Cold War
Here in America, Orange Tree Theatre review - Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller lock horns in McCarthyite AmericaWednesday, 25 September 2024The 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... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2024 reviews: The Mosinee Project / Gwyneth Goes SkiingTuesday, 06 August 2024The 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... Read more... |
Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War: A Scenario review - on the inconceivableFriday, 29 March 2024"[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... Read more... |
Rock 'N' Roll, Hampstead Theatre review - exciting music, uneven stagingMonday, 18 December 2023There 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... Read more... |
Slow Horses, Series 2, Apple TV+ review - Mick Herron’s spies make a welcome returnMonday, 05 December 2022Apple 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... Read more... |
Meeting Gorbachev review - Werner Herzog offers a swansong tributeWednesday, 31 August 2022You 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... Read more... |
Deutschland 89, Channel 4 review - the Wall comes down, what next?Saturday, 06 March 2021Joerg 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... Read more... |
Tenet review - a heady delightWednesday, 26 August 2020Go 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... Read more... |
Ravens: Spassky vs. Fischer, Hampstead Theatre review - it's game over for this chess playFriday, 06 December 2019We’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... Read more... |
The Fall of the Berlin Wall with John Simpson, BBC Four review – the future we’ve left behindFriday, 08 November 2019John Simpson remains the BBC’s longest serving foreign correspondent. Here, he returns to the biggest moment of his career. This personalised retelling of the collapse of the Berlin wall encompasses fond remembrance, factual detail and the... Read more... |
Summer of Rockets, BBC Two review - pride and prejudice in 1950s BritainWednesday, 22 May 2019Hallelujah! At last the BBC have commissioned a Stephen Poliakoff series that makes you want to come back for episode two (and hopefully all six), thanks to a powerful cast making the most of some perceptively-written roles.His most recent efforts,... Read more... |
Chernobyl, Sky Atlantic review - a glimpse of ArmageddonWednesday, 08 May 2019“I take it the safety test was a failure,” remarked Viktor Bryukhanov, director of Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power station. You could say that again. The catastrophic explosions at the Vladimir I Lenin plant on 26 April 1986, caused by a safety... Read more... |
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