Germany
Helen Hawkins
When Berliners sat down to watch Franz Wedekind’s debut play Fruhlings Erwachen – Spring Awakening – in 1906, they had little inkling of the kind of drama he had written, or how it would change theatre for the century to come, despite being banned for long periods. Masturbation, homosexuality, underage sex, S&M, abortion, not to mention atheism and political radicalism had arrived onstage all at once. Inevitably, the musical based on the play that became a Broadway hit in 2006 dialled down some of this risqué content, but not by a lot. When I saw it there, my seat neighbours, a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
GW Pabst’s The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927), adapted from the novel by the Russian revolutionary author Ilya Ehrenburg, is a fascinating example of a major movie, vividly rendered by a filmmaker at his peak, that was compromised by its producers’ commercial agenda.Survive though it does as a late-silent-era German classic, Pabst’s sixth feature suffers in comparison with his Joyless Street (1925), the Louise Brooks vehicles Pandora’s Box and The Diary of a Lost Girl (both 1929), and The Threepenny Opera (1931).The arch-realist Pabst was the leading exponent of the socially driven Neue Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
One German writer found a neat yet teasing way to sum up the difference between Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), the first film in the Italian director’s “German trilogy”, and the two films that followed it.The Damned, known in Italian as La caduta degli dei (meaning "the twilight of the Gods"), the writer explained, is “a masterpiece which is nonetheless suitable for the cinema-goers who fell asleep during Death in Venice (1971) or Ludwig II (1973)."Visconti did, indeed, set out deliberately to surprise and to shock with The Damned, as he explains in a 1970 interview that Read more ...
Cordelia Lynn
As I write this, we've just had our final day in the rehearsal room and are going into tech onstage next week with my new play, which is also reopening the Donmar not only to live performance but follows major renovations at their home address.It’s a funny thing, but I can find it hard to describe what the play is "about" at this time. It has been unmade and remade, become something vividly new outside my own head, which is the process of making a play. If I go back to the initial impulse, it is about a young couple, roughly here, roughly now, and their relationship across roughly 10 Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A stealthily powerful play gets the production of its dreams in Camp Siegfried, which marks a high-profile UK presence for the American writer Bess Wohl. A world premiere at the Old Vic, Wohl's two-hander shines a scary and pertinent light on a Nazi training ground in the 1930s that is seen to have all sorts of ongoing repercussions for today. That a potentially slippery text is as well realised as it is pays tribute, and then some, to a creative team working in complete harmony, starting with an impeccable cast, Luke Thallon and Patsy Ferran, who deliver the play's darkening affect well Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In 2011, Ferdinand von Schirach’s novel Der Fall Collini (The Collini Case) was published, its narrative of crime and punishment inspired by a law passed in Germany in 1968. Promoted by Dr Eduard Dreher, a former Nazi-era prosecutor who served in the post-1945 West German justice ministry along with many fellow ex-Nazis, this law was in effect an amnesty for murders committed during the Third Reich era. Somehow it was passed almost unnoticed, under the carefully bland title of the Introductory Act to Administrative Offenses. “The law seemed so unimportant it wasn’t even debated in the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Historians seldom make the news themselves. However, Christopher Clark – the Australian-born Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University – hogged headlines and filled op-ed pages in Germany when the centenary of the First World War’s outbreak arrived in 2014. His magisterial 2012 book The Sleepwalkers argued, with formidable research and a propulsive narrative drive, that the catastrophe that struck Europe, then the world, after August 1914 came about not because of secret grand designs, plots or conspiracies. It happened thanks to the convulsive but unplanned breakdown of a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A gorgeous song exists in search of a show to match over at Bagdad Café, the 1987 film that gave the world the memorably plaintive "Calling You", which is threaded throughout Emma Rice's stage adaptation of the movie with understandable insistence.What hasn't yet been achieved in this Old Vic premiere is much narrative heft to go with the abundant heart of an evening that ends with a collective Zoom, a reminder in our fraught times of the collective call-out to community. All that's needed now is something more of substance. Rice has always been great when it comes to feeling and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
When Marie-Theres Härtel plays the viola, she is an astonishing force of nature. If great string-playing should combine the heavenly and the daemonic, the civilised and the raw, hers certainly does.She has a deep family folk heritage from the Steiermark in Austria (“yodelling was my mother tongue”, she says) but also spent quite a few years among the cohort of elite string players at the Vienna Conservatoire, trudging the streets around the Singerstrasse like Mozart (another viola player), and learning the magical Viennese art of how to function as an inner voice at the heart of any Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Whatever might be said about Longborough Festival’s first live opera since 2019, the first and most important thing is to praise the company without reservation for putting on a show of anything like this quality in the face of obstacles of the sort that normally confront the heroes of Russian fairy tales.So: no kissing, embracing or even approaching within two metres in an opera that begins with twins falling passionately, violently in love, and ends with Wotan literally kissing away Brünnhilde’s immortality (pictuted below, Paul Carey Jones at the end of the opera). So: general distancing Read more ...
mark.kidel
Martin Ritt’s 1965 classy screen adaptation of John Le Carré’s bestseller The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is an antidote to the full-colour hi-jinx of the Bond franchise that ruled over the spy movie genre in the 1960s. By the time Paul Dehn, an ex-spook himself, and the screenwriter of Goldfinger (1964), took over as the main scriptwriter for the film, the public was ready for something a good deal less glamorous, and a hero who was a serial failure rather than a seductive superman.This is perhaps one of Richard Burton’s greatest moments in film – as the desperate and melancholy agent Alec Read more ...
David Nice
I only saw Christa Ludwig twice live in concert, but those appearances epitomise her incredible dramatic and vocal rage as well as her peerless artistry in everything she did. The first event was Schubert’s Winterreise with pianist Charles Spencer at the Southbank Centre, at a time when it was less common for women to take on the role of the heavy-hearted wayfarer: the intensity still resonates. The second time was when she played the one-buttocked, easily-assimilated Old Lady in Bernstein’s Candide, conducted by the composer in his last Barbican concerts: the joie de vivre went beyond the Read more ...