1950s
Gary Naylor
In Italy, they did it differently. Their pulp fiction tales of suburban transgression appeared between yellow covers on new stands and spawned the influential Giallo movies of the Sixties and Seventies, gory exercises in an offbeat, highly stylised film language – cult movies indeed.The USA took its transgressive tales of domestic non-bliss and drew upon the language of Hollywood film noir to make short television plays, often lacing the arsenic in the tea with a soupçon of black comedy. They branded it with the master of suspense, the man who could delve into psychologies that other Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As something of an immigrant to the capital myself in the long hot summer of 1984, I gobbled up Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes’s novel of an outsider embracing the temptations and dangers of London.Written a couple of years earlier and set a couple of miles east, Sam Selvon’s seminal book, The Lonely Londoners, focuses more specifically on Caribbean immigrants’ experience of a metropolis emerging from post-war austerity, of the cold, of the racism, of the possibilities always just out of reach.Roy Williams’ adaptation of Selvon’s dazzling narrative was a big hit at the intimate Jermyn Read more ...
David Nice
There’s nothing like an anodyne new(ish) work to give a masterpiece an even higher profile. Rachel Portman‘s Tipping Points, promising to address climate change issues, was so bland and featureless it could have been composed by AI. Any one bar of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, on the other hand, shows originality of throught within a tradition, and unlike the Portman near-vacuum it challenged the musicians of the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland to the limits.That they pulled it off was obviously due in no small measure to the guidance of Jessica Cottis. I’d like to have seen more urging Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Last month a portrait of Alan Turing by AI robot AI-Da sold at Sotheby’s for $1.08 million – proof that, in some people’s eyes, artificial intelligence can produce paintings worth as much as those made by human hands.Depending on your view of AI, this can either be a very exciting or deeply depressing idea; whichever way you lean, it makes Tate Modern’s exhibition of work by the pioneers of machine art extremely timely.This exhaustive (and exhausting) show starts in the 1950s with Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka. In response to the neon signs brightening up Osaka’s streets in the aftermath of Read more ...
David Nice
At first, you wonder if the peculiar voice of Henry James’s maybe unreliable narrator can be preserved in this production. Surely the outcome is known if we first meet the Governess in an insane asylum bed? Yet whether she was mad or maddened during the course of terrifying events 30 years earlier remains crucially unclear. Between them director/designer Isabella Bywater, soprano Ailish Tynan and conductor Duncan Ward deliver all the frissons in Britten’s concentrated masterpiece.Bywater shows she knows the novella and the opera equally well in possibly the most intelligent programme essay I' Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s hard to work out why Kwame-Kwei Armah chose to end his tenure at the Young Vic by directing this soggy musical by Elvis Costello (songs/lyrics) and the American playwright Sarah Ruhl (book). Was it because of it seemed to be a warning about the dangers of populism? Such warnings are always welcome, but this isn’t the piece to do that. In its original form it was a punchy Elia Kazan film that in 1957 launched the career of future sitcom star, Andy Griffith. HIs TV show was a byword for down-home values and folksy wisdom, but In Kazan’s film he had played an Arkansas drifter, Larry “ Read more ...
Robert Beale
If audience reaction is anything to go by, Kahchun Wong’s season-opening first concert officially in post as principal conductor of the Hallé was an outstanding success.And the reception was deserved. Still young enough, with a mop of hair cascading over his forehead, to look like a Wunderkind, he has considerable experience behind him, with a career on both sides of the world – in south-east Asia and in Europe and America.That particular characteristic was symbolized in this programme. He has an interest in Britten’s music, and already he and the Hallé have recorded the complete score of The 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 ...
graham.rickson
Once regarded as highly as Kurosawa and Ozu, Japanese director Mikio Naruse’s star has fallen in recent decades, with few of his films readily available in the West. I’d suggest reading Hayley Scanlon’s concise introduction to Naruse’s work on the BFI website as a prelude to watching this restored print of Floating Clouds. Scanlon describes him as "cinema’s greatest pessimist", something that’s hard to disagree with on the basis of this work alone.Floating Clouds, released in 1955, is a dark love story set in the ruins of post-war Tokyo. Hideko Takamine’s Yukiko returns from working in an Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Before a word is spoken, a pause held, we hear the seagulls squawking outside, see the (let’s say brown) walls that remind you of the H-Block protests of the 1980s, witness the pitifully small portions for breakfast. If you were in any doubt that we were anywhere other than submerged beneath the fag end of the post-war years of austerity, the clothes confirm it. And a thought surfaces and will jab throughout the two hours runtime: “How different are things today in, say, Clacton?”But Ultz’s design work has grounded Harold Pinter’s second play firmly in pre-Beatles England, where even Elvis Read more ...
graham.rickson
There’s a lot to unpick in Zoltán Fabri’s 1956 film Merry-Go-Round (Körhinta). Take leading man Imre Soós’s disarming resemblance to a young Peter O’Toole, and a central love story which plays out like a Hungarian take on Romeo and Juliet with some post-war agrarian politics thrown in for good measure.Fábri keeps his narrative and thematic plates spinning brilliantly: Soós’s charismatic co-operative farmer Máté falls for Mari (a luminous Mari Törőcsik in her debut film appearance), whose father István is a stubborn private smallholder looking to expand his empire. Fábri captures a society on Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Late summer 1966. Jazz was Margo Guryan’s thing. She was not interested in pop music. This changed when she was played The Beach Boys’s “God Only Knows.” Amazed by what she heard, she tuned in to pop radio for the first time. Her head was further turned by The Beatles and The Mamas & the Papas. A copy of “God Only Knows’s” parent album Pet Sounds was bought.Newly thrilled by a pop she saw as more innovative than a jazz scene she thought too full of Ornette Coleman imitators, she wrote a song titled “Think of Rain.” In tune with the burgeoning harmony pop style, its baroque leanings and Read more ...