history
Gary Naylor
You do not need to be Einstein to feel it. If the only dimension missing is time, 75% of a place’s identity can invade your very being, hollow you out, replace your soul with a void. It happened to me at Auschwitz and it’s happening to Samuel at Cape Coast Castle, Ghana.Not at first. We meet him as our host, full of bonhomie, not just reading his script, but revelling in communicating his love of history to the tourists who come to the last staging post for slaves before the dreadful Middle Passage to the Americas. Disillusion sets in. Some visitors are ticking off a bucket list, others Read more ...
Gary Naylor
So, a jukebox musical celebrating the apotheosis of the White Saviour, the ultimate carnival of rock stars’ self-aggrandisement and the Boomers’ biggest bonanza of feelgood posturing? One is tempted to stand opposite The Old Vic, point at the punters going in and tell anyone within earshot, “Tonight Thank God it’s them instead of you”. Such a reaction was obviously on John O’Farrell’s mind when writing the book for this new musical and he spikes those guns (to some extent) by using a device that is occasionally clumsy, but just about does the job. Jemma (Naomi Katiyo) is our sceptical Read more ...
Sarah Kent
From its opening shot – of a flock of sheep backlit by the sun’s rays – The Settlers is visually stunning. But the beauty ends there; as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that everything else about this episode in Chile’s history is cruel and ugly.The year is 1901, the location a sheep farm in Tierra del Fuego, a wind-swept island at the southern tip of South America. Don José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), who owns large swathes of land in Argentina and Chile, is erecting a fence to prevent the indigenous people from killing his livestock.A scream rends the air; the fencing cable has Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As last week’s news evidenced, genocide never really goes out of fashion. So it’s only right and proper that art continues to address the hideous concept and, while nothing, not even Primo Levi’s shattering If This Is a Man, can capture the scale of the depravity of the camps, it is important that the warning from history is regularly proclaimed anew – and heeded.With just a few bleak, snowy back-projections of Silesia’s woodland near Auschwitz (it was enough to chill my soul with memories of a visit 34 years ago) and a lone cellist (Gemma Rosefield) to accompany her on stage, Samantha Spiro Read more ...
Lia Rockey
Richard Schoch, in the subtitle of his new book on Shakespeare’s House, promises something big: “a window onto his life and legacy.” To the disgruntled reader – pushed to the brink by one too many new books on Shakespeare, each nervously proclaiming truly never-before-seen revelations – I suggest patience. Schoch is aware of the balance that writing this kind of book demands. He also has the sort of well-oiled experience that reassures us of a pair of safe hands. There’s a sweet spot that must be struck when writing a Shakespeare book, one between nicheness and accessibility, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Waiting in the National Theatre’s foyer on press night, a space teeming with people speaking different languages, boasting different heritages – London in other words – news came through that leading members of the government had resigned because the proposed Rwanda bill was not harsh enough. Looking across the Thames, one could not help but imagine what this city would have looked like without its immigrants, its trade, its wealth, the skyscrapers, streets and opportunities they represent built on that 1000 year old continuing story. Thinking of my own Anglo-Swedish sons, for neither the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If a week is a long time in politics, what price 44 years? And 3500 miles? Turns out, not much, as Michael Healey’s sparkling play, 1979, proves that events all that time ago and all that way across the Atlantic maintain a remarkable relevance today.We open on a besieged prime minister, Joe Clark, being harangued by his finance minister, John Crosbie, who has Malcolm Tucker’s lexicon on his lips and a budget to force through a hung Parliament. Lose the vote and Clark’s fragile minority government will fall; postpone the vote and his credibility (not least in his own mind) will plummet; win Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Half way through Something, I Forget, in a poem entitled “Returns”, and subtitled “Invasion of Ukraine, February 2022”, Angela Leighton writes, “Today’s my birthday. Many happy returns. / Elsewhere there’s shot, mortar shells, grenades.”The technical term for this is poetic licence because Leighton’s birthday falls on 23rd February, and Russia’s invasion of that particular "elsewhere" didn’t happen until the following day. Strictly speaking, the poem can’t be true. Leighton’s birthday was as quiet and uneventful in Ukraine as it was anywhere else.One of the strengths, however, of Angela Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin wrote,"So life was never better than In nineteen sixty-three (Though just too late for me) – Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban And the Beatles' first LP."That might be the only point on which he and Joan Littlewood, a fellow poet, might agree, because she caught the zeitgeist and was doing iconoclastic work of her own in Stratford (emphatically not "upon Avon") with her revolutionary musical Oh What A Lovely War. Though it feels now to be something of an artefact in theatre’s archaeology, it has not lost its sting nor its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sir Ridley Scott has taken umbrage at the French critics who weren’t too impressed with his new movie. Not only do they not like his film, but the French “don’t even like themselves”, according to the dyspeptic auteur.But I feel our French cousins may have a point, especially the one who described Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of the fabled emperor as “a sullen boor and a cad with his wife, Joséphine.” Like Steely Dan sang, “I have never met Napoleon”, but one might reasonably expect that a man who masterminded a European empire which stretched from Spain to Poland and temporarily as far as Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A flea bites a rat which spooks a horse which kicks a man and… an empire falls?James Fritz has won writing awards already in his developing career, but he has set himself quite the challenge to weave a thread that can bear that narrative weight. Two and a half hours later in this retelling of the late 19th-century Cleveland Street scandal, the empire survives, the fall guy takes the inevitable tumble and we’re a little punchdrunk. Here is a play that beats you up with its sheer volume of artistic choices but also dips into stretches of unnecessary exposition that drain energy away: there’s a Read more ...
David Kettle
Casting the Runes, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ A viciously critical review gets its unfortunate writer driven mad and sent to an untimely death in this adaptation of a macabre MR James chiller. In that case, I’d better be careful what I say about British movement and puppetry company Box Tale Soup’s fluent two-hand staging. Though to call their Casting the Runes a two-hander isn’t strictly correct: actors Noel Byrne and Antonia Christophers (who also adapted the tale for the stage, adding in a few choice elements from elsewhere in James’s output) are joined by three puppets in Read more ...