To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
Latest editorial
Different but the same
GORDON PARSONS sees an imagined confrontation between Queen Elizabeth I and the jailed Mary Queen of Scots which reveals them as equally confined by personal and political traumas
Juliet Stevenson (centre)
[Manuel Harlan]
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
Mary Stuart
Duke of York Theatre, London
WE ARE all prisoners of our own personalities and of history and no-one understood this better than Friedrich Schiller, widely regarded as Germany’s Shakespeare.
His epic historical drama Mary Stuart, transferred from the Almeida theatre to the West End, focuses on the tragic conflict between the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots and England’s Protestant Queen Elizabeth.
The complex family web of the Tudors left Mary with a valid claim to the English crown in the event of Elizabeth’s death and was consequently a rallying point for Catholic dissidents.
Similar stories
GORDON PARSONS salutes the apt return of Brecht’s vaudevillian cartoon drama that retains the vitality of the boxing or the circus ring
PETER MASON applauds a stage version of Le Carre’s novel that questions what ordinary people have to gain from high-level governmental spying
GORDON PARSONS is blown away by a superb production of Rostand’s comedy of verbal panache and swordmanship
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today