coronavirus
Gary Naylor
Well, I wasn’t expecting a Dylanesque take on "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" as an opening number and I was right. But The Zim, Nobel Prize ‘n all, has always favoured The Grim American Songbook over The Great American Songbook and writer/director Conor McPherson’s hit "play with music" leans into the poet of protest’s unique canon with his international smash hit, now back where it all began eight years ago.It remains a curious and unique piece, at once overly familiar (take you pick from Williams, Steinbeck, Miller or even Chekhov as inspirations) but also continually surprising. The songs Read more ...
Gary Naylor
MOR. Twee. Unashamedly crowdpleasing. Are such descriptors indicative of a tedious night in the stalls? For your reviewer, who has become jaded very quickly with a myriad of searing examinations of mental health crises and wake up calls about the forthcoming environmental collapse, I often find comfort in material more suited to the large print section of the library. But the show still has to be good and that’s a big challenge when dealing with "smaller" subject matter.We open on a large scale doll’s house, and, to be fair, the allusions to Ibsen, Chekhov, Williams et al don’t ever fade away Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We meet Joe first at the keys, singing a pretty good song, but we can hear the pain in the voice – but is that the person or the performance? When Ellie walks in, he leaps up like a cat on a hot tin roof, nervous as a kitten, and we know – it was the person.Barney Norris’s 2024 play comes to London and finds the right venue in the Arcola’s intimate studio space freighting just the right quantum of claustrophobia into a production that often suggests our eavesdropping on three real people who have hired the room to rehearse. You wonder if it would all just go on whether we were there Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Lockdown feels more like a dream now: empty streets; bright, scarless skies; pan-banging at 8pm. Did it all happen? One part of our brains insists that it did; another resists such an overthrowing of what it means to be human. Try recalling events of 2019, 2020 and 2021, and you’ll find them hazy, ill-defined and you reach for a phrase I say more often than I ought, “I don’t know whether it was before or after the pandemic…”Spencer Jones didn’t find it easy and upped sticks for The Sticks, moving home and family to Devon for those oft-cited reasons - nearer to Mum, better for the kids and a Read more ...
Pandemonium, Soho Theatre review - satire needs a shot of Pfizer's finest to revive tired storylines
Gary Naylor
In 2020, throughout the country, many people’s lives were affected adversely by an ever-present threat to our already fragile society. Though most got over it, many people still bear the cost every day, sapping them of energy, making them cough and splutter frequently, instilling a longing that it would just go away and stay away. Like many, I have been suffering from “Long Boris”, the affliction reactivated last week with his appearance as the Covid Inquiry Variant spread far and wide. And such topicality ought to work in favour of Armando Iannucci’s first venture on to the stage, Read more ...
Lia Rockey
In The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, Jacqueline Rose makes a surprising pivot from her usual topics – Sylvia Plath, children’s fiction, Zionism, to name a few – to throw a spotlight on the Covid-19 pandemic. It was hard to process the experience while it raged, she argues, and it feels even harder to process things now, when normalcy has made its tentative return and there is all the more reason to forget.This book, then, is not only ambitious in scope, but startingly up-to-date in ways that other explorations of the pandemic are perhaps not, set as it is on reminding the reader that, Read more ...
Jon Turney
The Cayapo tribe, a shade under 10,000 strong, lived in South America unacquainted with humans in the wider world until 1903. That year, they accepted a missionary who, along with news of salvation, brought new disease. By 1918, they numbered only 500, a mere 25 were around in 1927, and by 1950 just three living people could identify a Cayapo ancestor.Jonathan Kennedy relates this sorry tale as emblematic of the potential calamity every time people are exposed to novel bacterial or viral illness. Whether they came from fellow humans or from closer contact with other species, nothing has Read more ...
Andrew Mellor
“Silence,” Andrew Mellor contends, “is more prominent in the northernmost reaches of Europe.” Yet it is more like a texture or an apprehension of vacancy than a state of true soundlessness: sometimes “real and pure”, sometimes it “lingers despite the noise”.Against this muted backdrop, Mellor’s new book The Northern Silence - Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture follows the circuits of musical culture across Scandinavia, Finland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, tracing the attempts to fill the quiet, asking why “the arts, and classical music in particular, occupy a different position in Read more ...
duncan.minshull
I began work on Where My Feet Fall a few months into the pandemic of 2020. After lockdown was announced we all became better walkers, and the collection took on greater resonance.The writers I selected were invited to do one of two things – recall a past journey or go on a new one. Not only did they willingly set off, but I discovered that many were skilled snappers, mappers and sketchers, or their families were. Vivid images would be added to their words, and here is a sneak preview of five of them. “Lost” by Joanna KavennaThe wind howled. I was asleep when someone tugged at my foot. I Read more ...
Lizzie Hibbert
A garden is a space defined by its limits. Whatever its contents in terms of style and species, and however manicured or apparently wild its appearance, what distinguishes a garden from its equivalent quantity of uncultivated land is its enclosure within an uninterrupted border, which might be a wall, a hedge, a fence, or else natural dividers such as streams or woodland.The border creates the garden by shutting it off from the rest of the encroaching world. What is allowed to pass in and out of this bounded space is then up to a gardener: over this small portion of a chaotic planet, he or Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In 2019, Russell Howard was all set to celebrate his 20th year in comedy by going on a world tour. Covid put paid to that, so it was with some genuine celebration that he was able to return to the stage with Lubricant, his second Netflix special, recorded at the Eventim Apollo in late 2021.He was able to use some of the material of that anniversary show, Respite – about finding the pleasure rather than the pain in life and describing a world spinning out of control. Little did he know. In Lubricant he has skilfully updated Respite – written “when Corona was a beer and Harry was a prince” – Read more ...
India Lewis
Sarah Moss’s new novel is a slim snapshot of a moment of fear and danger in the year of Covid. That year when judgement and recrimination ruled, and neighbourly feeling was in short supply. It is almost too close to the bone, but it is a neat examination of humanity in crisis.The Fell describes one night, when Kate, who is supposed to be self-isolating with her son, Matt, goes for a disastrous walk on the fells. She cannot stand having to stay inside with her own thoughts and longs to be free, living with the feeling that many of us had last year: that her actions couldn’t possibly lead to Read more ...