Nick Hammond
Un Chant de la Terre
Speaking of the Earth
For four days between March 7 and March 10, the Philharmonie de Paris staged a series of events to celebrate the work of women poets. I was delighted to attend the opening evening, entitled Un Chant de la Terre (A … Read More
Hamlet: #La Fin d’une Enfance
Post-Shakespearean Tour de Force
I decided to go see Hamlet: #La Fin d’une Enfance, an updated version of Shakespeare’s play, with some trepidation, as so many modern rewritings of Shakespeare tend to be pretentious at best and toe-curlingly awful at worst. After climbing several … Read More
Eugene Onegin
Musical Triumph, Conventional Staging
The headline name for this new production of Tchaikovsky’s adaptation of Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin at the Palais Garnier is evidently Ralph Fiennes in his directorial debut for the Paris Opera. Not only has the much-lauded British actor spoken … Read More
L’Engloutie
The Dark Magic of the Alps
Louise Hémon’s first feature film, L’Engloutie (literally meaning “The Engulfed One” but due to be released in the Anglophone world with the title The Girl in the Snow), is inspired by her great-great aunt, Aimée Bigalet, who wrote of her … Read More
L’Étranger
The Scent of Alienation
Some well-known and/or much-loved novels have proved notoriously difficult to portray onscreen. Books, for example, that rely on the internal thoughts of their heroines or heroes, such as Jane Austen’s Emma or Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves rarely … Read More
Les Mondes de Colette
Outrageous, Immoral and Multitalented
Having visited the writer Colette’s childhood home in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye on a sun-kissed spring day last year with two good friends, I suppose it was payback time when I arrived alone at the exhibition “Les Mondes de Colette” at the Bibliothèque … Read More
David Hockney 25
Unstoppable Hockney
One advantage of being possibly the most famous living artist and having reached the grand old age of 87 is that the world gets to see retrospectives of your work at regular intervals. So is it worth making the effort … Read More
Lumière: l’Aventure Continue
Big-Screen Pioneers
The release of Thierry Frémaux’s delightful new documentary, Lumière: l’Aventure Continue, has been timed in France to coincide with the 130th anniversary of the first-ever showing of a film on the big screen, Louis Lumière’s Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory … Read More
Théâtre de l’Athénée Louis Jouvet
An Italianate Parisian Jewel
While Parisian theatrical and musical life is dominated by its large theaters (Palais Garnier, Opéra Bastille, Comédie Française, Mogador, Odéon), so many smaller establishments deserve to be visited. One recent such “discovery” for me (I blush to admit) is the … Read More
Un Ours dans le Jura
The Bear Did It
It sometimes helps to go to a film with low expectations – on the rare occasions when they are turned upside down, the sense of sheer pleasure and relief afterward feels all the better. That was the case with the … Read More