ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
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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]
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
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GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
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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