Germany
Gary Raymond
There can be few modern plays as testing for a female actor as Manfred Karge’s Man to Man. When Tilda Swinton took it on at the Royal Court in 1987 and brought to the many roles of this one woman show her androgynous intensity it was the performance that made her name. Here in Cardiff for the Wales Millennium Centre’s revival, Margaret Ann Bain gives one of the most tireless and faultless performances a Welsh stage has seen in some time; a breathless, kinetically poetic 70 minutes that is never anything less than entirely captivating.The story of Ella Gericke, a working-class woman in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Blood Brothers" is the title of the featurette included with this DVD. It tells how Brad Pitt and his fellow cast-members learned what it felt like to be the crew of a World War Two tank – Fury is the name painted on the gun of their battle-scarred Sherman – thanks to some hard-slog dawn-to-dusk training and conversations with 90-year-old veterans of the US 2nd Armored Division. The actors (including Shia LeBeouf, Jon Bernthal and Michael Peña) seem sincere as they describe how the experience gave them some insight into the true nature of warfare, and blood brothers is what they felt like Read more ...
David Nice
After seven glorious Welsh National Opera performances in the summer of 2010, it looked like curtains for Richard Jones’s Mastersingers (or Meistersinger, as it then was, sung in German): no DVD, no co-productions. The director seemed happy with that, as philosophical as Wagner's operatic characterisation of 16th-century cobbler-mastersinger Hans Sachs. Such, he implied, was the ephemeral nature of the true theatrical experience, rare at a time when nearly everything gets documented. Now that a syndicate of passionate Wagnerians has helped to bring it back against all odds, even those who Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Some documentaries can feel like trying to view a desert landscape through a telescope. The need for tight focus on too large a subject can leave you constantly aware that there’s important stuff going on out of eyeshot. The stuff you can’t see becomes a constant irritant, like a pending tax return, or David Starkey. Kraftwerk: Pop Art, in significantly narrowing its focus, was more like studying a Petri dish under a microscope – and just as fascinating.The particular prism chosen for this band biography was the connection between Kraftwerk and the art world. This was centred around 2013 Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s been a pronounced sense of finality at this year’s 70th anniversary commemoration of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz. No closure, of course, but an awareness that the ranks of survivors are diminishing, and that soon their first-person testimonials will disappear into a past.So it was more than fitting that Touched by Auschwitz should see historian Laurence Rees (whose past films like The Nazis: A Warning from History and Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution are as authoritative as they come) following the lives of six survivors through to the present day, examining not least Read more ...
Heather Neill
The mother, so often a sentimental figure in art, can be as tenacious and bold as any animal when protecting her young. Mark Hayhurst's play about Irmgard Litten, mother of Hans, a lawyer who cross-examined Hitler – and won – in 1931, celebrates the single-minded determination of a woman daring to take on Nazi might in the cause of her son. Hans was imprisoned in Sonnenburg "for his own protection" on the night of the Reichstag fire in 1933 and, after spending years in concentration camps, was found hanged in Dachau in 1938.Taken at Midnight, with Penelope Wilton as Irmgard, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
More than once in André Singer’s documentary Holocaust: Night Will Fall – marking in advance the 70th anniversary, on 27th January, of the liberation of Auschwitz, having added that explanatory first word to the title with which the film was released in cinemas last year – his interviewees describe their experience as like “looking into hell”. We hear phrases like “world of nightmare”, “utter shock”, “beyond describing” repeatedly, uttered by the first Allied soldiers to enter the German concentration camps at the end of World War Two.We, the general viewer, have had seven decades to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
First-hand testimonial is surely the building block of history. Whether it’s in the form of written diaries or the television memory, it allows us to go back to the very basics as we, the reader-viewer, effectively re-experience the life of the teller.Last year witnessed a multitude of such remembrances of the First World War, and brought home the fact that little could match the sheer simplicity of such memories of those who had lived through that experience. But there were no more survivors to tell tales, and before long the same will be the case with the Holocaust, currently being marked Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
No one could have known it would be one of his final screen appearances – there’s another still to come in a further installment of Hunger Games – but Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role in Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man proved, with hindsight, a fitting farewell. This was Hoffman living the part, as on-the-edge, largely off-the-radar Hamburg spymaster Gunter Bachman, whose life and professional energy seems fuelled by cigarettes and whisky.Adapted from John Le Carré’s 2008 novel, it can’t but help bring back memories of that writer’s other spy-supremos, though control – to appropriate the title Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Sir Simon Rattle wants you to hear Das Paradies und die Peri. He is convinced that Schumann’s oratorio is one of the great undiscovered masterpieces of the Romantic era. To that end, he has led performances with the Berlin Philharmonic and an all-star cast, and has now brought that cast to London to convert the Brits.He’s right. It is magnificent, and last night it received as good a performance as could be imagined. Every strength of Schumann’s art is showcased. The solo vocal writing is emotive and imaginative. The chorus is used prominently, and to excellent effect. The orchestration Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Everything about this little-known and largely forgotten show suggests epic, starting with the title: multiple locations, ambitious concept, big ideas. But like so much of Jerry Herman's work - and the received wisdom on it is invariably wide of the mark - The Grand Tour is a chamber piece at heart. Adapted from the Franz Werfel play Jacobowsky and the Colonel, the show focuses on a Polish Jew, Jacobowsky, and an anti-Semitic Polish Colonel, Stjerbinsky, who are thrown together in a desperate flight across France from the fast-advancing Nazi tsunami.Their eventual bonding - brought Read more ...
fisun.guner
We commemorated the centenary of the start of the First World War and we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The year also marked a 70th anniversary for the D-Day landings. So it was oddly fitting that the London art calendar was most notable for the invasion of heavyweight Germans; namely, four postwar artists whose sense of the weight of German history is writ large in their work.There was Georg Baselitz with new self-portrait paintings at the Gagosian, early prints and drawings at the British Museum and a loan of his extensive German Renaissance print collection Read more ...