history
Liz Thomson
What adjectives best describe a performance of The Ballads of Child Migration? None of those you’d normally expect to see applied to an evening of superlative music-making, for the song cycle chronicles the deprivations suffered by child migrants sent from Britain over the course of one hundred years. Mostly they were sent to Australia, poor children in need of a loving home and an education who were used as slave farm labour. Some were also sent to New Zealand, others to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and a smaller number to Canada, where they fared somewhat better. More than 100,000 Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dramatic Exchanges is a dazzling array of correspondence, stretching over more than a century, between National Theatre people. It’s a chronologically arranged anthology that acts as a history of the institution, from its appearance as an idea around 1906, through its first incarnation at the Old Vic from 1963, then on to its continuing life as a three-theatre powerhouse on the South Bank today.We witness its remarkable talents hard at work, but also happily finding time to snipe, grumble, feud – and carry on; they do hurt feelings, paranoia and betrayed promises with élan, too. As editor Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Considering how the UK prides itself on having created the "Mother of Parliaments" and its citizens having once chopped off a king's head for thwarting its will, remarkably little is taught in our schools about one of the seminal events on the way to fully democratising this country: the Peterloo Massacre.Mike Leigh's spawling, intricately detailed film will give you a good overview of that appalling day in British history; on 16 August 1819 an undisciplined and badly led group of mounted and foot soldiers – whose commanding officer had a more pressing date at the races – charged with sabres Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Jamil Dehlavi is a filmmaker whose work straddles two worlds. His native Pakistan is certainly the key element in the two early films on this BFI dual-format release – it follows on from the director’s August South Bank retrospective, the first there for a director from that country – but it is as if, for a variety of reasons, he always had a foot in a cinematic context that went beyond it.His film education and training came in New York, and the spirit of experimental cinema of the time infuses his 1975 Towers of Silence, though its visual elements are anchored in Karachi’s shoreline and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Humdinger! This is a totally brilliant idea for an amazing anthology, although the subtitle “Letters that Changed the World” is slightly misleading. All or any of these letters might substantially or subtly change your view of grandees of all sorts – emperors, tsars and tsarinas, kings, queens, presidents, generals, admirals, dictators, politicians, authors, artists – as well as the ordinary folk who have written them, but not all are letters that fall into that elevated category (there are certainly letters that initiated wars, though).In the age of the internet, who will be writing letters Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Even for those with only a passing acquaintance with Irish history, the Famine – or the Great Hunger – looms large, when British indifference to the failed potato crop in large parts of Ireland resulted in the deaths or emigration of nearly a quarter of the country’s population in the 1840s and 1850s. The wholly avoidable tragedy (Ireland exported huge amounts of grain, butter and livestock during the famine) resides still in the modern Irish psyche; it is no coincidence that of all the nations that contributed to Live Aid in 1985, Ireland’s contribution, per capita, was the greatest.Lance Read more ...
graham.rickson
Much has been made of Iceman’s characters speaking the ancient Rhaetic dialect, unsubtitled, but that’s never a problem: Felix Randau’s no-frills revenge thriller doesn’t need any words. The juiciest bits of dialogue are the various grunts and shrieks uttered by the protagonist Kelab (Juergen Vogel). His outbursts are something else: pained, guttural explosions of rage and terror – if there was a prize for best shouting in a film, Vogel would be a shoo-in. Kelab is based on Ötzi, the "Tyrolean iceman", whose frozen, mummified body was uncovered by a pair of German tourists in 1991: Iceman Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Iris is a museum conservator with a pair of pre-adolescent daughters and a failing marriage. Raif is a widower and an academic who, since writing a book on curiosity cabinets a decade ago, has quietly sunk into a kind of irrelevance. Both have established lives that are slowly and undramatically falling apart; both are well into middle age. They meet by chance at an evening event at Iris’s museum. Nothing out of the ordinary happens, but something more than words is exchanged. Together, separately, they experience “a turning towards one another as natural as waking,” a sensation as familiar Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The end-of-season contemporary writing slot at the Globe must be a proposal as full of promise for playwrights as it is perhaps intimidating. There’s the sheer scale of the space and the chance to write for a large cast; a historical subject seems to be part of the brief, so a chance to experiment for many writers, while despite a run that’s rarely more than a dozen performances, it brings an investment in rehearsal time and other support that commercial theatre couldn’t offer.The challenge, of course, is living up to the rest of the repertoire, as well as finding material that somehow also Read more ...
Jeanie O'Hare
I admit it took me a while to give myself permission to do this project. We English are very squeamish about altering Shakespeare. Our cousins in Germany thrive on radical undoings of our scared son, but we cross our arms and say no. I started thinking about making this play when I was at the RSC ten years ago. Queen Margaret, aka Margaret of Anjou and wife to Henry VI, thumped me in the heart as I watched Katy Stephens's peformance in Michael Boyd's History Cycle (the three Henry VI plays and Richard III). She then nagged at me every day as I nodded to the enormous photo of Peggy Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Underground Railroad Game is scabrous theatre – in every sense. To start with, Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R Sheppard’s two-hander is as down and dirty as anything you’ll find on the London stage at the moment, with one sex scene that’s belly laugh-out-loud funny, another which creates a silence of unease that chills the house.But it’s scabrous in the original sense, too, about a wound that doesn’t heal, the scab that has formed over it only precarious protection against the original hurt. That hurt, of course, is slavery, the legacy of which simply has not gone away for America, even a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For viewers challenged by the work of French auteur classic Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Hazanavicius’ Redoubtable catches the moment when Godard himself began to be challenged by Godard. The irony, a considerable one, is that Godard was rejecting precisely those films that most of the rest of us delight in, the ones from the first decade or so of his career. From his debut Breathless in 1960, through the likes of Vivre sa vie, Contempt, Alphaville and Pierrot le fou – what an astonishingly prolific time it was for him – they practically constitute a roll call of the Nouvelle Vague.Hazanavicius Read more ...