Latest news with #Aeneid
Sydney Morning Herald
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Robber barons and moonshine: This show about the road to Hades is a hell of a good time
MUSICAL THEATRE Hadestown ★★★★ Her Majesty's Theatre, until July 6 Ancient Greek and Roman myths involving the underworld tend to agree on the ease with which mortals can find the road to hell. In Anais Mitchell's folk-musical Hadestown – a retelling of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, draped in a distinctly American mythos and musicality – the road becomes a railway line, and Hades a pinstripe-suited robber baron, whose train ferries denizens of jazz-age speakeasies to 'eternal overtime' in a factory at the end of the line. The other point on which the myths agree is how difficult the underworld is to escape. As Dryden put it in his translation of Virgil's Aeneid: The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labour lies. We know that Orpheus will fail, that a fatal glance backward will condemn Eurydice to the underworld forever, but the tragic love story swells with every repetition and Christine Anu's Hermes – glam emcee in this steampunk adaptation – is determined they're going to tell it anyway. If Hadestown is too schematic to provide much emotional depth or tragic catharsis, it is musically superior to most Broadway blockbusters. This production delivers Mitchell's score (which started as a concept album and bloomed into a stage show) with propulsive catchiness and assurance. It's usually billed as a folk-musical, though the range of popular music referenced is much wider than that term suggests. Anu unleashes brassiness for the opening scene-setter, Road to Hell. Adrian Tamburini's Hades has a gravelly, embittered bass with dark country vibes going on – infernal shades of Johnny Cash or Nick Cave or even Tom Waits lurking in the low notes.
The Age
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Robber barons and moonshine: This show about the road to Hades is a hell of a good time
MUSICAL THEATRE Hadestown ★★★★ Her Majesty's Theatre, until July 6 Ancient Greek and Roman myths involving the underworld tend to agree on the ease with which mortals can find the road to hell. In Anais Mitchell's folk-musical Hadestown – a retelling of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, draped in a distinctly American mythos and musicality – the road becomes a railway line, and Hades a pinstripe-suited robber baron, whose train ferries denizens of jazz-age speakeasies to 'eternal overtime' in a factory at the end of the line. The other point on which the myths agree is how difficult the underworld is to escape. As Dryden put it in his translation of Virgil's Aeneid: The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labour lies. We know that Orpheus will fail, that a fatal glance backward will condemn Eurydice to the underworld forever, but the tragic love story swells with every repetition and Christine Anu's Hermes – glam emcee in this steampunk adaptation – is determined they're going to tell it anyway. If Hadestown is too schematic to provide much emotional depth or tragic catharsis, it is musically superior to most Broadway blockbusters. This production delivers Mitchell's score (which started as a concept album and bloomed into a stage show) with propulsive catchiness and assurance. It's usually billed as a folk-musical, though the range of popular music referenced is much wider than that term suggests. Anu unleashes brassiness for the opening scene-setter, Road to Hell. Adrian Tamburini's Hades has a gravelly, embittered bass with dark country vibes going on – infernal shades of Johnny Cash or Nick Cave or even Tom Waits lurking in the low notes.
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ian Hamilton Finlay review – under the classical veneer, this artist was an idiot
We all respect a classicist. So it's hard not to be impressed by Ian Hamilton Finlay's learned citing of the Aeneid, Book X, on a stone column in this exhibition marking the centenary of his birth. The poet, artist and creator of Little Sparta – his renowned art garden – revived the neo-classical style at a time when artists were more likely to quote Warhol than Virgil. He appeals to anyone who's sick of illiterate pop culture – a defiantly archaic figure who made no apology for his erudition. Unfortunately, under the marble veneer, Finlay was an idiot. He flirted – more than flirted, claim some critics – with Nazi imagery, apparently fascinated by Panzer tanks and the SS logo. His fans insist it was all very nuanced but the Little Sparta website acknowledges 'letters in which Finlay had made 'anti-semitic' remarks'. (Their quote marks on antisemitic, not mine.) There are no Nazi images in this exhibition but Finlay's interest in extremism and violence is unleashed in a series of bizarre and brutal conceptual artworks about the French Revolution. Marshall McLuhan's maxim 'the medium is the message' is incised on a panel of black slate. At first this looks like a witty transmutation of pop communication theory into engraved stone, but then you see the drawn outline of a guillotine blade: the 'medium' Finlay's celebrating is the slaughter of the Terror during the French Revolution, when first monarchs and aristocrats, then revolutionaries themselves, were decapitated in a bloody production line. This is even more emphatic in a gnarled wooden reproduction of the block where a victim's neck was held in place for the descending blade. It is inscribed 'Le Revolution est un bloc' ('The Revolution is a bloc') – a quote from the politician Georges Clemenceau in 1891, meaning the French Revolution had to be taken as a whole. Finlay, in a visual pun, changes its meaning: the Revolution requires bloodshed, he enthusiastically declares. To the block with them all. What adolescent stuff. Candles on stools commemorate characters from the French Revolution including Robespierre, architect of the Terror. Marble reliefs pay homage to the revolutionary neo-classical artist Jacques-Louis David and his propaganda masterpiece The Death of Marat, a portrait of the revolutionary leader assassinated in his bath. You may agree with Finlay that the Terror was a necessary purging, or an inevitable backlash, to reactionary attacks on the Revolution. The meaning of the French Revolution is still passionately debated, its history still being written. At least Finlay cares about history, a defender might say. So no, I'm not offended by his love of the guillotine. I am just saddened by the shallowness of an artist who, in his latter years, fumed in his garden about the need to wipe out the filthy aristocratic pigs instead of making art with any kind of universal human content. Superficiality is Finlay's real sin. Artfully concealed behind the apparent weightiness of classical plinths and columns, his take on life lacks seriousness or depth. Someone who makes 'provocative' Nazi references without apparently knowing what he meant by them is a fool not an intellectual. