Homeland
Sarah Kent
A traditional Korean house has appeared at Tate Modern. And with its neat brickwork, beautifully carved roof beams and lattice work screens, this charming dwelling looks decidedly out of place, and somewhat ghostly. Go closer and you realise that, improbably, the full-sized building is made of paper. It’s the work of South Korean artist Do Ho Suh (main picture).In 2013, he covered his childhood home in mulberry paper and painstakingly made a rubbing of every single nook and cranny of the exterior. He left the paper in situ for nine months until the drawing had weathered to resemble an old Read more ...
David Nice
It's a very big deal for musical Prague: Czechia's symphonic epic, the six tone poems that make up Smetana's Má vlast (My Homeland), launches every Prague Spring Festival at the Smetana Hall, but in the Czech Philharmonic's opulent home, the Rudolfinum, the work hasn't appeared in any of its seasons for 49 years. This is also an important test case for the orchestra's chief conductor and music director since the beginning of the 2018-19 season, St Petersburg-born Semyon Bychkov: will he give this hard-to-please audience the essence of what it expects?The answer seems to be a "yes," by and Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This year the state of Israel marks its 70th birthday. Which means it will also be the year Palestinians remember the Nakba, the catastrophe, the mass dispossession. With that in mind, the Public Theater in New York commissioned this adaptation of a short novel by the acclaimed Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, who was killed in 1972 by a Mossad car bomb.Returning to Haifa was possibly the first work of fiction in which both sides of the divide were presented with equal sympathy. Kanafani’s novella traces the impact of the events of 1948 and their aftermath on two families – one Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was a long time coming, but Homeland’s sixth series at last awoke from its early-season slumbers to put on a late surge over the closing episodes. For a while, it had seemed that the story was barely advancing at all, as the screen was self-indulgently hogged by Carrie Mathison’s emotional life, particularly her anguish over her daughter being taken into care. Yet by the end, she found herself in the teeth of the hurricane as the USA was threatened by a brutal coup d'état.Homeland has always been about the personal cost of undercover work, where commitment to the greater cause tends to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The big surprise of this new-season opener of Homeland was that black ops specialist Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) didn't die at the end of series 5 after all, despite the fact that we last saw him apparently moribund in his hospital bed, having penned a poignant adieu to sometime paramour Carrie Mathison. But, after surviving a hefty dose of sarin gas, he isn't the man she used to know.The action has moved from last season's Berlin to New York, where Carrie (Claire Danes) is working at a Brooklyn-based foundation which provides assistance for Muslims, such as those who may find themselves Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Earlier this year, Sky Living showed The Enfield Haunting, a tale of eerie events in a 1970s council house. One of its stars was Timothy Spall, playing a paranormal researcher. Maybe he had a premonition that his son Rafe would carry on the family's supernatural tradition in the leading role of Harry Price: Ghost Hunter (★★★★★).Anyhow, Spall Jr was shrewd, witty and skilful in the role of a 1920s spookbuster called in to investigate the mysterious case of a politician's wife, Grace Goodwin, who had been found wandering naked in a London market. Part of the problem was that she and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stunningly reinvented in series four, Homeland sustained the momentum with this tense and menacing fifth season opener. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) has now quit the CIA for a new job in Berlin, where she's working as head of security for billionaire philanthropist Otto Düring (Sebastian Koch). The past, however, is not giving up without a fight.In the light of recent real-life events, it was smart work by the writers to throw the spotlight on the German capital. Filming obviously took place before the current refugee crisis (and Frau Merkel's controversial leading role in it) blew up, but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Back for its third series [***], Sally Wainwright's saga of Yorkshire folk continues to tread a precarious line between syrupy soapfulness and a family drama with sharp little teeth. Its excellent cast helps to carry it over the worst of the soggy bits, and its best moments have a way of catching you unawares. You'd have to guess that it also scores strongly by not being crammed with serial killers, paedophiles and corrupt cops.It's a sign of the confidence that healthy ratings bring that they dared to open this new season with Alan (Derek Jacobi) and Celia (Anne Reid) sitting at a restaurant Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was tempting to assume that Homeland [****] had died along with Damian Lewis's Brody, last seen dangling gruesomely from a crane in Tehran at the end of series three, but this tense and uncomfortable season-opener suggested that all may not be lost. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) has been promoted to CIA station chief in Kabul, but she's finding that the personal price of professional success is growing exorbitantly high.At front and centre was the question of the legitimacy of killing the enemy at long distance by remote control (in Homeland's first series, it was a drone attack which Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Homeland's coming home? Well not exactly, but the conclusion to this crazy, mixed-up third series did suddenly feel as if the writers had finally managed to express something that they'd been groping towards for the last three months. Namely, if the show was to stay on the road (series four is in the works), Brody had to go.The endgame to Brody's assassination assignment to Tehran was brutal and shocking, but given the stakes being played for it kind of had to be. True, you had to swallow enormous skip-loads of steaming disbelief before you could allow yourself to experience the cathartic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is this the real Homeland, or a different series with the same name? The original, and fascinating, hook for the show was the question of whether Marine Sergeant Brody had been brainwashed into becoming a fanatical jihadist during his years in captivity. Then came the story of Congressman Brody, a lethal sleeper agent at the very heart of the US administration.Both of these angles have now been dumped into the shredder of history (along with many of the original cast, all blown up at the end of series two), and there's a lingering sense that neither was explored as fully as it might have been Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Joyce Hatto achieved a rare kind of immortality for being the pianist at the centre of an audacious classical music fraud, in which her husband faked "Joyce Hatto" CDs from the work of other artists and, for a time, enjoyed considerable success with them. The Hatto goose was cooked when the Gracenote music database used by iTunes detected that one of her albums was not her work at all.A couple of novels based on Hatto-like events have already appeared, but for this TV treatment, writer Victoria Wood stuck to the couple's real-life story, though she had clearly allowed herself plenty of Read more ...