university
David Kettle
The Sound Inside, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★ Adam Rapp’s unapologetically intricate, bookish two-hander arrives for its UK premiere at the Traverse Theatre following a successful run in New York, including no fewer than six Tony nominations. It’s not a new work, then, but its themes and its gloriously, unashamedly erudite writing make it one of the strongest offerings in the Traverse’s Fringe programme.Not for nothing do literary references ricochet back and forth across Rapp’s Ivy League thriller-cum-love story. Bella Baird is a Yale professor of creative writing, and she discovers a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Kwame Owusu’s 55-minute one-hander does just what it says on the tin: it features a young student who dreams he is drowning. But its brevity is no bar to its being a dense and intense experience, worthy winner of last year’s Mustapha Matura Award.Nineteen-year-old gay Malachi (Tienne Simon) has gained a place at university in Bristol to study English Literature. He adores reading, especially books by Black authors and, above all, sci-fi and fantasy. But his arrival at uni is blighted by a recurring dream that intensifies with each iteration: his room is at the bottom of the ocean, and a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Beatrice Blackwood had lived in a clifftop village between surf and jungle on Bougainville Island, part of the Solomon archipelago in the South Pacific. She hunted, fished and grew crops with local people as she studied their social and sexual lives; she joined the men on risky forays into other communities “that had never seen a white person before, but she never recorded any animosity from them”. Later, in 1936, she relocated to the remote interior of New Guinea. There she lived among the “remarkably inscrutable” Anga people, fabled for their ritualised violence, in a region feared and Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures is a collection of transcripts, recording weekly group lectures delivered by Mark Fisher to his students at Goldsmiths, University of London during the 2016/17 academic year. These lectures provide the substance of a module of the same name, taught within the university’s then-newly formed MA in Contemporary Art Theory. In his capacity as a lecturer, Fisher coaxes his students through the questions explored and raised by the concept of postcapitalist desire, described as the “shadow” to the ideas explored in-depth in Fisher’s earlier, Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Don’t you just love that new concert hall smell? The main hall at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire is so new that as soon as you walk in you get the scent of fresh woodwork; so new, in fact, that it won’t even be officially opened until next month (Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and the Earl of Wessex are doing the honours, apparently). And it’s a beauty: a spacious, shoebox-shaped room with a stage big enough for a Mahler symphony and acoustics that are lucid (without being flashy) in all registers. You can sort of understand why the RBC succumbed to the temptation to smash a bottle of musical Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Metaphor, metonymy, simile and synecdoche, anyone? FR Leavis, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode? If any of this, and more, turns you on, this lengthy memoir will be irresistible. It is almost a day-by-day account of 15 years of the family and professional life of one of the anglophone world’s leading academics, critics and authors, who now has some 30 volumes of novels, literary criticism, and plays for stage and television behind him.It is the narrative of a somebody, but at times almost risibly reminiscent of George Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody. We are treated to a rundown Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
University, anyone? Student days? If you were ever an undergraduate, who does not remember the simultaneous sense of dislocation and excitement, the feeling of the familiar combined with a heady awareness that we might fall off a cliff, metaphorically speaking, at any moment?University life in various guises is at the centre of The Idiot. Elif Batuman is an autobiographical writer whose subject is her own intellectual and geographical adventures, imbued with a sense of discovery and emotional involvement that does not seem to depend on amatory alliances, unless you count the books and authors Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Naomi Roth, president of Webster College, Massachusetts, has come a long way since readers first made her acquaintance in Korelitz’s second novel The Sabbathday River (1999). There, Roth was a well-meaning Vista (community service) volunteer striving to improve the lives of a rural community for whom she felt little genuine empathy. Now, she’s the first female president of a highly successful college, once WASPY but now working hard to embrace liberalism. Yet the suspicion lingers that beneath the surface of this openness lie darker instincts that without Roth’s good offices would quickly Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Rebecca Miller’s fiction and her previous films’ manifestly ambitious visual style and narrative structures led to high expectations from Maggie’s Plan. As a movie, it may appeal to audiences craving the kinds of films that Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach and Richard Curtis make – talky comedies revolving around middle-class professionals chewing over their relationship crises with their friends. But if that’s not your cup of decaf, it may just grate on your nerves.Greta Gerwig plays Maggie, an arts administrator in her early 30s, contemplating single parenthood with the help of donated sperm. She Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The extraordinary workings of an unusual mind are reduced to TV-movie proportions in The Man Who Knew Infinity, the latest and least re-telling of the too-short life of the self-taught Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose tale has previously been told in novel form (David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk) and as an Olivier Award-winning play (A Disappearing Number). Now along comes American writer-director Matthew Brown with a tentative take on the intriguingly knotted story of the Madras-born Ramanujan (played this time out by Dev Patel) and the eventual acclaim and renown Read more ...
ellin.stein
Ever since his 1967 breakthrough film Titticut Follies, an unsparing look at a Massachusetts prison for the criminally insane, Frederick Wiseman has been turning his dispassionate observational camera on the workings of institutions ranging from the US Marines to high school, juvenile court, and the American Ballet Theater. His latest, At Berkeley, is an in-depth exploration of the University of California’s San Francisco Bay Area outpost (UC is made up of several self-contained component universities distributed across the state, with Berkeley the jewel in the crown).Expecting anyone who isn Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Cinemagoers with an aversion to musicals need not fear, as in Pitch Perfect most of the singing is in a sane context, rather than its characters breaking into lavish routines in the street. After the fun but exhaustingly naff Rock of Ages, this comes as something of a relief. And if its chart pop mash-ups and campus antics seem squarely targeted at the teenage and twenty-something market, Pitch Perfect broadens its appeal shrewdly with some cross-generational acerbic and offbeat humour.The first thing Pitch Perfect gets right is its cast. Oscar and Tony nominated actress Anna Kendrick ( Read more ...