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion These Jacobin artworks were made in the wake of a controversy about his interest in the Third Reich. In the late 1980s Finlay was commissioned to create a sculpture garden at Versailles for the bicentenary of the French Revolution, but stories in the French press about his use of the SS logo, his correspondence with Hitler's architect Albert Speer and the revelation of his apparently antisemitic remarks in letters led to him losing this prestigious job. These artworks about the French Revolution were created in the 1990s in the wake of this humiliation. Perhaps his daft celebration of the guillotine is a longing for revenge. It certainly proves Versailles dodged a bullet, for these works are as crass as they are dry. They are not the art of a deep thinker or true poet. Why does he get in these knots of pseudo-erudition instead of addressing profound themes? Looking at his classical works you might be reminded of the French artist Nicolas Poussin. But in Poussin's most famous painting, Et in Arcadia Ego, shepherds puzzle over an inscription on a stone monument that translates as 'I too am in Arcadia', or maybe 'I was also in Arcadia'. Latin is a richly terse language, the interpretation varies, but however you read it, this refers to death. There is death, even in Arcadia. It is universal. Finlay completely lacks the sobriety and truth of Poussin. We all die, by the guillotine or some other way. Rhetorically raving about the glories of Jacobin violence is the opposite of the melancholy insights of great art. On this evidence, Finlay's works won't last another century. Ian Hamilton Finlay: Fragments is at Victoria Miro Gallery, London, until 24 May.
The Guardian
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on posthumously publishing Joan Didion: goodbye to all that
Joan Didion entered the fray on the publication of Ernest Hemingway's unfinished final manuscript in an essay titled Last Words in 1998: 'You think something is in shape to be published or you don't, and Hemingway didn't,' she wrote. You believe a writer's unpublished work is fair game after their death or you don't, and Didion – it would seem – didn't. Debate about the ethics of posthumous publication has been ignited once more, this time with Didion at its centre. After the writer's death in 2021, about 150 pages were found in a file next to her desk. These were meticulous accounts of sessions with her psychiatrist, from 1999 to 2003, focused mainly on her adopted daughter Quintana, who was spiralling into alcoholism. Addressed to her husband, screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, this journal has been published under the title Notes to John. 'No restrictions were put on access,' we are told in a brief, anonymous introduction, presumably the ghostly hand of her literary estate. The history of posthumous works is a long and contentious one, from Virgil's Aeneid to the publication of Gabriel García Márquez's Until August last year. Márquez's sons excused their 'act of betrayal' in publishing this abandoned novel against the Nobel laureate's wishes as a service to his readers. In 2009, Vladimir Nabokov's son published his father's incomplete last work, The Original of Laura, 30 years after his death, despite his instructions that the novel be destroyed. Harper Lee's 'lost' manuscript Go Set a Watchman (discovered in a safe deposit box) caused a sensation when it was published in 2015. Lee was 89 and in very poor health. It became the fastest-selling novel in HarperCollins history. But the critical verdict on all these recent 'rediscoveries' was that the authors had good reasons not to want them published. However, it is not always a case of publish and be damned. Most famously, we would not have Kafka's The Trial had his executor, Max Brod, not ignored his demand that it be burned. 'Don't pull the Max Brod-Kafka trick on me,' Michel Foucault reportedly warned his friends. Henry James made a 'gigantic bonfire' of his archive. Thomas Hardy followed suit. Philip Larkin's diaries, more prosaically, were committed to a shredding machine and then the University of Hull's boiler house. 'What he wished to be remembered would be remembered,' Larkin wrote of Hardy. 'What he wished forgotten would be forgotten.' How much of Notes to John was meant to be forgotten? Didion wrote two memoirs: The Year of Magical Thinking, after Dunne's sudden death in 2003, and, later, Blue Nights, about her relationship with Quintana, who died in 2005 at the age of 39. In both, her daughter's addiction is gracefully elided. Didion was America's literary celebrity. Aged 80, famous for her sunglasses, the author became the face of luxury fashion house Celine. Today, her image is printed on tote bags for bookish hipsters. Notes to John is a further offering to the cult of Joan. What could be more irresistible than her therapy notes? It seems unlikely that Didion, that most reticent of people and most exacting of writers, would have welcomed these intimate, unedited journals seeing the light of day. But it is implausible that she would have been unaware of the inevitability of their publication. In Notes for John we see Didion bare-faced. We see her pain. But still she remains an enigma.
Times
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Genetic mix held the secret of ancient Phoenicians' success
The story of Dido and her flight from Tyre, in modern day Lebanon, to found Carthage in North Africa is one account of how a powerful civilisation spread. In Virgil's telling in the Aeneid, one of the most vivid epic poems in Latin literature, the Phoenician queen sailed west after her brother, King Pygmalion, murdered her husband for his wealth. The story also contains the seeds of the Phoenician culture's demise. Dido's doomed love affair with Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome, whom she curses on her funeral pyre, foreshadows the Punic Wars and the avenging spirit of Hannibal, culminating in Rome's razing of Carthage in 146BC. Whether Dido existed is debated, as is the question of who exactly were the Phoenicians and how
