1920s
Gary Naylor
For many years, I would ask groups of students to vote in elections because “it’s important to honour those who gave up so much to ensure that the likes of us can”. Some would nod, others would shrug, a few might have inwardly scoffed – too cool for school, innit? Kate Prince’s long-aborning musical Sylvia illustrates how our (near) universal franchise was won and the emotional and physical cost levied on the pioneers who won the argument in Parliament and on the streets.Ben Stones’ set doesn’t give us much to work with – the dark greys on even darker greys suggesting the bleak Read more ...
Robert Beale
Two intriguing themes and two great guest artists were offered by the BBC Philharmonic to their Saturday night audience in the Bridgewater Hall: the themes were what “classicism” really is, and the variety of music inspired by (or written for) dance.The artists were Angela Hewitt, soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, and Sir Andrew Davis, making another welcome visit to Manchester. You might say that a third theme of the evening was the chance to see the two of them deliver a masterclass in piano playing and orchestral conducting.Classicism, then: what is it? Whole books have been Read more ...
Robert Beale
It’s good to think that there are some opera productions – not just compositions – that in themselves can have the status of classics. David Pountney’s 1980 interpretation of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen must be high on a list of contenders for that accolade. It was first seen at the Edinburgh Festival that year, performed by Scottish Opera in a co-production between them and Welsh National Opera.Now Opera North have revived it for their audiences, and it’s lost none of its inspirational magic. That comes both from Pountney’s English translation of the text and from the wonderful Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Babylon is sensational, a manic, pounding assault on the senses meant to convey Hollywood’s chaotic birth. Damien Chazelle’s return to La La Land’s showbiz dreams forsakes ineffable intimacy for hysterical thunder, and for much of the time that’s enough.It’s 1926, with Hollywood growing in LA’s backwater at America’s wild western edge. We start with an elephant shitting in a truck, en route to a party where that will count as decorous subtlety. Inside the party’s mansion doors, frenetic camerawork explores packed, deep-focus frames, embodying a seething, orgiastic crowd. Chinese-American Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The cynical might think Pearl Cleage’s play had been expressly written to address the over-riding issues in today’s USA – abortion and contraception rights, gun control, homophobia, racism. But the cynical would be wrong, as Blues for an Alabama Sky was written in 1995. What is notable is its timely scheduling by the National Theatre.Cleage has written a period play, set in the Harlem Renaissance during Prohibition, that works as a tribute to the major players of that movement. Their names are bandied about by the characters as their associates and colleagues – the poet Langston Hughes, the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Previous works by screenwriter-director Martin McDonagh, which include In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, might give you an inkling of the perverse and tantalising mindset that lies behind The Banshees of Inisherin… but then again, perhaps not. You could call it a drama, or a comedy or a tragedy. You might even call it a parable.The little stub of plot around which McDonagh has built his narrative is bafflingly simple. It’s 1923. Colm and Pádraic live on a tiny island off the coast of Ireland called Inisherin. They’re long-standing friends, and every evening they go to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Buster Keaton made his name in a series of two-reel shorts made from 1917 onwards; The Saphead, from 1920, was his first starring role in a feature film.It’s in no way comparable to the classics which Keaton produced and directed in his mid-1920s purple patch, the wordy screenplay cobbled together from a pair of popular stage plays and the film directed in workmanlike fashion by Herbert Blaché, who wasn’t familiar with Keaton. Douglas Fairbanks was originally slated to star, recommending his younger colleague for the part of Bertie Van Alstyne when he found himself unavailable.That Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Will Erich Korngold, the great cinema composer, ever be recognised as a great composer for the live theatre? Probably not, at least until the prejudices that did for him in his lifetime – the prejudice against film and popular music and the prejudice against Jews – are fully corrected in practice as well as in people’s minds. Korngold, happily, is on the way back, though it has taken a long time. Die tote Stadt should, if justice be done, clinch his return.This terrific opera, first staged in Hamburg in 1920 when Korngold was 23, admittedly created its own problems from the start. It was the Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
When Bliss, a new play adapted from an Andrei Platonov short story by Fraser Grace, made its debut in Russia in early 2020, Cambridge-based company Menagerie were told that their production was “very Russian”.I’m no expert on Russian culture, but I would agree – in a good way. Paul Bourne’s production for the Finborough Theatre takes a while to warm up, but still packs a poignant punch.Nikita Firsov (Jesse Rutherford) has returned home from the Civil War to a post-apocalyptic landscape: rural Russia in 1921. There’s no food and almost no people. The price of stealing grain is execution, and Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Mancunian tribute to Ralph Vaughan Williams – a symphonic cycle shared by the BBC Philharmonic and Hallé – reached its conclusion with the Eighth Symphony last night. But, unlike most concerts in the RVW150 sequence, in this one (the final performance in the Hallé Thursday concerts series of 2021-22), Sir Mark Elder added an eclectic mix of other composers’ work to the evening. Value for money, without a doubt (main picture: Sir Mark Elder with the Hallé).First up was Stravinsky. The Concerto for piano and wind instruments is a challenge to the ensemble as much as its soloist, and there Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Who was Walter Sickert and what made him tick? The best way to address the question is to make a beeline for the final room of his Tate Britain retrospective. It’s hung with an impressive array of his last and most colourful paintings. Based on newspaper photographs, playbills and publicity shots scaled up for transfer onto canvas, they make a strong argument for viewing Sickert as a modernist – a precursor to artists like Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans and even Andy Warhol, who explore the alienating effects of the mass media on people in the public eye and their followers.By contrast, the early Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Bent Sørensen has christened his new harpsichord concerto Sei Anime: “six souls”. The six concise movements, written for Mahan Esfahani and a chamber-sized orchestra, are modelled, apparently, on the dance movements of a Bach keyboard suite. But as Sørensen explained from the stage – standing next to Esfahani’s gleaming black harpsichord – two further anecdotes explain the name. It’s borrowed from a range of French womenswear, seen in a Copenhagen shop: the audience laughed.But it’s also derived from a mis-spelling on the manuscript of JS Bach’s six partitas and sonatas for unaccompanied Read more ...