Bill Viola / Michelangelo: Life, Death, Rebirth, Royal Academy of Arts - ★★★ - Until March 31, 2019


Is this an exhibition, a conversation or even a meditation? Actually it’s all three. In the darkened main rooms of the Royal Academy we navigate - sometimes awkwardly - past Bill Viola’s large video screens and Michelangelo’s drawings. The parallels with being in a cathedral are clear. And the subject matter is suitably heavyweight: essentially, the cycle of life. Viola frequently employs diptych and triptych formats. Water features a lot, usually suggesting ritual or redemption. The intention is to provide an immersive experience: would the content work as well scaled down? Veils in one piece offer relief from the hard-edged technology elsewhere. Michelangelo’s drawings are on a much smaller scale and require closer examination. They were made late in his career and if the themes of mortality and transcendence weren’t obvious enough, the curator hammers them home for us. Some of the draughtsmanship is breathtaking: how were such effects achieved using chalk? Occasionally (heretical idea) it’s a bit naff! The ‘Taddei Tondo’ sculpture of the Virgin and Child displays a very human bond but also Christ’s mortality. It is this duality of the physical and the spiritual that connects both artists. A stimulating dialogue between very different approaches, if a rather gloomy one.

 Reviewed by A.L.
 Our Score:  ☆☆☆ 

 WHEN, WHERE, GETTING THERE:
Until March 31, 2019
Daily: 10 am - 6 pm (last admission: 5:30 pm)
Fri: 10 am - 10 pm (last admission: 9:30 pm)
Royal Academy, Main Galleries, Burlington House
Nearest tube: Piccadilly Circus
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/bill-viola-michelangelo
Map & Location: Burlington House, Piccadilly, Mayfair, London W1J 0BD, UK

Most Popular

Top Hat ★★★★ Southbank Centre | Dec 12, 2025 - Jan 17, 2026

Image
“They’re Dancing Cheek to Cheek Again!” The posters and advertising for the original 1935 film starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers promised romance, dancing, and songs you would never forget. This current production is every bit as delightful as the original and largely lives up to the film’s hype. The farcical confusions of the love story continue to charm and amuse, and it is refreshing that director Kathleen Marshall has chosen not to update the references. The show is unapologetically presented as a period piece, relying on the quality of its singing and dancing to bridge the gap between eras. With its unforgettable Irving Berlin score and top notch tapping from Phillip Attmore as Jerry Travers, it succeeds admirably. Attmore clearly relishes his role, and his exuberance is infectious. As Jerry’s love interest, Dale Tremont, Amara Okereke displays a fine voice, and the couple’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” is a definite highlight. As the comic foils the young lovers, Horace...
Full Details »

Indian Ink ★★★★★ Hampstead Theatre | Dec 3, 2025 - Jan 31, 2026

Image
This first-rate production of Tom Stoppard’s palimpsestic masterpiece is simply a must-see. When the English poet Flora Crewe travels to India, she sits for a portrait by the Indian painter Nirad Das. Both that portrait and this play reflect the complex melding of cultures that emerged from the British presence in India. Exploring different approaches to art and the presentation of the artist, the drama also exposes the intricate and often fraught political relationship between the two countries whose histories became so deeply intertwined. Flora’s meeting with the Indian painter hints at the complicated dynamic between a dying imperial vision and its colonial subject, while also questioning the epistemological frameworks through which we seek to understand the past. Many years later, Crewe's American biographer meets with her sister Mrs Swan as he attempts to reconstruct that Indian encounter. Both that actual experience and the artistic impression of Crewe created by Das stand in...
Full Details »

St. Martin in-the-fields: Lunchtime Concerts ★★★★ FREE

Image
Maybe the best musical value in London. The lunchtime concerts at St. Martin's are always a wonderful way to escape the hustle and bustle that is London and the sensory overload that is Trafalgar Square. This is a beautiful setting with great acoustics, and a church pew hard enough to make sure you don't nod off. Reviewed by J.C.  Our score:    ☆☆☆☆  WHEN, WHERE, GETTING THERE: Mon & Fri: 1 pm - 1:45 pm ( occasionally Tues & Thurs)  St. Martin in-the-fields, Trafalgar Square Nearest tube: Charing Cross https://www.stmartin-in-the-fields.org/whats-on
Full Details »

When We Are Married ★★★★ Donmar Warehouse | Dec 6, 2025 - Feb 7, 2026

Image
Set in 1908 and written in 1938, When We Are Married was produced shortly after the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1937, which expanded the grounds for divorce beyond adultery to include cruelty and desertion. At the turn of the century, particularly for the chapel-going middle classes, marriage was firmly understood as a till-death-do-us-part commitment. For Priestley’s original audience, the play’s premise that three couples might discover, after twenty-five years together, that they were not legally married and could therefore make different choices was not only comic but almost subversive. Times have changed, but Priestley’s comedy remains strikingly relevant, especially in its clear-eyed identification of the pressures that can undermine marriage: infidelity, financial anxiety, and bullying abuse. Although these themes are treated lightly, the point behind the laughter remains sharp. The play offers shrewd insight into relationships, class and the hypocrisy that often i...
Full Details »

