The Conan yarns are familiar from novels, comics and TV series, but most of all from the early-Eighties Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer. In this new remake, the title role is stretched around the pneumatic bulk of Jason Momoa, the half-Hawaiian and half-Irish veteran of the celebrated cheesecake opera Baywatch.
This wasn't only the series finale, but the last ever episode of Camelot, since the American Starz network has decided to scrap plans for further seasons. It's not hard to see why. After a fairly promising start, Camelot spent several instalments staggering around aimlessly, as if writers and directors had been beheaded by King Arthur's Excalibur. Annoyingly, this tenth and final episode offered belated flashes of what the show might have been.
Some years ago the Dulwich Picture Gallery invited Howard Hodgkin to exhibit alongside the Old Masters in their collection. I am not a fan of this vastly overrated artist, but even a diehard enthusiast must have found the juxtaposition cruel. How could Hodgkin’s crudely daubed, splishy-sploshy canvases (I exempt from the description a few works painted at the highpoint of his career in the mid-Seventies) bear scrutiny against works by Rubens or Rembrandt? They couldn’t, and the exhibition was a car crash. So how will an artist whose works appear similarly unrestrained and unstructured fare in his “conversation” with just one formidable Old Master?
Mozart's Idomeneo is subjected to a famous bit of abuse in Milos Forman's Amadeus. "A most tiresome piece," a courtier critic sniffs. "Too much spice. Too many notes." As it happens, not a wholly inaccurate statement. The work is quite an exotic curry of an early Classical opera.
With The Tudors recently departed from BBC Two, the kindly Channel 4 has stepped in to fill the gap with this new cod-mythological romp through a Middle Ages that never existed. Funnily enough, it comes from the same Irish-Canadian production consortium that cooked up The Tudors, and shares similar attitudes to casting, production values and dialogue.
David Nixon has been artistic director of Northern Ballet for a decade, and it’s probably safe to say he is the king of the story ballet: Wuthering Heights, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Madame Butterfly, Dracula – if it’s got a story, he is, seemingly, willing to tell it. As Christopher Wheeldon’s recent Alice in Wonderland for the Royal Ballet showed, this is not as easy as might first appear. Nixon shoots straight from the hip: he is interested in narrative, he loves answering the question, “What happened then?”
As genres go, it’s a broad church: the tale of the alien who visits our world (our world obviously being contemporary America) encompasses everything from The Man Who Fell to Earth to Galaxy Quest. The story tends to riff on the same tension: how our planet shapes up in the eyes of intergalactic visitors. It can be done for laughs, for thrills, even for tears (see, if you are indeed an alien and haven't already, ET). Thor, in which the titular Norse god is exiled to small-town New Mexico, makes a play for all three.
Certain big dramas can work really well in small places. Sophocles’s revenge play Electra (end of the fifth century BC) is as consequential, and influential, as they come; the Gate Theatre one of the smallest spaces in London. It continually produces sparky, original productions of old and new work.
The sea: the depths from which all life emerged, and a force of destruction. Anselm Kiefer contemplates its sublime beauty and terror in a new exhibition of 24 panoramic photographs, ranged three-deep on two facing walls. Each grey and grainy seascape has been smeared and splattered with white paint and transformed by “electrolysis”, a process which isn’t further explained in the press release but which sounds suitably and impressively dramatic.
Northern Ballet’s genes are rooted in the Royal Ballet’s narrative golden age of the Sixties, its most significant leader Christopher Gable having been the originally intended Romeo of Kenneth MacMillan’s iconic 1965 Romeo and Juliet.