Germany
Cordelia Lynn
As I write this, we've just had our final day in the rehearsal room and are going into tech onstage next week with my new play, which is also reopening the Donmar not only to live performance but follows major renovations at their home address.It’s a funny thing, but I can find it hard to describe what the play is "about" at this time. It has been unmade and remade, become something vividly new outside my own head, which is the process of making a play. If I go back to the initial impulse, it is about a young couple, roughly here, roughly now, and their relationship across roughly 10 Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A stealthily powerful play gets the production of its dreams in Camp Siegfried, which marks a high-profile UK presence for the American writer Bess Wohl. A world premiere at the Old Vic, Wohl's two-hander shines a scary and pertinent light on a Nazi training ground in the 1930s that is seen to have all sorts of ongoing repercussions for today. That a potentially slippery text is as well realised as it is pays tribute, and then some, to a creative team working in complete harmony, starting with an impeccable cast, Luke Thallon and Patsy Ferran, who deliver the play's darkening affect well Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In 2011, Ferdinand von Schirach’s novel Der Fall Collini (The Collini Case) was published, its narrative of crime and punishment inspired by a law passed in Germany in 1968. Promoted by Dr Eduard Dreher, a former Nazi-era prosecutor who served in the post-1945 West German justice ministry along with many fellow ex-Nazis, this law was in effect an amnesty for murders committed during the Third Reich era. Somehow it was passed almost unnoticed, under the carefully bland title of the Introductory Act to Administrative Offenses. “The law seemed so unimportant it wasn’t even debated in the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Historians seldom make the news themselves. However, Christopher Clark – the Australian-born Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University – hogged headlines and filled op-ed pages in Germany when the centenary of the First World War’s outbreak arrived in 2014. His magisterial 2012 book The Sleepwalkers argued, with formidable research and a propulsive narrative drive, that the catastrophe that struck Europe, then the world, after August 1914 came about not because of secret grand designs, plots or conspiracies. It happened thanks to the convulsive but unplanned breakdown of a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A gorgeous song exists in search of a show to match over at Bagdad Café, the 1987 film that gave the world the memorably plaintive "Calling You", which is threaded throughout Emma Rice's stage adaptation of the movie with understandable insistence.What hasn't yet been achieved in this Old Vic premiere is much narrative heft to go with the abundant heart of an evening that ends with a collective Zoom, a reminder in our fraught times of the collective call-out to community. All that's needed now is something more of substance. Rice has always been great when it comes to feeling and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
When Marie-Theres Härtel plays the viola, she is an astonishing force of nature. If great string-playing should combine the heavenly and the daemonic, the civilised and the raw, hers certainly does.She has a deep family folk heritage from the Steiermark in Austria (“yodelling was my mother tongue”, she says) but also spent quite a few years among the cohort of elite string players at the Vienna Conservatoire, trudging the streets around the Singerstrasse like Mozart (another viola player), and learning the magical Viennese art of how to function as an inner voice at the heart of any Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Whatever might be said about Longborough Festival’s first live opera since 2019, the first and most important thing is to praise the company without reservation for putting on a show of anything like this quality in the face of obstacles of the sort that normally confront the heroes of Russian fairy tales.So: no kissing, embracing or even approaching within two metres in an opera that begins with twins falling passionately, violently in love, and ends with Wotan literally kissing away Brünnhilde’s immortality (pictuted below, Paul Carey Jones at the end of the opera). So: general distancing Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Martin Ritt’s 1965 classy screen adaptation of John Le Carré’s bestseller The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is an antidote to the full-colour hi-jinx of the Bond franchise that ruled over the spy movie genre in the 1960s. By the time Paul Dehn, an ex-spook himself, and the screenwriter of Goldfinger (1964), took over as the main scriptwriter for the film, the public was ready for something a good deal less glamorous, and a hero who was a serial failure rather than a seductive superman.This is perhaps one of Richard Burton’s greatest moments in film – as the desperate and melancholy agent Alec Read more ...
David Nice
I only saw Christa Ludwig twice live in concert, but those appearances epitomise her incredible dramatic and vocal rage as well as her peerless artistry in everything she did. The first event was Schubert’s Winterreise with pianist Charles Spencer at the Southbank Centre, at a time when it was less common for women to take on the role of the heavy-hearted wayfarer: the intensity still resonates. The second time was when she played the one-buttocked, easily-assimilated Old Lady in Bernstein’s Candide, conducted by the composer in his last Barbican concerts: the joie de vivre went beyond the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The term most often used about Berlin director Angela Schanelec’s filmmaking seems to be “elliptical”, and her latest film, I Was at Home, But..., which won the Best Director award at Berlinale 2019, is no exception. Approaching it is like an associative process – you absorb elusive hints, as much from visual elements as from any suggestion of story, trying to gradually assemble something, almost like creating a mosaic. Except that Schanelec determinedly avoids endorsing any final picture: links are left open, and narrative, such as it is, is very much secondary to mood.And the mood of I Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It can't be easy maintaining dignity when everyone in your vicinity is losing theirs. But that's the position in which the inimitable Judi Dench finds herself in Six Minutes to Midnight, a bewildering movie in which star and co-author, Eddie Izzard, spends a lot of time running hither and yon even as the film itself refuses to budge.Based on the tantalising existence of an English finishing school for daughters of German higher-ups and the like that shut its doors in 1939 just prior to England's entry into World War Two, the director Andy Goddard's quasi-thriller suggests The Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The late Weimar-era film Mädchen in Uniform (1931) was visionary – a delicate Queer love story set in a repressive girls’ boarding school that denounced the Prussian militarist creed as dehumanising. Like The Blue Angel (1930), another German early talkie classic in which sexual energy confronts authoritarianism, Leontine Sagan’s film contained intimations of Nazism. Foreshadowing the Hitler Youth, the schoolboys who unwittingly steer their complacently bourgeois master toward sexual humiliation and death in The Blue Angel have less corruptible counterparts in the daughters of poor Read more ...