Playwrights take career breaks for all sorts of reasons, but none quite so strikingly as Václav Havel, the former President of the Czech Republic. This week his first play for nearly 20 years receives its British premiere, at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. He was, of course, getting on with other things in the [...]
Entries from September 2008
12/09/2008
Yevgeny Nesterenko as Boris Godunov
From: Trisolde
The Bolshoi Opera Moscow, lead by Boris Khaikin.
11/09/2008
Auden not our contemporary
W. H. Auden’s imaginary academy for poets, described in his essay “The Poet and the City” from The Dyer’s Hand (1962), is of a clear practical bent, for as well as poetry the curriculum requires its students to undertake allotment-keeping and the care of a domestic animal. The habit of situating the useful alongside the [...]
07/09/2008
Perfect delivery
On a sultry evening in Manhattan last month, Joseph O’Neill was to be found in the cool downtown atmosphere of the independent SoHo bookstore McNally Jackson. The occasion was a party thrown for the store’s renaming (it had previously been called McNally Robinson), a champagne affair with a guest list and a doorman. A slew [...]
