green
Boyd Tonkin
For the final concert in their 80th birthday season, the Philharmonia swept us into the great outdoors. Three works imbued with the forces of nature made up a sort of musical sandwich, with a novel central filling flanked by more familiar, and comfortingly nutritious, outer layers. The surprise flavours in the middle arrived in the form of the UK premiere of the Mother Earth piano concerto performed by its composer: the maverick, prolific Turkish pianist Fazil Say. Hearty but well-baked fare before and after was supplied by Sibelius’s tone-poem En Saga and Dvořák’s bucolic Eighth Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Mike Bartlett is, like many writers, a chronicler of both contemporary manners and of the state of the nation. In his latest domestic drama, which premieres at the Donmar Warehouse, he examines our anxieties about food, farming and the environment in a play of ideas that, despite its energy, is more cerebral than emotional.Set in Juniper Rise, a north-west Oxfordshire farm, the story concerns Ruth, a middle-class 40-something who now owns the land together with Lip, a dope smoking radical whose family has farmed in this area for generations. At the start of the action we are Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Francisca Alegría’s debut is an eco-fable about mourning and enduring love, for a mother and Mother Earth. We start by Chile’s River Cruces, where a mill pumps poison, and the fish hear a death-song in the previously “sweet and clear” water. Magdalena (Mia Maestro), who drowned herself here decades ago, breaks the surface, gasping and suddenly alive, and walks back into the world.The family Magdalena left behind are meanwhile riven. Daughter Cecilia (Leonor Varela, pictured below) is a surgeon in the city, raising her own young daughter Alma (Laura Del Rio) and teenage Tomás (Enzo Ferrada, Read more ...
India Lewis
Annie Proulx’s Fen, Bog & Swamp sees the Pulitzer-winning novelist join a number of authors decrying the ecological devastation we’re wreaking on the planet. James Rebanks’ English Pastoral argued for radical agricultural rethink. Journalist Bronwyn Adcock chronicled Australia’s worst bushfire. And essayist and poet Rebecca Tamás reckoned with the ecological meanings of hospitality, pain and grief.Proulx, mainly known for writing fiction and guides to smallholdings, has become a champion of fens, bogs and swamps, the mulchy sinking places she loves and which are both a victim of and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I would suggest watching River on the largest possible screen, so you can bask in the breathtaking beauty of the visuals. Directed by the Australian Jennifer Peedom, who won awards for Mountain and Sherpa, the documentary celebrates the magnificence of rivers and reminds us that we are utterly dependent on water for our survival. “Humans have long loved rivers,” says narrator Willem Dafoe but, he asks, “as we have learned to harness their power, have we also forgotten to revere them?”The answer, of course, is “yes” and the film reveals our propensity for treating rivers merely as resources – Read more ...
Lizzie Hibbert
A garden is a space defined by its limits. Whatever its contents in terms of style and species, and however manicured or apparently wild its appearance, what distinguishes a garden from its equivalent quantity of uncultivated land is its enclosure within an uninterrupted border, which might be a wall, a hedge, a fence, or else natural dividers such as streams or woodland.The border creates the garden by shutting it off from the rest of the encroaching world. What is allowed to pass in and out of this bounded space is then up to a gardener: over this small portion of a chaotic planet, he or Read more ...
David Nice
Dara McAnulty’s Diary of a Young Naturalist (14 at the time of writing) is a total vision, effortlessly poetic where the likes of Rober Macfarlane sometimes seem to strive for effect. Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s 26 songs, with a text drawn from the journal by the late Amanda Holden, offered only a partial panorama at its world premiere.That’s not the problem of the work or its first-rate performers. The fact is quite simply that these often exquisite fruits need a different soil in which to thrive.Southwark Cathedral, unfortunately, doesn’t allow for enough of the crucial text to be heard. That Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Why are we indifferent to anti-Semitism? In the past few weeks the Royal Court, a proud citadel of wokeness, has been embroiled in an appalling case of prejudice by allowing a character, who is a really bad billionaire, in Al Smith’s new play, Rare Earth Mettle, to be called Hershel Fink. Stereotype, or what?The really stupid thing about this row is not just that Smith created this nominal caricature of a money-obsessed Jew, but also that no one, repeat no one, in this theatre’s script reading process seems to have noticed. Proof, if that was needed, that, as comedian and writer David Baddiel Read more ...
Jon Turney
Our everyday lives, if we’re fortunate, may be placid, even contented. A rewarding job, for some; good eats; warm home; happy family; entertainment on tap. Yet, even for the privileged, awareness of impending change – probably disaster – intrudes.Our entertainment is saturated with foreboding. In the Anthropocene, the hard-to-define era when the human collective has planet-wide effects that will endure for aeons, any new fictional world bears traces of the ways our real world is being made, or unmade.Mark Bould’s book explores how these reveal what he calls the Anthropocene unconscious, which Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Sebastião Salgado has carved out his career by documenting the unimaginable. He takes areas of life all too often ignored by wealthy westerners and reveals them in mesmerising, teeming detail.To look at one of his photographs is to experience the world not just through the eyes but through the mind of a man for whom everything is interconnected. Whether it’s a Mumbai commuter or a Brazilian gold-digger, a giant tortoise in the Galapagos or a worker covered in oil in Kuwait, each subject is revealed as a vital part of a planet that’s as turbulent as it is miraculous.He was in his twenties Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
At no point in their near-30-year career have “shy” or “retiring” been adjectives you could apply to Garbage - and yet, on this their seventh record, the Scottish-American rockers go to places that they never have before. With songs taking on capitalism, climate change, misogyny, racism and police brutality, No Gods No Masters is a no holds barred, politically charged firecracker of a record - one which is as brutal, messy and vulnerable as the human condition.Despite its songs pre-dating the pandemic - the band’s last day of recording together was in March 2020, before the world went into Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gary Numan says that his new album “looks at climate change from the planet’s point of view… it feels betrayed, hurt and ravaged… it is now fighting back.” Intruder is, then, a bleak, apocalyptic concept album. Given his last album explored similar terrain and that gothic dystopian wordplay has been central to his work for a decade, this isn’t new territory. Then again, his Eighties fans shouldn’t quibble. His chart-topping classics are riddled with po-faced Ballardian sci-fi so, arguably, it’s simply what Numan does.Where Intruder is different is the sound. Numan’s recent work often placed Read more ...