1930s
Saskia Baron
Theatreland is currently awash with pantomimes and rehashes of A Christmas Carol, so all credit to this ambitious new production, an adaptation of the 1935 children’s book, The Box of Delights. Long before Narnia, poet laureate John Masefield was concocting tales of children dispatched to mysterious country houses for safekeeping but encountering deep magic, time travelling and talking animals. Serialised by the BBC in the mid-1980s, this new stage version is the work of children’s writer Piers Torday and takes full advantage of the wonderfully ramshackle Victorian relic that is Read more ...
Katherine Waters
One of the questions that can be asked of Brecht is whether for a modern audience his Verfremdungseffekt — or alienation effect — still works as intended, provoking genuine reflections on justice by distancing audiences from emotional entanglement with the characters. At a time when verbatim and community theatre is accomplishing just that with exactitude and force, it appears that inducing audiences to think morally is most effective when delivered in unexpected ways. Deeply though Brecht’s work may have influenced these pieces, audiences’ capacity for surprise remains a good Read more ...
Rebecca Sykes
Born into an artistic Swedish-speaking household in Helsinki, Tove Jansson’s first, and most enduring, ambition was to be a painter. Although best known as the illustrator behind the creatures of Moominvalley, those plump white hippopotamus-like folk with an existential longing for adventure, Jansson came to regard her widely successful creations as a distraction from what she considered to be her “real work”.Jansson’s illustrations may have been exhibited in Britain before, but Dulwich Picture Gallery is the first to make explicit those connections between the artist’s graphic work and her Read more ...
David Nice
Hands both sensitive and surgical are needed to guide a reader into the heart of the 20th century’s second biggest genocide and out again. Anne Applebaum is the right person for a queasy and difficult task, never turning away from the horrifying details of the man-made famine that caused nearly four million deaths throughout Ukraine in 1932-3 but also giving it a context of before and after that ends on a positive note for the nation’s sovereignty. At last, it seems, a new intelligentsia is rising up in the country to replace the cultured Ukrainians wiped out in the 1930s, whose absence led Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Robert Harris’s first book about Hitler told the story of the hoax diaries which seduced Rupert Murdoch and Hugh Trevor-Roper. After Selling Hitler (1986) came Fatherland (1992), another fake story about the Führer. In that alternative history the Third Reich had stuck to a non-aggression pact with Britain and expanded unopposed into the lebensraum of the Soviet Union. One founding fact of the thriller was that at Munich in September 1938, Britain and Germany made a commitment to peace in our time.That infamous piece of paper has lured Harris back to Nazi Germany after 25 years. This time he Read more ...
David Nice
It can’t be too long before “women” no longer needs to prefix “conductors” to define what’s still a rare breed. Yet seven at the Proms is certainly an improvement, with many more coming up through the ranks. And American Karina Canellakis turned out to be very much the season’s final trump card. She seemed precise and watchful in a new work and in getting the BBC Symphony Orchestra to keep perfect tabs on live-wire Jeremy Dank in Bartók’s dizzying Second Piano Concerto (he watched, too, in return). But it was Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony which defined the Canellakis style – keenly-spring and Read more ...
David Nice
No sunshine without shadows was one possible theme rippling through this diva sandwich of a Prom. Even Richard Strauss's chaste nymph Daphne, achieving longed-for metamorphosis as a tree, finds darkness among the roots; and though Renée "The Beautiful Voice" Fleming has a heliotropic tendency in her refulgent upper register, her mezzo-ish colours are strong, too. Besides, Scandinavians are always aware of transience in sunny summer days, and the outer panels of this curious programme were fine-tuned to that.The opener - "parking-lot music" as another Swedish composer, Anders Hillborg, wryly Read more ...
bella.todd
Plays with songs in, or more precisely plays with famous songs in, can feel like the uncanny valley of theatre. They’re not quite musicals and not quite tribute shows. They deliver on familiar tunes and disconcert with fresh narrative. You’re constantly wrongfooted by the rush of recognition.Lazarus was good-weird – a mash-up of David Bowie and Enda Walsh with a vision so unique and uncompromising it didn’t matter if anyone else could quite see it. Girl from the North Country, the new play by Conor McPherson for the Old Vic with songs from Bob Dylan’s back catalogue, is also very weird. Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Manchester International Festival – a biennale of new creative work – this year has a new artistic director in John McGrath, and there’s no large-scale new opera or prominent "classical" work, it would seem, other than Raymond Yiu’s song cycle, The World Was Once All Miracle, performed on Tuesday by Roderick Williams with the BBC Philharmonic. But the BBC Philharmonic also teamed up with Icelandic composer-photographer-creator Jóhann Jóhannsson for an ambitious premiere at the Bridgewater Hall, Last And First Men, that McGrath clearly sees as one of the festival’s most substantial Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Standing inside the Gemeentemuseum’s life-size reconstruction of Mondrian’s Paris studio, the painter’s reputation as an austere recluse seems well-deserved. Returning from Holland to France after the First World War, he lived and worked in what seem like impossibly cramped conditions, a narrow and unforgiving-looking bed the only comfort in a room dedicated to the rigorously geometric compositions for which he had become famous. Walls, furniture and even books were painted white, with selected features like the stove and an ashtray left black, and squares of primary colour pinned here and Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The CBSO is justifiably proud of its association with Benjamin Britten. There’s rather less proof that he reciprocated, dismissing the orchestra as "second-rate" after it premiered his War Requiem in 1962. Throughout the 1950s, he’d repeatedly promised to write an orchestral work for Birmingham, only to renege on the deal after the orchestra’s then chief conductor Rudolf Schwarz moved on to the BBC in 1957. What the CBSO did get from Britten, in September 1954, was the world premiere of an unwieldy Symphonic Suite from what's generally agreed to be one of his patchier operas, the 1953 Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can London support two dance musicals, each one dazzling in a different way? We're about to find out, now that the mother of all toe-tappers, 42nd Street, has set up shop a jeté or two away from where An American in Paris is achieving balletic lift-off. Similar generically but as different in content and approach as two major Broadway transplants to the West End can be, 42nd Street proves decisively that sometimes bigger really is better. You can scale back Sondheim and the like to rending effect, but when it comes to the sheer synchronised splendour accompanying an army of Read more ...