World War One
Kieron Tyler
The silent-era Wings is not a subtle film. Director William A. Wellman’s action-packed World War One tale of loyalty, love and war is also, at just short of two-and-a-half hours, long. At the time of its release in 1927, the film news bulletin Movie Time News declared it “the spectacular epic of the year, the national box office sensation of 1927”. In 1929 it became the first film to pick up an Oscar for Best Picture, at the first Academy Awards ceremony.As one of the extras on this new edition makes clear, the path which led to Wellman helming the film was collaborative and needed to be Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The trend of celebrating anniversaries by digging out old classics might suggest that no good new plays are being written, but at least it gives us the chance to re-assess their worth. Theatre Royal Stratford East, the legendary Joan Littlewood’s old venue, presents a new production of Oh What a Lovely War in its 60th anniversary year to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the First World War. This classic, first staged in 1963, is a powerful anti-war tract — but is there any more to it than a flamboyantly theatrical humanity?The idea for the musical originally came from BBC producer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
World War One overkill - if you'll pardon the expression - is a clear and present danger as the centenary commemorations gather pace, but this investigation of the roles of the interlinked royal families of Europe in the onrush of hostilities was as good a chunk of TV history as I can remember. Informative and detailed but always keeping an eye on the bigger picture, it made me, at any rate, start to think about the road to 1914 in a different light.The pivotal figure was Queen Victoria, whose influence we could see reaching far beyond the immense era named after her and onwards into the Read more ...
Deborah McAndrew
Shall I let you into a secret? Barrie Rutter isn’t always right. I’ve enjoyed a creative and rewarding professional relationship and personal friendship with Barrie for almost 20 years now, and I think I can say that without fear of him falling out with me. He isn’t always right – but he often is, and one of the things he’s right about is that a tragedy isn’t a tragedy until it’s a tragedy.What does he mean? Well - notwithstanding the fact that outside the theatre in the mid-1590s Romeo and Juliet was advertised as a "Tragedy" and the Prologue tells us that the play will end with the deaths Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Harry Patch may have finally answered the summons of the last bugle, but there are still those whose memories run all the way back to the war to end all wars. Violet Muers, 106, was in the firing line when the German navy crept up on the east coast of England and unleashed hell on Hartlepool. A century on, she lucidly recalled the bangs going off in the night. “Me older sister said, ‘I think somebody’s beatin’ the carpets.’” Jeremy Paxman sat in her front room, enthralled by the bonny voice of another England.The most recent attack on these islands was recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry. The Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Barely a month of 2014 has passed, and yet already the opportunities to remember the First World War seem to be presenting themselves at every turn. In this trio of short plays, we get a more unusual treatment of the anniversary – as the overall title suggests, the purpose is to hear the voices that don't sound so loudly across the intervening hundred years. We are here to understand what the women did in the war.The first of the three plays, Luck of War by Gwen John, presents a scenario that must have occurred far more frequently than official histories record. Ann Hemingway, played Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
We return to the dramatised Selfridges five years after the opening of the store that changed the face of British shopping - and yet, despite proving those who doomed his enterprise to failure wrong, the smile on its eponymous owner’s face is as false as his moustache is magnificent. Although Harry Selfridge (Jeremy Piven) was able to turn on the charm for visiting journalists in tonight’s series opener, the absence of his wife and daughters - back home in the US where the girls, we are told, were finishing school - cast a shade over the celebrations.Although Rose (Frances O’Connor) did Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Stanley Spencer’s painting Map Reading shows us, in dizzying perspectives and changes of scale, a mounted cavalry officer reading a huge unfurled map concerning the now forgotten campaign in Macedonia in World War I, his horse nibbling oats all the while. Clustered all around his giant figure, ordinary soldiers surround their commander, fanned out at oblique angles to his central figure. The men are lying about in various casual poses, resting, or are perhaps out of this world, in more ways than one. The whole is framed by gorgeous outbursts of white blossom. The military uniforms, hats and Read more ...
Steve Clarkson
Never before has “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” been a more fitting opening gambit. This sprawling wartime spectacle knew few bounds as it marched across York’s cobbled streets for an evening that produced watery eyes, open mouths and, admittedly, tired legs.Treading the ever-narrowing waters between theatre and cinema was a travelling audience that followed the action through the city centre while listening on headphones. From the starting point in Exhibition Square, where young lad George (Luke Adamson) and his sweetheart Maisie (Edith Kirkwood) were Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Much hype has been whipped up around this tale of a gang of thuggish, racketeering bookies in Birmingham just after World War One. It's a pretty good cast, with Helen McCrory's Aunt Polly laying down the law within the criminal Shelby family, Cillian Murphy playing her ambitious nephew Tommy and Sam Neill as sinister Belfast copper Inspector Campbell. But this opener still felt a little wobbly on its feet.A lot of it was down to the accents, which can be slippery little devils to get right (we know how easily attempts at Welsh can end up detouring to Mumbai). Since this is Birmingham, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The last time we saw soldiers going over the top at the Somme with comic baggage attached was the tragic finale of Blackadder. It’s the inevitable comparison that The Wipers Times writers Ian Hislop and Nick Newman were going to face, and though they aim for something different in what is, after all, a true story, there’s no escaping the same absurdity of clipped understatement that they have given their British officer heroes, or the essential one-dimensional nature of characterisation. Even fleshed out with free-standing cabaret-style sketches, at 90 minutes this sometimes felt as long as Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The very tall, skeletal and formidable Henry Tonks (1862-1937), surgeon and anatomist, became one of the most decisive, influential, scathing and inspirational teachers in the history of visual education. At the Slade, in his second career as artist and teacher, he presided over several generations of London-based artists who formed the bedrock of modernism, from the absorption of Impressionism to the various isms of the turn of the last century. He referred to this cohort of his students, here being celebrated, as “a crisis of brilliance”.It is the generation who first gaily embraced the Read more ...