Oh, Mary! ★★★ Trafalgar Theatre | Dec 3, 2025 - Apr 25, 2026

Image
Riffing on the long-standing rumours that Mary Todd Lincoln was an alcoholic and that her husband harboured homosexual tendencies, Oh, Mary! is a drag extravaganza with a sharp ahistorical and satirical edge. Its humour relies heavily on standard drag tropes. There is abundant mugging, snide asides, sexual puns, and what was once considered blue language. Much of this feels familiar, and the shocked laughter that taboo sexual references once provoked has been dulled by overuse. Indeed, anyone acquainted with the drag genre will see most of the jokes coming well in advance. That said, the production values are notably higher here than those of the average drag show. The set is handsomely appointed, and the use of music to underscore scenes is effective. Cole Escola’s script presents Mary as a bored housewife yearning to become a cabaret star. In an effort to keep Mary away from the bottle, her husband hires a teacher to give her acting lessons. The funniest moments actually emerge from...
Full Details »

Snow White ★★★★ Emerald Theatre | Dec 17, 2025 - Jan 4, 2026

Image
This adult-themed, all-drag panto delivers all the seasonal fun and silliness one could hope for, and then some. There are plenty of clever jokes mixed with a fair number of groaners, alongside some strong physical comedy and parodies of familiar tunes that genuinely raise a laugh. The contemporary cultural references are right up to date and so numerous it is hard to catch them all. Everything from the new Paddington Bear musical to The Traitors gets a mention. Nods to RuPaul’s Drag Race and The Great British Bake Off come thick and fast, with the latter earning extra resonance thanks to drag king Oliver Clothezoff, who plays the Prince, having previously appeared on the show. Not all of the material lands. Some well worn sexual puns feel overdue for retirement, as does the "Twelve Days of Christmas" routine. Even so, there are far more hits than misses, although the second act does seem to lose a little momentum. We were also left uncertain about why Keir Starmer had bee...
Full Details »

Christmas Day ★★★★ Almeida Theatre | Dec 9, 2025 - Jan 8, 2026

Image
In an odd warehouse conversion where his son and daughter live with a strange assortment of inhabitants, a Jewish father joins his children for a Christmas Day meal. Elliot, a secular Jew, represents a generation for whom identity and allegiances are largely unquestioned. His children, however, inhabit a far less certain world. His daughter Tamara is urgently searching for spiritual answers and openly challenges Israel’s actions, even as her former boyfriend has found a new sense of himself through Israeli nationalism. On the other hand, Elliot’s son Noah, who has a non-Jewish girlfriend, is adrift, struggling to locate himself within the tradition that shaped him but no longer anchors him. Sam Grabiner’s Christmas Day explores what it means to be Jewish in contemporary Britain, asking whether it is possible, or even desirable, to maintain or reconcile ethnic, religious, and cultural identity in an assimilative society. While rooted in a specifically Jewish experience, the play’s ques...
Full Details »

Orphans ★★★★ Jermyn Street Theatre | January 5 - 24, 2026

Image
Phillip is an emotionally immature, developmentally challenged recluse, protected and controlled by his impulsive and potentially violent older brother Treat who supports them both by stealing. Together they inhabit a sealed world of rituals, games, and shared fantasy. However, when Treat kidnaps Harold, an apparently wealthy criminal on the run, this act proves far from the solution he expects. Instead, the power dynamic shifts as Harold, himself an orphan, assumes an almost parental role, exposing the brothers to an alternative way of living beyond their self-made confinement. In just two weeks, he becomes a conduit to the outside world and offers the boys a new vision of themselves. Harold’s repeated rendition of “The Prisoner’s Song” underscores the play’s central metaphor of entrapment. Phillip is paralysed by his fear of leaving the apartment, Treat by his reliance on violence and control, and Harold by his desperate attempt to outrun the past. While Lyle Kessler’s dark vision e...
Full Details »

The Playboy of the Western World ★★★★ National Theatre | Until February 28, 2026

Image
John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World is a work rich in significance and open to varied interpretation. In his programme notes, Christopher Collins views the play through the contemporary lens of the global migrant crisis and society’s fascination with celebrity. Yet Christy Mahon’s (Christ as Man) symbolic killing of his father, who returns with amusing regularity, also invites a reading of the play as a religious satire in which Synge advances a vision of bold and irreverent humanism. In many respects, this is a radically innovative piece of writing that challenges both social expectations and the established conventions of comedy. This current National Theatre production preserves much of the original’s force and the stark and lyrical set vividly conjures the atmosphere of the west of Ireland. As the eponymous hero, Éanna Hardwicke convincingly portrays the timid youth who, through the fantasies of the townspeople, discovers his identity and is reborn as a figure...
Full Details »

The Rivals ★★★ Orange Tree Theatre | Until January 24, 2026

Image
This latest version of The Rivals is one part Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his eighteenth-century social satire, one part P. G. Wodehouse and the Roaring Twenties, plus a dash of topical humour such as references to the television series Survivor . It is not a mocktail that will be to everyone's taste, but it is clearly a labour of love for director Tom Littler. This attempt to reimagine Sheridan’s comedy of manners and modernise its references frequently succeeds, yet it also produces some awkward moments. Elements such as the anachronism of a duel set in the 1920s or the unnecessary aside about nudity in a bathroom scene are jarring and forced. Indeed, too often, the drive to provoke laughter at any cost appears to dominate the production, resulting in moments that feel strained and tonally uneven. This approach undermines the original and intelligent concept of relocating Sheridan’s play to a period whose literature was often similarly dismissed as superficial but which was al...
Full Details »

The City Life Magazine | Reviews & Ratings