Communism
The Master and Margarita, Barbican TheatreFriday, 23 March 2012
The Master and Margarita is a rare beast. Not only is it considered to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, it also regularly tops reader-lists of all-time favourite books. So it’s no wonder that, since its publication in 1966, 26... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Russian Choreographer Boris EifmanSaturday, 17 March 2012
No choreographer so divides American and British critics as Russia's only international dancemaker, Boris Eifman. He's "an amazing magician of the theatre", according to the late, great US critic Clive Barnes. He "flaunts all the worst clichés of... Read more... |
Song Dong: Waste Not, The Curve, BarbicanWednesday, 29 February 2012
A remarkably tidy parade of thousands upon thousands of objects, neatly grouped into their categories – soap, plastic bottles, cooking pots and utensils, empty cardboard boxes, shoes, flower pots, gloves, string, to name but a few – Waste Not is a... Read more... |
Václav Havel, 1936-2011Sunday, 18 December 2011
In Rock’n’Roll, the play by Tom Stoppard, two characters haunt the stage without actually appearing on it. One of them, Syd Barrett, absconded from Pink Floyd to lead the life of a hermit. The other, Václav Havel, gave up the life of an... Read more... |
Collaborators, National TheatreWednesday, 02 November 2011
“Smackhead, groin doctor and smut-scribe”: that’s one way in which writer Mikhail Bulgakov is described in John Hodge’s debut stage drama. A kind of wild fantasia spun around incidents from Soviet history, the piece goes on to show how Bulgakov –... Read more... |
Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975Friday, 21 October 2011
This is a strangely kaleidoscopic approach to documentary. A selection of recently unearthed footage and interviews which shows the Black Power movement in the USA through the eyes of idealistic Swedish film-makers, now re-edited and framed with the... Read more... |
DVD: Red PsalmThursday, 20 October 2011
They don’t make films like Red Psalm any more. They rarely made them then either. In Red Psalm (1971), Miklós Jancsó imagined a corner of a Hungarian field in 1898 in which the forces of revolution were pitted against the uniformed, armed and often... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Durrës: Albania after Norman WisdomSunday, 04 September 2011
Once upon a time - and for a very long time, at that, under its hard-line Marxist leader, Enva Hoxha - world cinema was represented in Albania by Norman Wisdom. Today, 26 years after Hoxha's death and 21 years after the fall of Communism there,... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Director István SzabóSaturday, 27 August 2011
When I interviewed the great Hungarian film-maker István Szabó (b 1938) in his native Budapest, he took me on a tour of the city centre on the Pest side of the Danube. On the way we were distracted by a flashy café designed to lure tourists. It... Read more... |
Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century, Royal AcademyThursday, 30 June 2011
A subtly haunting and brilliantly composed photograph by André Kertész lives on as a wistfully memorable image of exile: in Lost Cloud, 1937, a small, isolated cloud drifts we know not where next to a New York skyscraper. Kertész is one of the... Read more... |
Chicken Soup With Barley, Royal Court TheatreWednesday, 08 June 2011
"Love comes now. You have to start with love," urges Sarah Kahn (Samantha Spiro) early in Chicken Soup With Barley, and it's inconceivable that Dominic Cooke's knockout production of Arnold Wesker's 1958 play could have sprung from any other... Read more... |
X-Men: First ClassTuesday, 31 May 2011
If there's one thing Hollywood hates more than people bootlegging its latest blockbusters on mobile phones, it's letting a lucrative franchise go to waste. Thus, after the initial three X-Men films and 2009's Wolverine spin-off, you are invited to... Read more... |
