Cold War
Boyd Tonkin
If the distance from Festen to The Railway Children looks like a long stretch of track, remember that Mark-Anthony Turnage’s operas have often thundered through the drama of shattered families mired in mystery and secrecy – all the way back to the Oedipal conflicts of Greek in 1988.Now, in the the same year as a Covent Garden triumph with his version of the dysfunctional dynasty of Thomas Vinterberg’s Danish film, the composer returns with a project he first conceived during the 2020 lockdown with librettist/partner Rachael Hewer. The pair have updated Edith Nesbit’s adored 1906 Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Older readers may recall the cobbled together, ramshackle play, a staple of the Golden Age of Light Entertainment that would close out The Morecambe and Wise Show and The Generation Game. Mercifully, we don’t have grandmothers from Slough squinting as they read lines off the back of a teapot in this show, but there are still too many callbacks to those long-forgotten set pieces of Saturday night telly.There’s a lot of effort put into creating a 1950s Cold War vibe in Emma Rice’s adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, but that jokey 1970s tone overpowers set design, costuming, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Even by Stanley Kubrick’s standards, Dr Strangelove went through an extraordinary evolutionary process. After starting it off as a serious film about nuclear war based on the 1958 novel Two Hours to Doom, he decided to turn it into a comedy with the help of porn-obsessed satirist Terry Southern.The distinctive result – as remarkable for its futuristic War Room design as its weapons-grade humour – brazenly evoked the madness of a world on the brink. It’s not hard to see why – when human self-destructivity is breaking records on the Doomsday Clock – Sean Foley and Armando Iannucci thought this Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The clue is in the title – not Then in America or Over There in America or even a more apposite, if more misleading, Now in America, but an urgent, pin you to the wall and stick a finger in your face, Here in America.Pre-Trump 2.0, David Edgar’s new play tells us (at least twice, Edgar not shy of driving home a point) that we can learn from past trauma in order to guide current behaviour. So, 300 million+ Americans are to draw on Stanislavski's Method in the polling booths come November?The memories Edgar conjures are from the 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee went Read more ...
David Kettle
The Mosinee Project, Underbelly Cowgate ★★★★In May 1950, a small US town awoke to hammer-and-sickle flags hanging from lamp-posts, its local newspaper transformed into a Soviet propaganda journal, its citizens’ firearms confiscated and handed to loyal communist troops, and – most alarmingly – its mayor detained under armed guard.It’s a fascinating and little-known byway of US history, and how the Wisconsin community of Mosinee arrived at that elaborate and eyebrow-raising simulation is the subject of the debut Fringe show from new theatre company Counterfactual. And what begins with a Read more ...
Jack Barron
"[A]n unimaginably beautiful day": this was how Kikue Shiota described the morning of the 6th of August, 1945, in Hiroshima. The day was soon to change, unimaginably, as the city was blitzed by the airburst of the first atomic bomb, nicknamed Little Boy. Shiota’s perfect weather was instantly and irrevocably translated into a brightness totally beyond the imaginative powers of the humans that brought it into being. It is a brightness that blinds, burns your clothes away, and flays the skin beneath – as Shiota discovered, when she stumbled across her brother. It illuminates your very Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There is a song by Syd Barrett, founder member of Pink Floyd, called “Golden Hair”. It’s on his album The Madcap Laughs, released in 1970, a couple of years after he left the band, and every time I hear it I feel like I’m falling in love again. It also features in Tom Stoppard’s 2006 epic, the aptly named Rock ’N’ Roll, now revived at the Hampstead Theatre by playwright and director Nina Raine.The figure of Barrett – an antic madcap whose use of LSD both inspired his psychedelic music and destroyed his mind – runs, skips and somersaults through the play, which spans European Cold War history Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Apple TV+ is using the arrival of season two of Slow Horses to offer a generous three-month free trial to its streamer service. Ample time to catch up with season one and watch it multiple times before all of season two is available at the end of December. Go for it.Mick Herron is now preparing the ninth Slough House novel for publication in 2023 (there have also been three related novellas in the sequence), while the TV series is just embarking on volume two, Dead Lions. Predictably, the literary critical backlash has already begun: the books are formulaic, the magic doesn’t last, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You react differently to Meeting Gorbachev knowing that the film’s subject was on occasions brought to its interviews from hospital by ambulance; his interlocutor, Werner Herzog, doesn’t mention that fact, of course, anywhere in the three encounters on which this documentary is based, but he has alluded to it elsewhere.It seems somehow out of place to express cavils that the tone of this encounter is supremely respectful, that Herzog does not press Gorbachev into commentary on events of history beyond those in which he was immediately involved. Though today’s Russians would hardly agree with Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Joerg and Anna Winger’s gripping drama of East Germany, a loose portrait set over the final decade of that country’s existence, has reached its culmination, and this first episode of Deutschland 89 landed us right in the unpredictable maelstrom of history. Following on from Deutschland 83 and Deutschland 86, the thriller and espionage elements of those two predecessors have been folded with true aplomb into the real-life events that reached their unforeseen conclusion with crowds of East Germans breaking through the Berlin Wall – or the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”, as it’s occasionally Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Go back over Christopher Nolan’s films and count the clocks. He has an obsession that would give a horologist a run for his money. Time is a continual motif of his body of work and it finds its zenith in his latest work Tenet. Beneath the highly polished spy-thriller aesthetic lies a head-spinning, temporally warped plot, laced with concepts and conceits that will delight and baffle in equal measures. At the heart of the story is The Protagonist (John David Washington, pictured below with Robert Pattinson), a highly trained agent who stumbles upon a time-bending technology Read more ...
Marianka Swain
We’ve had Chess the musical; now, here’s Chess the play. Tom Morton-Smith, who has experience wrestling recent history into dramatic form with the acclaimed Oppenheimer, turns his attention to the 1972 World Chess Championship in Reykjavík, in which American challenger Bobby Fischer battled the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky. The event gained outsize importance from the Cold War propaganda battle – the two men pawns in their countries’ games, and the match characterised as the lone hero versus the Soviet machine.The play follows the tournament through, as both Fischer (Robert Emms, pictured Read more ...