East Germany
Adam Sweeting
It’s difficult to give Simon Russell Beale a brief introduction, so encyclopedic is his list of stage and screen acting credits. He has cruised masterfully through Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, the Restoration playwrights, Shaw and Pinter, and recently camped it up madly in a revival of Peter Nichols’s Privates on Parade. He has been such a mainstay of the National Theatre that the building may have subsided into the Thames without him.On screen, he has appeared in such diverse fare as adaptations of Persuasion, An Ideal Husband and Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, and his portrayal of Falstaff Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A young man eaten up by fears of inherited disease, a mother who hid the facts of her awful marriage from her son to spare him, but is rewarded with even worse pain: the emotional plotlines of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts are huge. While the plot ticks off taboos - incest, rebellious women, euthanasia - deep at the heart of it is an atavistic fear in all of us that we will die in fully conscious agony, eaten up by a madness wished on us by someone’s selfishness or stupidity.Ibsen's play was meat too strong for its 1881 public, and the private stagings that managed to get past the first decade’s- Read more ...
james.woodall
For a remarkable BBC Radio Four half-hour programme broadcast on 14 September, The Stasi Jigsaw Puzzle, Chris Bowlby pieced together tales of treachery in the former German Democratic Republic. At one point a 1950s recording of a trial of a woman was played. Her cries above the rasping sound of the judge, if that’s what he was, sentencing her to death was one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever heard.The GDR was a poisonous place, crawling with vengeful creeps like that Stasi judge whose mission in life was to maintain such a level of fear in its citizens that exposure of its actual rot Read more ...
Sarah Kent
As an art school the Bauhaus has a reputation for being the cradle of modernism, famous for establishing an alliance between art and industry which produced enduring design classics such as Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel chairs, Josef Albers’ silver and glass fruit bowl and Marianne Brandt’s elegant globe lamps. But that is only part of the story.When the school was set up in Weimar in 1919 the image used to embody its aims and ideals owed nothing to new technology. Illustrating the prospectus was a woodcut by Lyonel Feininger (pictured below right) intended to evoke the era of great cathedral Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Human League: Dare (Deluxe Edition)Thomas H GreenLast year, when I interviewed The Human League for theartsdesk, singer Susan Sulley said of Leonard Cohen, “He’s got a personality voice. It’s not a voice that’s going to pass the auditions on The X Factor but you wouldn’t mistake him for anyone else on the radio.”You would never mistake The Human League for anyone else either, a unique band born of Sheffield, punk and a love of Kraftwerk. It’s hard to credit that their hugest song, “Don’t You Want Me”, and its massively successful parent album Dare, were put together with little Read more ...
joe.muggs
“I'm moving to Berlin.” In artistic circles and especially those that include electronic musicians, over the past few years such a threat has become so commonplace as to be cliché. It's not without reason, though. For one, despite gentrification, Berlin has endless space (and empty industrial artistic “spaces”) and its cost of living is about a two-hundredth that of London. And just as importantly, it is more soaked in electronic music than anywhere else on the planet.From the Weimar Republic, through West Berlin's defiant isolation, the city thrived on decadent nightlife; electronic Read more ...
joe.muggs
In a pirate television (pirate television!) broadcast from 1992, a large group of Russian youths in flat top haircuts and leather jackets discuss Depeche Mode's appeal. “It's romantic style,” suggests one with absolute assurance, “it's music for the lonely.” It is just one touching, funny moment in a film packed with them, but it also sums up what The Posters Came From The Walls is about. This “music for the lonely” by a band of awkward blokes from Basildon has brought this group of young people together, as it has all the legions of devoted lovers of the band that we see throughout the 58 Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There aren’t many composers or musicians who can say that they changed society. And by that I mean really changed it. Few have ever come close to materially or politically transforming their surroundings in any truly meaningful way. There are many who claim they have, or wish they had: Wagner or Beethoven in the 19th century, Barenboim most notably – but doubtfully – in our own. But there is only one musician who actually did: the conductor, Kurt Masur.Earlier today, at the German embassy, the Mayor of Leipzig and the Sheriff of the City of London formalised the Barbican’s partnership with Read more ...