by Meg Taintor. Staged by Whistler in the…
A hold-onto-your seat month with some intriguing world premieres, including a musical version of a Korean folktale, an attempt to turn Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound into a rock event, and a cerebral confab featuring Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli. By Bill Marx. King Lear by William Shakespeare. Directed by Michael Grandage. NT Live screens the…
By Bill Marx I narrate disintegration among rulers And the kindness of the enemy I report the speed at which fear grips the innovative And the intolerable loneliness of the habitually free — From Howard Barker’s poem “Gary Upright” A Hard Heart by Howard Barker. Directed by Richard Romagnoli. Presented by Whistler in the Dark…
By Bill Marx “I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly.” — Howard Barker Given the New York Times’s unenthusiastic review of an off-Broadway staging of Howard Barker’s A Hard Heart back in December – “Kathleen Chalfant can perform such miracles onstage that she has…
The Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll at Mid-Year: Warming Up a Riff — How It Happened, and Why It Matters