politics
Gary Naylor
We’re reminded, in a grainy black and white video framing device, that, as late as the summer of 1941, the USA saw World War II as just another European war. As brilliantly illustrated in Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America, not only was such indifference to the rise of fascism more widespread than feels comfortable to reflect upon, but so, too, was a sympathy extended to the Nazis in their psychotic mission to make Germany great again.It was against that complacent background that Lillian Hellman wrote Watch on the Rhine, a seductive call to arms that knew its audience of New York’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A disclaimer in the opening credits confessed that some scenes in this three-part history of disgraced Labour MP John Stonehouse had been “imagined for dramatic purposes”, but there was no need. The man’s life story fell comfortably into the “you couldn’t make it up” zone, and there wasn’t really much that screenwriter John Preston needed to add.It was indeed true that Stonehouse was given a job as a junior minister of aviation, that he negotiated a technology agreement between Britain and Czechoslovakia, and that he was later found to have been spying for the Czechs (he was depicted here as Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s been a shit year. Global horrors from Kiev to Karachi and Tehran to Texas all somehow feeling too close for comfort, and even closer to home heatstroke, frostbite, floods, strikes, impoverishment, the grinding realisation that pestilence is a long term way of life now…I’ve never been so glad of the extreme privilege of just being able to keep my head above water, but even given that there’s been misery, grief, regret and a whole heap of grinding tedium. Which in turn means I’ve never – and I mean this most vividly: NEVER – been so glad to have music and the rich culture and subculture Read more ...
Mert Dilek
As bio-musicals continue to have their heyday, it makes sense for the Young Vic to throw its hat in the ring and champion a work about the hugely influential Nelson Mandela. But this new musical about the South African anti-apartheid activist and statesman is such a baffling hodgepodge that it actually risks being a disservice to Mandela’s legacy.Mandela covers the period in the eponymous figure’s life from his militant activities and subsequent imprisonment in the early 1960s to his release from prison in 1990. Perhaps because the piece is chiefly focused on Mandela’s imprisonment on Robben Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Life is full of coincidences and contradictions. As I was walking to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was on his feet in the House of Commons delivering yet another rebalancing of individual and collective resources. On reading a couple of fine essays in the excellent programme, I saw the acknowledgement of the production’s sponsor, Pragnell.The first item that appears on the jeweller’s website is a pair of earrings retailing at an eye-watering £71,500. Which is to say that the inequalities that fired Charles Dickens’ anger in the 1840s are still with us in the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Scottish playwright Rona Munro is both prolific and ambitious. After her trilogy of historical dramas, The James Plays, was staged in 2016, she continues to work on her cycle of seven works, covering the years from 1406 to 1625, which are designed to give today’s Scotland a contemporary equivalent of Shakespeare’s medieval history cycle.Her latest, Mary, opens at the Hampstead Theatre because this venue is run by her long-time collaborator, director Roxana Silbert. So who is it about, and how relevant is the play to a general audience?The title refers to Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, who Read more ...
Gary Naylor
I’ll confess to a certain schadenfreude when the American televangelists who seemed so foreign to us Brits were led away to be papped on their perp walks, ministers in manacles: One big name after another skewered on their own hubris, gulling the gullible out of their savings and shoe-horning right-wing ideologues into political and judicial office. Thank God (ironically) that we’re too smart for that kind of nonsense in Europe. How’s that turning out then? Perhaps it was the lockdown; perhaps it was the recent excellent film, The Eyes Of Tammy Faye; or perhaps it was just getting Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Brecht – as I suppose he intended – is always a shock to the system. With not a word on what to expect from his commitment to the strictures of epic theatre in the programme, a star of West End musical theatre cast in the lead and a venue with a history of more user-friendly shows, some are going to have to sit up straight in their seats from the very start – including your reviewer.This new production, the first in London for 25 years, opens on a present day refugee camp, displaced people squabbling over who gets to go home first and what support they can expect when they get Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The title of Andrew Murray’s new book poses a question that also vexed Friedrich Engels over 130 years ago. The German co-author of The Communist Manifesto despaired of English socialism, "that abomination of abominations", on the grounds that it had "not only become respectable but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causeuses.”The treacherous lure of the Establishment has indeed been a constant problem for Labour leaders from Ramsay MacDonald and Hugh Gaitskell to Sir Keir Starmer. Roy Jenkins, who narrowly failed to get the top job, was Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It’s hard to keep up with what terms are in vogue amongst those who insist on classifying and vilifying young people, but one that you don’t hear so often these days is NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training). Back in 2015 when Gary Owen's lauded monodrama Iphigenia In Splott premiered, Effie was a NEET, and a proud one to boot.She is seen living the hedonism worthy of a fortnight in Ibiza for 52 weeks a year in er… Splott, a district of Cardiff, shit-faced, smoking and shagging. Effie may be a failure of society, but she's loving her life. Or so the lady protests. When she meets Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
From underneath the messy ash-white thatch of hair, a strange mooing suddenly issues: Sir Kenneth Branagh is wrestling with Boris Johnson’s odd way of saying the “oo” sound. It’s a brave attempt but ultimately a bit wayward, rather like the drama series Branagh is starring in, This England, Michael Winterbottom’s six-part reconstruction of Boris’s early days as PM, Covid, lockdown and all. Branagh has certainly captured the former PM’s stance, arms held unnaturally behind him, shoulders hunched, trousers at risk of dropping as he shuffles in and out of a quick succession of government Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You react differently to Meeting Gorbachev knowing that the film’s subject was on occasions brought to its interviews from hospital by ambulance; his interlocutor, Werner Herzog, doesn’t mention that fact, of course, anywhere in the three encounters on which this documentary is based, but he has alluded to it elsewhere.It seems somehow out of place to express cavils that the tone of this encounter is supremely respectful, that Herzog does not press Gorbachev into commentary on events of history beyond those in which he was immediately involved. Though today’s Russians would hardly agree with Read more ...