World War One
Marina Vaizey
The exhibition Out of Chaos is a powerful dose of specific human experience, here presented almost exclusively in the form of portraits and group scenes. The selection comes almost entirely from the more than 1,300 works of art owned by Ben Uri Gallery, whose centenary commemoration this is; the gallery was founded in 1915, primarily to explore the work of Jewish artists in Britain. The majority of those in the collection are immigrants or first generation, with a few from beyond this island to expand on the Jewish experience. Several score works are arranged in chronological clusters, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a clear territorial divide in the small space of the Jermyn Street Theatre at the opening of Ashley G Holloway’s new drama Lesere. At the centre of Ellan Parry’s persuasive design there’s a bright decked area in which the seemingly sunny lives of its characters play out – the setting is the peaceful French countryside, 1921. Around the stage edges, however, is a very different environment, a dark space of silent, agonising memories.Lesere moves between such light and dark, the latter coming to dominate the action. An English couple, Jane and John, have settled in rural France to put Read more ...
theartsdesk
There were female pioneers of photography before Christina Broom, most notably Julia Margaret Cameron. And others have hidden their light under a bigger bushel: Vivian Meier's body of work remained stashed away only to be discovered after her death. Broom's importance is partly one of timing: she prowled the streets of London at a time of great historical significance. As suggested by Soldiers and Suffragettes, the title of a new exhibition and book celebrating her work, she was a witness to the struggle for universal suffrage and the First World War.Her career starrted late. In 1903, at the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The country is groaning under the weight of commemorations, exhibitions, publications and programmes all marking significant anniversaries of World War One, but the underlying message – lest we forget – remains as potent as ever, perhaps even more so in these tumultuous times.Narrating this documentary chiefly concerned with the art of the First World War, Oscar-winning actor Eddie Redmayne told us that the art described the indescribable, conveying what is beyond description. If that sounds unbearably fey it isn’t at all, for the surprise and interest of this programme was in fact two-fold: Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“All children, except one, grow up.” So begins J. M. Barrie’s iconic tale of arrested development, given new power and poignancy in this high-flying production. A century after one of Barrie’s youthful collaborators, George Llewelyn Davies, was killed at Ypres, it tells their familiar story through the prism of the brutalising First World War, in which context Peter’s neverending youth becomes an escapist beacon.Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel’s rich reimagining opens with wounded soldiers, far from home, tended by reassuringly maternal nurses – there are enough mother issues in Barrie’s Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
From the strings’ first entry, sweet and mysterious, conveying at once the erotic charge between Berlioz's Dido and Aeneas, its long-suppressed unfolding and also its transience, the BBC Symphony Orchestra played like a dream for their conductor laureate Sir Andrew Davis. He has done the Royal Hunt and Storm from Les Troyens many times before, with them and others, if never yet the work entire, but this was a performance fit for the opera house, full of sussurating passion, “grotesque dances” and “dishevelled hair” as the composer demanded, built carefully towards its orgiastic but abortive Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You can’t move for the World Wars on the BBC. Gallipoli (100 years ago) and VE Day (70) are this month’s on-trend anniversaries, and they’ll soon budge up for VJ Day and the Somme. And let’s not forget older victories: there’s Waterloo (200 years ago), and isn’t it time to go once more unto the breach, Agincourt being 700 this year? And for extra lashings of commemoration let us now turn to Britain’s Greatest Generation.This new four-parter is revisiting events which have been covered ad infinitum already. The difference is that Britain’s Greatest Generation comes at them exclusively through Read more ...
Nick Hasted
World War One poems can become too familiar. So can the war itself, its five years of centenary commemorations so far suffering from excessive patriotism, a sense of uncomprehending disconnection from the gone generation which lived it, and a politically expedient veil drawn over its holocaust, the Armenian genocide. The Lads In Their Hundreds combines contemporary English music and French war poetry unknown here to more intimately recall the time’s voices. As the poems’ performer, Tcheky Karyo, mentions in an after-show talk, some of them were written huddled over trench candlelight. They Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For Australians and New Zealanders, the grim meat-grinder of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 was their equivalent of the Somme, albeit under brilliant Aegean skies. The Australian-made Anzac Girls is based on real-life diaries and letters from the era, and homes in on five nurses from Down Under who were sent to treat the casualties. Inevitably they found conditions far more shocking and horrific than they'd imagined.However, as the BBC discovered with its own nurses-at-war yarn The Crimson Field, this fraught and poignant environment may theoretically sound like a goldmine for drama, but Read more ...
David Nice
It was melody versus the machine last night as Sakari Oramo’s six voyages around the Nielsen symphonies with the BBC Symphony Orchestra hit the high noon of the 1920s. The fallout from the First World War found three composers scarred but fighting fit. Prokofiev seemed less than his essential insouciant self in a Third Piano Concerto of more than usual bizarreries, and it was twice through the human meat grinder for the Viennese of Ravel’s La Valse and his Spanish proletarians in Boléro. The bookending made programmatic sense but in the end proved one work too many, exhausting for both Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Russell Crowe, who has played more than his fair share of rugged action heroes, makes his directorial debut with The Water Diviner, a film in which he plays, you’ve guessed it, a rugged action hero. He is Joshua Connor, a farmer living in the Australian Outback in the early 1900s, who has an uncanny knack of finding water sources, enabling him to farm this otherwise arid landscape (beautifully shot by Andrew Lesnie).Actually, this isn’t a film about water-divining or the Outback; rather it’s about one man’s search for his three dead sons, who went off to the Great War together as part of the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If proof were needed that war exists in some quarters as an excuse for beautiful images, along comes this screen account of Vera Brittain's celebrated 1933 memoir Testament of Youth to offer up prettified pain in abundance alongside some fine performances that do what they can to break through the prevailing gloss. First-time feature director James Kent's film can be seen as the converse to something like, say, the awful Unbroken, which rubs our noses almost fetishistically in suffering and torture. But surely some sort of possible middle ground exists whereby this fascinating story could Read more ...