As Damon Albarn sings of apple carts on Silbury Hill, we watch a collection of stock figures from English history, led by a red-mohawked punk – in this context redolent of the Battle of Stonehenge in the mid-1980s – form a procession across the main stage of the English National Opera. There is a man with a bowler hat and a walking stick, a shorthand vision of Edwardian London. Then W.G. Grace, icon of a golden era for English cricket. He is followed by a suffragette with a placard demanding ‘Votes for Women’, a group of Morris dancers, Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, Charles II and a couple of Puritans. In Albarn’s own words, ‘we find ourselves predominantly at the end of the Elizabethan age, the beginning of that Puritanical purge of esoteric ideas in England.’ Dr Dee stands on the threshold of the modern age.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 13:36:36 +0000
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