Welcome to cultural capital, our weekly show where we look at the best of London’s new and upcoming arts and culture.
This week, we’re at the Royal Opera House, looking ahead to the forthcoming revival - the show’s tenth - of David McVicar’s extraordinary, lavish 2003 production of Mozart’s quite silly but spectacular comic opera The Magic Flute, and we’ll be talking to the team at the National Gallery, who’ve brought 20 full-scale reproductions of the museum’s highlights, by the likes of Titian, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Gainsborough and Rembrandt, outside to a new exhibition in Trafalgar Square.
Thing of the Week is a stone tablet of a rather unusual kind from the Natural History Museum, and I’ll be reviewing Our Ladies, an adorable new film gleefully adapted from Alan Warner’s 1998 novel Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, which follows a raucous, riotous 24 hours in the lives of six Fort William teenagers in determined search of a shag while on a trip to Edinburgh with their Catholic girls’ school choir. A gorgeous portrait of enduring teenage female friendship in the face of poverty of opportunity, terrible men and recalcitrant nuns, it’s a sweary joy.
Enjoy!
