1930s
william.ward
Perhaps the longest-lasting, the oddest – and almost certainly the most gratuitous – battle still busy raging with its roots in the ideological conflicts of the past century is the one regarding the artistic output of Italy’s engagement with Fascism.You would be hard pressed to find even a ferociously anti-communist critic who condemned Shostakovich or Prokofiev’s Stalinist-era oeuvres as an affront to our liberal sensibilities. Aware of the ideological pressures of the time, we take it in our stride, as we do when viewing those 1960s “worker porn” posters (hunky proles building the new China Read more ...
peter.quinn
Jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall has won two Grammys and sold more than 15 million albums worldwide. Born in 1964 in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, she attended Berklee College of Music in the early 1980s and had her major breakthrough with the 1995 album, All for You: A Dedication to the Nat King Cole Trio. Produced by T Bone Burnett and featuring Marc Ribot on guitar (and a cameo from Howard Coward, a.k.a. Elvis Costello, whom she married in 2003), her new album of vintage material largely from the 1920s and '30s, Glad Rag Doll, features songs that Krall has spent a lifetime Read more ...
David Nice
Somehow the manic cry of “Scooby-Doo man!” from the back of the stalls didn’t seem too incongruous. We were in the thick of Shostakovich’s craziest symphony, the Fourth, composed in the mid 1930s when such maverick Russian talent was about to be stamped on and potentially quite a sledgehammer of a season opener for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Instead dapper Jukka-Pekka Saraste - a more than satisfactory replacement for the great Neeme Järvi - ran through this nightmarish world like an open razor, every cutting gesture aimed with deadly accuracy, having allocated the spiritual healing to a Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Cleopatra didn’t hold a beast to her ass but in this lavish 1934 production, she could have. Cecil B DeMille amped up his two favourite topics - sex and sin - to create the world's second most opulent celluloid Cleopatra. Scripted by Waldemar Young (grandson of Brigham Young) and Vincent Lawrence (who seems to have kept working after his death), this hysterically fancy film was "based" on an "adaptation" of historical elements by Barlett Cormack - this is shorthand for “we only used the shiniest parts of the true story”. Despite phenomenal art direction by Roland Anderson and Hans Dreier Read more ...
David Benedict
“Has it ever occurred to you that flippancy might cover a very real embarrassment?" Elyot's response to fulminating Victor is a line of defence – and since he has run off with Victor's wife Amanda he has a good deal of defending to do. But the line is also Coward’s statement of intent. It's a direction as to how Private Lives works and is the key to why it’s not just his funniest and finest play but one of the greatest in the language. Disobey it – as much of Jonathan Kent’s overheated Chichester Festival Theatre production does – at your peril.The delicious flippancy is the (relatively) easy Read more ...
Laura Silverman
The Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret, inspired by the Berlin stories of Christopher Isherwood, is soon to return to the West End with Will Young. Its less well-known source is John Van Druten's 1952 play I Am a Camera. The title comes from the opening page of Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood's memoirs published in 1939 inspired by his years in the capital of a country reeling from the last war and suffering from the global Depression: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”The play focuses on Christopher's relationships with the people he meets in the city: Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Australian director John Hillcoat certainly knows what he likes, and what he likes is lawlessness. It’s the central focus of his brilliantly uncompromising film Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, which saw a high-security prison driven to bloody ruin, and of his scorching western The Proposition. And there it is again in the anarchic dystopia of The Road (less impressive because, despite Hillcoat’s flair for brutality, it perversely shied away from some of the key violence of the source novel). It therefore comes as no great surprise that Hillcoat’s Prohibition-era latest should be lawless not just Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Accolades are due again for the tiny Finborough Theatre, whose production of JB Priestley's all-but-unknown Cornelius constitutes the most exciting reclamation from the English theatrical canon since the same venue produced Emlyn Williams's startling and welcome Accolade some 18 months ago. Funny and endearing in parts when not devouringly bleak, the play is as eccentric as a title character who can debate "this suicide business" one minute and lose himself in a story about the Incas the next, and the young director Sam Yates and his hugely accomplished cast do the occasion proud. Read more ...
Tom Priestley
I am keenly looking forward to seeing the new production of JB Priestley’s play Cornelius at the Finborough Theatre. This will be the first time I have seen the work performed, though I have of course read it. But my father always said his plays were made for the stage rather than the page. They need the skill of a cast and director to bring the characters alive and the active engagement of the audience to enhance the experience. Cornelius is subtitled “A Business Affair in Three Acts” and takes place entirely in a London office; there are echoes of my father’s novel Angel Pavement Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Storyville documentary strand must rank as one of the special glories of British television. As its opening titles unfold in different languages, we can only celebrate programmes that still give time to international stories, told in their own time, and allowing an eclectic, sometimes oblique view on their subjects. Hitler, Stalin and Mr Jones, a film by George Carey (pictured below), serves as a rallying cry to endorse exactly that.The “Mr Jones” of the title was a Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, whose career in the 1930s and before took him to both Hitlerite Germany and Soviet Russia, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Cafés, ballets, it’s all the same to the mighty petty bullyboys of the London Olympics, who have not only devised two of the most revolting mascots in Olympic history (the one-eyed slugs Wenlock and Mandeville) but also employed teams of apparatchiks in your name and mine to compel artists and small businesses not to infringe their entirely dubious copyright in the Olympic motto. David Bintley came out much the better of a last-minute squabble a fortnight ago about his new ballet’s name - he had to truncate it to Faster, from his original “Faster, Higher, Stronger”, so that LOCOG could keep Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Anyone familiar with the 1915 spy thriller The 39 Steps and Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1935 adaptation – fleet, déclassé, and oneiric – knows the movie is a superior piece of entertainment to John Buchan’s coincidence-laden potboiler, which as a gentleman's adventure is smugly establishmentarian. In its depiction of a pre-war Britain mired in political complacency yet socially discontent, the film better caught the tenor of the times.Passive everyman Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) is accosted by an exotic spy (Lucy Mannheim) as he pushes through a panicked mob in a London music hall and brings Read more ...