biography
Jill Chuah Masters
Roland Orzabal, co-founder and lead guitarist of Tears for Fears, laughs to himself often during this documentary — the latest in the BBC’s often-excellent, always-forensic Classic Albums series. “I agree, I agree, it sounds great,” says Orzabal. He’s listening to “Shout,” the band’s 1984 Billboard No. 1 hit. “There’s something about it,” he chuckles, “I believed it.” The documentary focuses on Orzabal and Curt Smith, Tears for Fears’ founders and frontmen, and the development of their album-topping record Songs From The Big Chair (1985). It tells the somewhat unlikely tale of how a cathartic Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Like many writers, Jeet Thayil is a bit of an outsider. And, if his track record is anything to go by, he has been happy to keep it that way. The poet, novelist, editor, performer and former addict spent a couple of decades rubbing shoulders with the writers, artists and eccentrics of bohemian Mumbai before putting pen to paper in the late 90s and, eventually, offering a glimpse of that underworld in his kaleidoscopic first novel, Narcopolis.After courting one literary prize (the 2012 Man Booker) and picking up another (the 2013 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature), his sophomore effort, The Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Just Mercy, the latest film from Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12), is based on a New York Times bestseller. It has a star-studded cast. It’s emotionally moving as well as intellectually accessible. But it’s no easy film to watch. “They can call it what they want – it’s just another way to lynch a black man.” Just Mercy is about death row in the American South, and it is a bruising and beautiful film. It lights a fire under you.Just Mercy is based on a memoir by Bryan Stevenson, an American civil rights attorney who has spent his life working with adults and children condemned to die in Read more ...
Charlie Stone
Nathalie Léger’s superbly original Exposition is a biographical novel meditating on the nature of biography itself. Its plot – if indeed its 150 pages of intense reflection bordering continuously on stream of consciousness can be called a plot – is an account of the life of Virginia Oldoïni, better known as the Countess of Castiglione. Specifically, the narrator (a half-fictional version of Léger herself) is fascinated by the visits Castiglione made to be photographed in the same Paris studio over four decades – turbulent years which saw her reach the height of power and influence and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This charming BBC Two hagiography – which may be a contradiction in terms – opened on a montage of praise, with just a hint of irony for the hugely successful actor Hugh Grant. He was born in Hammersmith Hospital, although neither he nor his father can quite remember. He felt (he told us) that it was a kind of family tradition as about 800 of his own children have been born there since.Thus the tone was set for the classic English trope of self-deprecation. Variations on the choreography of backing into the limelight and making jokes at your own expense, so characteristic of many of Grant’s Read more ...
James Dowsett
When U.S. president George W. Bush looked into the eyes of Vladimir Putin he famously “saw his soul”. In his latest meditation on modern Russia, Britain's top Kremlinologist Robert Service gets as close to the Russian president’s soul as may be possible in a scholarly account. No less could have been expected from the author of a series of magisterial biographies on the Soviet leaders, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. Service offers us no clumsy caricatures in Kremlin Winter. He does not try to scare us with bogeymen. His even-handed, level-headed analysis restores critical ambiguity to the riddle Read more ...
Simon Stephens
Light Falls is the sixth play that I have written for the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester and the fourth that its outgoing Artistic Director, Sarah Frankcom, will direct.She directed On the Shore of the Wide World, Punk Rock and Blindsided. In many ways Light Falls marks a culmination of a collaboration that has informed my working life and a return to ideas I have been interrogating in that collaboration.I was born in Stockport and lived there until I went to university when I was 18. I live in London now and have done for 25 years. The relationship between the two places continues to Read more ...
India Lewis
My Mother Laughs was first published in Chantal Ackerman’s native French in 2013. This year it has been translated into English for the first time, twice. Silver Press’ elegant version is framed by a foreword by the poet, Eileen Myles (who also has a poem on the back flyleaf) and an afterword by the academic, Frances Morgan. These women’s voices are sympathetic, and naturally turn the book as a whole into a kind of conversation.The book, which loosely records the decline of Ackerman’s mother, reads like a diary or monologue, its confessions interspersed with family photos and stills from her Read more ...
India Lewis
A Month in Siena is a sweet, short mediation on art, grief, and life. Ostensibly describing the time and space of its title, Matar touches on vanishings and lacunae in his past. Early on, he links the disappearance of his father in Cairo in 1990 to his interest in art: “He was imprisoned and gradually, like salt dissolving in water, was made to vanish. It was shortly after this that, for reasons that still remain unclear to me now, I began to visit the National Gallery in London.” Art and Siena itself gave himself space in which to exist beyond his own troubles.Matar describes how the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Vincent van Gogh (b. 1853) could be difficult, truculent and unconventional. He battled with mental illness and wrestled with questions of religion throughout his life. But on good form he was personable. He was said to be an excellent imitator with a wry sense of humour, and was a loyal (if often fierce) friend and family relation. The Noordbrabants Museum's new exhibition seeks to humanise the artist and people his world. It comprises paintings, drawings and personal documents spread across three main rooms that are either by van Gogh or people close to him, and shed light on his life. Here Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It’s now Edinburgh Fringe transfer season in London, but here’s one they made earlier: Cora Bissett’s Fringe First-winning autobiographical play from the 2018 Festival about her time in 1990s indie band Darlingheart. Though the broad shape of this tale is familiar, Bissett’s gig-theatre approach lends it a raw authenticity and engaging confessional quality.Bissett (pictured below) was still at school when she replied to an advert in the local Fife paper and became the lead singer of Darlingheart. She was driven less by musical ambition – though Patti Smith was already a favourite – more Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Where does music come from? That’s the vital question posed to Sergei Rachmaninoff in Dave Malloy’s extraordinary 2015 chamber work, as the great late-Romantic Russian composer – stuck in his third year of harrowing writer’s block – tries to relocate his gift. It comes from others and from himself; from past and present; from everything and nothing. It is ephemeral, and yet it is at the core of his very being.Rach (Keith Ramsay, pictured below with Tom Noyes), traumatised by the failure of his first symphony in 1897 – mangled by a drunken conductor and finished off by a sharp-tongued Read more ...