tragedy
John Carvill
Thomas Pynchon’s saturnine '70s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) begins with “[a] screaming [that] comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” In contrast, on 10 March 2019, when a Boeing 737 MAX operated by Ethiopian Airlines took off from Addis Abada and, six minutes later, plunged into a field near the town of Bishoftu and killed 157 people, there very much was something to compare it to. Less than six months earlier, a MAX belonging to Indonesia’s Lion Air had crashed into the Java Sea thirteen minutes after takeoff, killing all 189 passengers Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
To make bricks you torment the soft, moist and fluid material of clay and sand in a prison of fire until it becomes dry, hard and unyielding. In Selva Almada’s rural Argentina, that’s also how you make – and break – men. Brickmakers is the third of her books translated as part of the expertly-curated series of contemporary Latin American literature published by the Edinburgh-based Charco Press. Its predecessor, Dead Girls, took the form of a non-fiction novel that investigated the killing of a trio of young women in provincial Argentina in the 1980s. Those three, all-too-typical, cases Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Memories are notoriously treacherous — this we know. I remember seeing Shelagh Stephenson’s contemporary classic at the Hampstead, when this venue was a prefab, and enjoying Terry Johnson’s racy staging, which starred Jane Booker, Hadyn Gwynne and Matilda Ziegler as the trio of bickering sisters, and then being blown away by his West End version, in which comedy heavyweight Alison Steadman partnered Samantha Bond and Julia Sawalha (with Margot Leicester thrown in for good measure). The play then won an Olivier for Best Comedy in 2000, was made into a forgettable 2002 film called Before You Go Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Philoctetes, Odysseus, Neoptolemus: the men’s names in Sophocles’ Philoctetes are all unnecessarily long and weighed down by expectations. Poet Kae Tempest’s lyrical new adaptation for the National Theatre focuses on the chorus, spinning out the original’s scope to examine the effects of conflict on women – and showing off all their Mercury-nominated wit and wordplay in the process.The subject matter located us at the end of the Trojan War, after Achilles’ death but before the horse comes into play. Philoctetes has been festering on an island for a decade, marooned there by Odysseus after an Read more ...
Lucy Popescu
“The challenges of the Vietnamese people throughout history are as tall as the tallest mountains. If you stand too close, you won’t be able to see their peaks. Once you step away from the currents of life, you will have the full view…” This is the advice a grandmother offers to her beloved granddaughter in Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s lyrical family saga. Born in North Việt Nam, Nguyễn won a scholarship to study in Australia and currently lives in Jakarta. Aged thirty-nine, she wrote The Mountains Sing in English rather than her Vietnamese mother tongue. These factors presumably offered the Read more ...
David Nice
So much for the assertion that nowhere in the world would be staging the big Strauss and Wagner operas for the indefinite future. With a combination of lavish funding and good pandemic management on Austria's part, it’s been possible in Salzburg. Ironic, then, that though no holds are barred in terms of how close everyone on stage and in the pit can be, with any amount of feeling and touching permitted short (I’m guessing) of osculation, this Elektra feels, for the most part, distanced not socially (or, in the case of this work, anti-socially) but in psychological terms.Some of that could be Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Theatres will begin gently unlocking their doors as we head into August. In the meantime, a beleaguered community continues to find fresh and startling ways to sustain interest and excitement, whether that be the premiere of a new play starring Andrew Scott at the Old Vic or a pictorial tour round long-shuttered playhouses from the photographer Helen Murray. The American composer Jason Robert Brown is back on view yet again, this time with a revival of his earliest show as performed by a high-voltage musical theatre cast, and one of the most celebrated theatres in the world livestreams a show Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Medea is the original crazy ex-girlfriend: the wronged woman who takes perfectly understandable revenge on the man who made her life hell. In Blueprint Medea, a new adaptation premiered at the Finborough Theatre in May 2019 and available on YouTube until 2nd August, writer-director Julia Pascal gives us a 21st-century reworking of Euripides’ tragedy. This Medea (Ruth D’Silva) is a Kurdish freedom fighter who’s come to England on a dodgy passport; working illegally as a cleaner, she meets Jason (Max Rinehart) – or Mohammed, to his Iraqi-immigrant parents. They move in together and Read more ...
Jessica Payn
“I was ten and stopped taking off my coat.” This bare beginning marks the opening of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s startling and lyrical novel, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison: an introduction to ten-year-old Jas and the dislocated world of metaphor she inhabits. Later, she kidnaps two toads and hides them in a bucket in her bedroom, deeming them talismanic substitutes for her parents: if the toads mate, so will they, and everything will be alright. She picks her nose because it helps her to think, “as though looking for ways out in my thoughts has to be expressed physically.” More Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This raunchy, gleefully cynical production takes one of Thomas Middleton’s most famous tragedies and turns it into a Netflix-worthy dark comedy. Where the themes of incest, betrayal, cougar-action and multiple murder would be spun out over several episodes these days, Amy Hodge’s production compresses them into a tart, wittily toxic two and a half hours. Hodge, by her own admission, has sheared off one third of the text to produce a sharply outlined drama of devices and desires. At the same time she has introduced music and songs that tip between jazz and blues, so that Middleton’s Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Channel 4’s The Accident closed with a bang and a whimper. Jack Thorne provided a definitive answer to his series’ central question, but his characters and subplots petered out in the meantime.Over four episodes, this series examined the fallout of a fatal explosion, in a town cloaked by the long shadows of Grenfell and Aberfan. Each episode centred on a kind of reckoning: between old friends, husbands and wives, mothers and widows. But its core tension, as tonight’s episode hammered home, was the standoff between a broken-hearted community and a corporation unmoved by their loss.The finale Read more ...
David Nice
Hallucinatory theatre has struck quite a few times in the Barbican's international seasons. On an epic scale we’ve had the Shakespeare compendiums Kings of War and Roman Tragedies from Toneelgroep Amsterdam, newly merged with the city's Stadsschouwburg to form this present company. Most concentrated in intensity of vision, in my experience, have been director/playwright Simon Stone's Belvoir Theatre Sydney adaptation of Ibsen's The Wild Duck, and now his Dutch Medea for our times. They almost make a diptych, with the same hermetic acting space - this time white and open, not black and glassed Read more ...