England
Marina Vaizey
When they were children the interviewees in this film – the last survivors – were taken away in incomprehensible circumstances, on their way to be murdered for who they were, in Germany and places further east. A handful of the few thousands who reached the UK after 1945, now octogenarians and nonagenarians, bore witness in this incredibly painful, profoundly necessary programme.In spite of the sheen of normality as we met these elderly people in their apparently comfortable homes, it was almost unbearable to watch. What some of the survivors asked even now was what could they do with their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When Shirley Collins appears at The Roundhouse next week, it will be 50 years since she last played there. On 30 May 1969, she and her sister Dolly were on a bill promoting their then label Harvest Records. When she plays there on 31 January, she is the main event. After her comeback album Lodestar was issued in November 2016, the knowledge that Shirley is the most important voice of traditional English music has been reinforced.Lodestar was released 37 years after her last full-length album, 1979’s Shirley & Dolly Collins set For as Many as Will. The – as she puts it – “long layoff Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a stark power to Jack Gamble’s production of DH Lawrence’s The Daughter-in-Law, which has transferred to the Arcola’smain stage after an acclaimed opening run in the venue’s downstairs studio last May. It still plays with a concentrated darkness in this larger space, heightened by the colloquial vigour of Lawrence’s language (wonderful phrasings like "th' racket an' tacket o' children"), and the heady dialect of the Nottinghamshire mining area where he grew up; you don’t assimilate it immediately, but it certainly grows on you with its sinewy expressiveness.There’s as little Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The scintillating, commercially bold season of Pinter one-acts at the theatre bearing his name plays a particular blinder with Pinter Five (★★★★★), from which I emerged keen to engage with its mystery and breadth of feeling all over again. Pinter Six (★★★) is worth seeing, as well, and may pay added dividends for those who didn't catch its author's world premiere of his brilliantly spiky play Celebration in 2000 – a production unlikely to be bettered anytime soon. But those keen to savour the esoteric will be richly rewarded by what director Patrick Marber's triptych in Pinter Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's been 40 years since The Double Dealer last had a major airing (indeed, perhaps any airing) in London, so on the basis of novelty value alone, the Orange Tree's end-of-year offering is worth our attention. But as always with Restoration comedy, Congreve's 1693 story of romantic skulduggery and misalliance poses a basic problem: how do you make sense of a byzantine plot characteristic of the genre? Selina Cadell, the fine actress here turning once again to directing, meets the matter head-on with a newly added prologue telling us not to fret it and by then ramping up the physicality and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You wouldn’t turn to Jimmy McGovern for a drawing-room comedy, but there’s no doubting his gift for seizing big issues and turning into them raw, bleeding chunks of drama. You’re either for him or against him, but if you’re against him he’d love to grab you by the throat and shake you into seeing it his way.In Care, McGovern (with co-writer Gillian Juckes, whose first-hand experiences inspired the story) took aim at the way the NHS and social services treat the elderly and the incapacitated. The set-up was simple but devastating. Mary (Alison Steadman) had been taking her two granddaughters Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is Natasha Gordon’s first play, and in it she has created an entire world. A world of grief and laughter, conflict and closeness. A world that is very specifically located within Britain's Jamaican community, yet one whose themes of loss and belonging cross boundaries. Between the tears and the recriminations, it is also frequently very, very funny.“Nine Night” refers to the protracted funeral wake ritual that follows a death, which brings family and friends together to remember the departed, to recall the stories over nine nights fuelled by food and drink, music and words. Gordon’s Nine Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
The Old Vic's revival of its successful Christmas Carol first seen this time last year had me at the mince pies: they were served before curtain up by a Bob Cratchit figure while we admired the shoal of Victorian lanterns lighting the way over a cross-shaped stage that cuts the audience into quarters. Top-hatted gentlemen and gentleladies in swishing black great coats strolled about tossing oranges. One waved a sign that said, "Please do not use your mobile phones in the auditorium," which could have been more appropriately phrased but did at least keep the devices from being doused in the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jerusalem! This fact-studded story of 20th century British music told us that the nation's unofficial national anthem, Hubert Parry’s setting of William Blake’s poem, originated in 1916 as a commission from the “Fight for Right” movement. Officials wanted a grand piece of music to boost morale (following the law of unintended consequences, Parry saw to it that Jerusalem became a rallying song for the suffragettes, too). The work of Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams was also enlisted to boost the national spirit. Even bureaucracy recognised the potential of music to uplift, encourage, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The West End is specialising in two-parters of late. To Imperium and The Inheritance we can add the latest duo of Harold Pinter one-acts that has opened in time to spread ripples of delight even as the nights draw in. "Delight", you may well ask – from this of all sombre and murky dramatists? To be sure, that more spectral Pinter is on view, too, at no point more memorably than when a bedridden Tamsin Greig wakes from a woundingly long sleep in A Kind of Alaska, with which Pinter Three (★★★★) – the superior of the two double-bills – concludes. But I'd be surprised if you Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
War Horse at the National Theatre on Sunday’s Armistice Day centenary: there were medalled veterans and at least one priest in the rows in front, dark suits and poppies all around, and scarcely a youngster in sight. When the bells rang out in a closing scene, the tolling was extended, and the veterans in the audience stood. Eleven years after the play-turned-phenomenon began its first run at the National, many of the original creative team were there for this return of the touring production. Sir Michael Morpurgo took the stage for an introduction. “It’s not the show that matters, it’s the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
When, in 1853, Edward Burne-Jones (or Edward Jones as he then was) went up to Exeter College, Oxford, it could hardly have been expected that the course of his life would change so radically. His mother having died in childbirth, he was brought up by his father, a not particularly successful picture- and mirror-framer in the then mocked industrial city of Birmingham. Early on at King Edward’s School he was marked out as a pupil of promise and transferred to the classics department which enabled him to attend university and prepare for a career in the Church. Yet he never took his degree, Read more ...