If you’re looking for escapism from anxieties about Brexit, the worldwide refugee crisis and rising authoritarianism, Christian Petzold’s Transit is not going to provide comfort. Adapted from Anna Segher’s 1944 novel about a Jewish writer fleeing incarceration in Germany and trying to get passage to Mexico, this is a wholly original take on the Holocaust genre.Eschewing period costumes and art direction, Transit is an existential thriller filmed in present day France with Nazi uniforms replaced by police body armour. Georg (a mesmeric Franz Rogowski) sees a way to flee by taking on the Read more ...

Just over a decade ago it was predicted by those supposedly in the know that Ilan Volkov would succeed Sakari Oramo as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. In the event, the gig went to Andris Nelsons, and it was probably for the best. An artistic temperament as inquisitive and uncompromising as Volkov’s probably wouldn’t have been well suited to the box-ticking and base-touching involved in planning full length seasons for an orchestra with the CBSO's civic responsibilities. Which is not to say that the orchestra doesn’t have a noticeable rapport with Volkov – or, Read more ...

Maggie Smith is not only a national treasure, but every casting director's go-to old bat. Now 84 years young, she is our favourite grande dame, or fantasy grandma. With an acting career of nearly 70 years, an instantly recognisable face and voice, and several shelves groaning with awards, she returns to the London stage for the first time in 12 years, tempted by Nicholas Hytner to perform a one-woman show at his high-profile Bridge Theatre. This time, the much-honoured Dame will be playing neither a dowager nor a professor, nor a Shakespearean heroine, but instead a real-life German secretary Read more ...

How long does it take for grief to crystallise into art? No timetable can ever set that date. The poet George Szirtes’s mother took her own life, after previous attempts, during the hot summer of 1975 in the outer London suburbs where she lived. The fate of the woman born, as Magda Nussbächer, to a Hungarian Jewish family in Romania in 1924 has shadowed earlier sequences of poems by Szirtes. They dramatised, and imagined, scenes from his family history. Not until now, more than four decades after his loss, has the vast emptiness she left behind resolved into a prose memoir. Certainly, Read more ...

The opening shot of Jan Němec’s 1964 debut feature, Diamonds of the Night, recalls the start of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. Němec’s camera also ducks and dives, here following a pair of teenagers fleeing from a moving train and escaping into a forest (cinematography, Jaroslav Kucera). Steadicam wasn’t an option back in 1964: Nemec’s solution involved building an elaborate wooden track for his camera. Stretching for hundreds of metres, it consumed a third of the film’s budget. As a special effect it’s both extraordinary and unobtrusive, entirely in keeping with Diamonds’ pared-down aesthetic Read more ...

Theatrical alchemy is eternally slippery. On paper Rosenbaum’s Rescue at the Park Theatre looks like an excellent proposition – a play that switches between 1943, when seven and a half thousand Jews were rescued from the German occupation of Denmark, and 2001, when two old friends dissect their conflicting memories. Yet A Bodin Saphir’s drama - which combines family secrets lurking like landmines with debates about the fallibility of history - is a curiously solid affair, in which revelations that should be toxic feel little more than tepid.Is this to do with the pacing of the production, a Read more ...

This is a love story and a ghost story. The year is 1934 and the Held family have moved from the countryside to an elegant house on Katalin Street in Budapest. Their new neighbours are the Major (with whom Mr Held fought in the Great War) and his mistress Mrs Temes, upright headteacher Mr Elekes and his slovenly and unconventional wife Mrs Elekes.Almost as soon as Henriette, the diminutive daughter of the Helds, begins to explore the house, she is ambushed by her mother at the threshold of her new bedroom and introduced – in the assured, declaratory manner of adults – to the Elekes Read more ...

Ferenc Török is firmly aiming at the festival and art house circuit with his slow-paced recreation of one summer day in rural Hungary. A steam train stops at a rural siding, two Orthodox Jewish men descend and with minimal speech, oversee the unloading of two boxes onto a horse drawn cart and start their long walk into town. The station-master sets off on his bicycle to warn the inhabitants of the imminent arrival of these strangers. It’s not long after the end of hostilities but Japan has yet to surrender. This little Hungarian town is in limbo, liberated from the Germans but not yet Read more ...

Adam Gorb’s The Path to Heaven, with libretto by Ben Kaye, is his longest work to date (almost two hours’ running time without interval) and on a story that could hardly be more tragic – the Holocaust. Its premiere at the Royal Northern College of Music was conducted by Mark Heron and given by members of Psappha with singers and musicians from the RNCM, directed by Stefan Janski.This was the culmination of a two-day festival of the music of Anthony Gilbert and Adam Gorb (pictured below), the first and present Heads of Composition of the RNCM respectively. It’s really a kind of opera Read more ...

Striking it lucky with a successful new opera is a rare occurrence, though every company has a duty to keep on trying. The Royal Opera hit the jackpot with 4.48 Psychosis, a highly original approach to Sarah Kane's profound and authentic play by Philip Venables, the first Doctoral Composer-in-Residence on the scheme initiated by Covent Garden in alliance with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. How could one not wish his successor, Israel-born Na'ama Zisser, all the best? Her credentials are excellent, not least studies with Mark-Anthony Turnage. But Mamzer Bastard makes for a nearly Read more ...

Destination Unknown is a passion project 13 years in production, a documentary featuring moving interviews with a dozen Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution. Elderly men and women describe what happened to them and their families during the war. We see them returning to the slave labour and death camps, driving through the countryside and contemplating their former home towns and villages where they were rounded up for deportation.Their interviews are intercut with family photographs, ciné film and archive footage. Unlike a history programme made for television, there is no voiceover, no maps Read more ...

How do you tell a story as complex as the eugenics movement, which is pursued afresh in writer-director Stephen Unwin's new play All Our Children? Its idealistic origins lie in Britain with Francis Galton in 1883, before leading to forced sterilisation of the disabled in several countries, starting in America in the 1920s and continung in Sweden into the 1970s; its legacy is today’s screening for conditions such as Down Syndrome.One way is to focus on eugenics’ nadir in Nazi Germany, when mentally and physically disabled children and adults were deemed "lives unworthy of life". Unwin, a Read more ...