DOUGLAS FIELD relishes the hard-boiled language, satire and humour of the third and last of the Harlem trilogy
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Venice Preserved, Swan Theatre Stratford-upon-Avon
The conflict between love and honour in Thomas Otway’s Restoration tragedy gets a modish yet uneven update by the RSC
Patriarch: Les Denis as Priuli
[Helen Maybanks]
STEPHANIE BROWN draws attention to the hidden labour of the female embroiderers, and how a 19th century replica made no such error
MIK SABIERS revels in a band that ploughs an idiosyncratic furrow of expletive laden, guitar-driven alt rock
ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Synthetic Sincerity, Our Hero, Balthazar, Heartstopper Forever, and A Year In London
The bard invites readers to a gig, raps for Clacton, and lays out the Burnham-Hurzeler conundrum
RON JACOBS recommends an important book that enhances the oppositional theories put forth by Fanon and, in doing so, remakes psychology itself
IF THE RSC was seeking to complement its current production of Vanbrugh’s popular Restoration comedy The Provoked Wife with a tragedy of the period, they would have relatively little choice.
Thomas Otway’s 1682 play Venice Preserved has been virtually the only Restoration tragedy to maintain its stage popularity since its own time.
Although the play shares the genre’s characteristic mixture of rhetorical heroic language and thematic conflicts between love and honour — straining the patience of audiences in our more prosaic age — its subject of the plotting to overthrow a repressive regime has a more familiar ring.
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