Nazis
Best of 2021: TheatreThursday, 30 December 2021There was no live theatre at the start of 2021, just a return to the world of virtual performance and streaming to which we had become well accustomed, and very quickly, too. So imagine the collective surprise come the start of this month as show... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The DamnedSunday, 24 October 2021One German writer found a neat yet teasing way to sum up the difference between Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), the first film in the Italian director’s “German trilogy”, and the two films that followed it.The Damned, known in Italian as La... Read more... |
Ridley Road, BBC One review - Jewish community fights Nazi nightmare in 1960s LondonMonday, 18 October 2021Neo-Nazis held a Trafalgar Square rally under the banner "Free Britain from Jewish Control" in the year of my birth; I had no idea until I watched Ridley Road. Most of us know about the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, but, until now, next to nothing... Read more... |
Camp Siegfried, Old Vic review - the banality of evil, brilliantly served upTuesday, 21 September 2021A 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... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Mr KleinTuesday, 14 September 2021Joseph Losey’s career covered a great deal of ground, and several continents. From The Boy with the Green Hair, a noirish sci-fi film from 1948, through to his richly psychological collaborations with Harold Pinter, The Servant (1963), Accident (... Read more... |
The Collini Case review - it might be legal, but that doesn't mean it's justiceThursday, 09 September 2021Adapted from Ferdinand von Schirach’s bestselling 2011 novel, The Collini Case is a riveting mix of character study and legal drama, carefully blended into a historical perspective reaching forward 60 years from the 1940s. At its core is the so-... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: filmmaker Marco KreuzpaintnerMonday, 06 September 2021In 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... Read more... |
Once Upon A Time In Nazi Occupied Tunisia, Almeida Theatre review - flawed theatre but a great experimentTuesday, 31 August 2021An ageing Nazi, stuffed into a slightly too tight white linen suit, sits at the opposite end of the dining table to a young Jewish woman. Between them is a dish of chicken stew that we, just moments beforehand, have seen her lace with poison.The... Read more... |
Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury review - dazzling Disney rewriteMonday, 30 August 2021Bedknobs and Broomsticks has always suffered from not being Mary Poppins, the movie delayed in development and released in 1971 (it is a Sixties film in tone and technology) and always seeming to appear later on the BBC’s Christmas Disney Time... Read more... |
Christopher Clark: Prisoners of Time review - from Kaiser Bill to Dominic CummingsFriday, 13 August 2021Historians 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... Read more... |
Psappha, Phillips, Hallé St Peter’s, Manchester online review - Turnage world premiereFriday, 30 April 2021Manchester’s Psappha have been proudly flying the flag of new and radical music right through the year of lockdown, and last night’s livestream, with two-and-a-half world premieres, one of them by Mark-Anthony Turnage, showed they haven’t given up... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Mädchen in UniformTuesday, 23 March 2021The 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... Read more... |