history
Tom Birchenough
“There is something odd, I suppose, about anyone who betrays their country.” It’s an excellent opening line, particularly when delivered in director George Carey’s nicely querulous narrative voice, for Toffs, Queers and Traitors (BBC Four). He certainly knows what he’s talking about: Carey’s last two documentaries for Storyville have been about Kim Philby and George Blake, two other prominent entries in the roll-call of British Cold War intelligence infamy.But spies, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, are surely odd in their own unique ways. They turn traitor for all sorts of reasons, even if Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Oliver Sacks was the neurologist – and historian of science, and naturalist – whose exceptionally elegant, clear and accessible prose has captivated that almost mythical creature, the general audience, through more than a dozen books as well as many essays. Who could resist his narratives of patients who had, to say the least, unusual brains: the subject of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the astonishing musical savants who could communicate only through music in Musicophilia, or Awakenings about brain-damaged people affected by the infamous “sleepy sickness” (encephalitis lethargica Read more ...
mark.kidel
The much-respected visual artist Isaac Julien made his name as one of the first great black British filmmakers, not least with Looking for Langston (1989) and Young Soul Rebels (1991). While Steve McQueen moved from gallery art and installations to big-budget fiction movies, Julien has gone the other way, leaving narrative behind and finding his vocation as an artist rather than a story-teller.His BFI film on Frantz Fanon, made in 1995, co-written and directed with Mark Nash, focuses on the story of the psychiatrist from Martinique who made his name as a vivid and penetrating theoretician of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Much is being made of the fact that Kit Harington is not only playing the Gunpowder Plot mastermind Robert Catesby, but is genuinely descended from him (and his middle name is Catesby). However, despite its factual underpinnings and screenwriter Ronan Bennett’s flowery 17th-century dialogue, Gunpowder is drama in a historical vein, rather than nailed-down fact.This first of three episodes (on BBC One, but all are now available on iPlayer) was broody, dark and menacing, history recycled into a Gothicky netherworld. Westminster, 1603 style, was portrayed as a stygian pile on the bank of the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The controversial historian Niall Ferguson is the author of some dozen books, including substantial narratives of the Rothschild dynasty, a history of money, and a study of Henry Kissinger up to and including the Vietnam war. His new one has the subtitle Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power, and in it he turns his attention to analysing that most overworked 21st century word, “network”, as well as one that makes many uncomfortable in its encapsulation of inequality, “hierarchy”.We are given to conspiracy theories, but Ferguson goes well beyond exploding such myths – we are Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s getting to that time of the century. A hundred years ago to the month, if not quite the day, the Winter Palace was stormed, and the Russian Revolution came to pass. To commemorate the communists’ accession, Russia 1917: Countdown to Revolution (BBC Two) pieced together the narrative for those who haven’t read all or indeed any of the books on the Bolsheviks.A battalion of historians answered the summons to give their version of events, the types whose titles are prominently displayed in airports and beyond. Indeed, if you lobbed a Molotov cocktail into the documentary's green room you’d Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Documentary theatre has a poor reputation. It’s boring in form, boring to look at (all those middle-aged men in suits), and usually only tells you what you already know. It’s journalism without the immediacy of the news. But there are other ways of writing contemporary history. In telling the story of the 1993 Oslo Accords – the first ever agreement between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation – American playwright JT Rogers gets around the disadvantages of documentary theatre by writing what he calls “a scrupulously researched, meticulously written fiction”. And he Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The charm quickly palls in Victoria and Abdul, a watery sequel of sorts to Mrs Brown that salvages what lustre it can from its octogenarian star, the indefatigable Judi Dench. Illuminating a little-known friendship between Queen Victoria in her waning years and the Indian servant, Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), whom she invited into her inner sanctum, the busy Stephen Frears and his screenwriter Lee Hall could use considerably more of the incisiveness and wit that made Frears's similarly royalty-minded The Queen soar. Instead, we get a characteristically deft character portrait from Dench Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
History comes to the stage of the Globe only rarely – at least if you compare the frequency of productions there from that segment of the Shakespearean canon against the tragedies and comedies – which is certainly one reason to welcome Boudica. Much more importantly, however, Tristan Bernays's new play offers a crackingly powerful central female role, one which puts the first-century British queen right at the centre of the narrative. It’s one that has the kind of sheer dramatic grandeur that admits contradiction of character, and Gina McKee has made it her own.Given that Bernays has written Read more ...
Maggie Bain
When director Bruce Guthrie first gave me the script for Man to Man by Manfred Karge, I was immediately mesmerised by the language, each of the 27 scenes leapt off the page. Some are a few short sentences, other pages long; every one a perfectly formed fragment from a unique and potentially broken mind, flipping from prose to poetry. There are no stage directions, no character description.The script Bruce handed me was a photocopy of a typewriter copy he had been emailed by the National Theatre Literary Department; faded, smudged and with some of the bottom lines cut off, I had to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Temple Church gained worldwide fame when Dan Brown included a major plot point there in his mega-selling novel The Da Vinci Code in 2003, but it has been standing, minding its own business, since the late 12th century. Now it’s home for a short run of Antic Disposition’s Richard III, following a tour of several UK cathedrals – including, controversially, Leicester, where the king's skeleton was reinterred in 2015 after being discovered in a nearby car park.The controversy, such that it was, concerned Shakespeare’s treatment of the king – who was either an evil child murderer or clever Read more ...
Matthew Dunster
When you are adapting a novel like A Tale of Two Cities, it's a privilege to sit with a great piece of writing for a considerable amount of time. You also feel secure (and a bit cheeky) in the knowledge that another writer has already done most of the work.I always have an eye on the final production, whether I'm directing it or not. I want to always be thinking about what theatre and theatre artists can achieve on behalf of the novel. So the adaptations hopefully aren't like dialogue-led plays, more like scores for the theatre. Tim Sheader, the director, and I, love Dickens. We re-read Read more ...