Skip to main content

Can opera singers act – or do they just wave their arms around like traffic cops?

A new production of King Lear, drawn from the world of opera, aims to put paid to the notion that great singers make second-rate actors. We speak to its stars

I had coffee recently with King Lear and Goneril. To be more precise, with John Tomlinson and Susan Bullock, who play these roles in a brand new production of Shakespeare’s tragedy – one to be staged at the Grange festival in Hampshire next month with a cast exclusively drawn from the world of opera. This, however, is no headline-seeking gimmick but a show that has been years in gestation.

Its director, Keith Warner, says it started with him, Tomlinson and Kim Begley (ex-RSC before turning to opera) planning a two-person version called Lear’s Shadow. Word quickly spread and a reading of the whole play was mounted in Warner’s house. The result is a full-scale production with a dream cast including not just Begley as the Fool but Thomas Allen as Gloucester, Emma Bell as Regan and Louise Alder as Cordelia.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3qL7RDP
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Degrees of separation: what connects Seinfeld to Steve Bannon?

From the US sitcom to the far-right rabble rouser, we go down the rabbit hole, thanks to the arrival of Jerry’s show on Netflix Seinfeld All 180 episodes of the 90s’ most misanthropic sitcom have arrived on Netflix, but not everyone is happy. Some viewers have complained that the new transfer puts Jerry Seinfeld ’s show in a different aspect ratio: from an older square format to widescreen … yada-yada … now the picture crops out some sight gags and just seems slightly bizarro . Motion impossible: fallout It’s not the first time modern technology has caused problems. HD TVs can make even visually stunning films look like cheap soap operas, through motion smoothing – a process to reduce blurring (good for on-screen sport). But Tom Cruise was there to save the day: in a slightly awkward 2018 video , he explained how to adjust TV settings to undo this flat fiasco. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mr722c
Post a Comment
Read more