Art Gallery: Howard Hodgkin - Time and Place

Enter the colour-saturated world of an artist often compared to Matisse

Howard Hodgkin is unquestionably the grand figure of British non-figurative painting. Often compared to Matisse in his use of intense colour, he has always insisted that his paintings are not abstract. They allude, he says, to memories of people and places and states of being, so that his titles are what you would expect from a landscape artist or even, occasionally, a chronicler of modern manners: Dirty Weather, Spring Rain, Privacy and Self Expression in the Bedroom. And he often paints on unconventional surfaces, favouring wood rather than canvas, painting the frame so that we see the paintings more as objects than as two-dimensional surfaces. Tate Britain’s major 2006 retrospective surveyed his work over six decades, but a new exhibition, at Modern Art Oxford, is a tightly focused affair: paintings executed by the 77-year-old artist over the last decade, including a body of new work. They offer a window on to a brilliant, colour-saturated world.

Mick Gordon on directing The Tempest

Prospero is 400 years old: a leading director on an enduring enigma

The central character in Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest, is a betrayed Duke called Prospero. Prospero means omniscient panic: an apt name for an all-powerful creator of tempests and general wreaker of revenge. However, the profound appeal of this 400-year-old play, which I am directing in the Oxford Shakespeare Company's site-specific open-air touring production this summer, lies not in the narratives of malignant magi and lustful monsters, power-craving lords and their wine-craving servants.

The Lion's Face, Opera Group

Dementia is given the operatic treatment

An opera about Alzheimer’s disease might seem an idea calculated to send the most community-minded audience rapidly to the nearest exit. Yet there's a longish history of theatre – musical and otherwise – about loss of memory and the failure of language, from Wagner to Bartók to Beckett to (even) Michael Nyman; and if Elena Langer's new piece for The Opera Group, The Lion's Face, ultimately fails to measure up dramatically to that tradition, it may be because, in approaching the subject from a clinical angle, it imprisons itself in the inescapability of the condition itself, without hope of change or catharsis.

Dave's Oscar moment

I had a slightly surreal experience last night, when an actor playing the butler of a future Cabinet minister in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband announced during the interval that David Cameron had just departed Buckingham Place en route to 10 Downing Street to form the next UK government. It was just one of a few pleasing convergences of art and life of the evening, not least of which was that we were gathered in something called the Churchill Room at the time.

The play, which has several political references that could have been written just before curtain-up, was performed by a group of Oxford students led by actor/ director Krishna Omkar, in a gala performance at Dartmouth House in Mayfair. The historic building, just a stone’s throw from the play’s original setting, is now home to the English-Speaking Union, a charity launched at the end of the First World War with the aim of promoting closer ties between the world’s English-speaking peoples. It has a busy schedule of arts-related events, as well as political debates.

The gala performance was to celebrate 125 years of drama at Oxford, where Wilde himself studied, and which is also the alma mater of a huge number of writers, actors and directors, including Richard Burton, Partick Marber, Hugh Grant, Kate Beckinsale, Thea Sharrock and Rosamund Pike.

The Berlin Philharmonic European Concert 2010, Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford

Thunderous optimism in the annual Europe concert by the crack German players

"Madness! Madness! Everywhere madness!" The unsung words of cobbler-philosopher Hans Sachs in the third-act prelude to Wagner's Die Meistersinger might seem like an odd opening manifesto for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra's annual May Day ceremonial concert this morning, hosted this year by Oxford in the gorgeous venue where the Berliners had last played under Karajan a very long time ago. But there was method in it. Whether or not Oxford's traditional May Day eve revels last night had any drunken brawl as threatening as the one which set Sachs meditating on human folly there was certainly a bacchanalian atmosphere outside the Sheldonian - and even more to be found inside.

Posh, Royal Court Theatre

Toff antics, nostalgic politics and troubled masculinity in Laura Wade’s new play

When artistic director Dominic Cooke took up his new post at this venue in 2007, he said that he wanted “to look at what it means to be middle class, what it means to have power, what it means to have wealth”. Although this comment caused a lot of fuss, with die-hard Royal Court fans imagining that he was about to betray the theatre’s tradition of staging plays about low-lifes, Cooke’s programming has managed to balance gritty underclass dramas with plays about the rich and privileged.

theartsdesk in Oxford: Food, Sex and Amis

Where Shakespeare talks dirty, and very much more

“If I were a woman I would shag as many of you as had pubes and pricks that gave me sexual pleasure…” No less elderly than he is eminent, Professor Stanley Wells – editor of the Oxford Shakespeare and international authority on the Bard – smiles placidly around the room at his blue-rinsed audience. It’s less than 10 minutes into my first event at Oxford’s prestigious literary festival, and decidedly not what I had anticipated.

Miroslav Balka, Tate Modern & Modern Art Oxford

Dizzying video images of the Holocaust from Polish installation artist

Walk into the gaping mouth of the metal container featured in Miroslaw Balka’s installation at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and you are plunged into a disorientating darkness. Unnerved, you shuffle forward, passing and perhaps finding comfort in the ghostly presence of other limbs, other bodies which are also shuffling uncertainly, all awareness of spatial relationships denied in the enveloping blackness.

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