World War Two
Adam Sweeting
Readers of Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winning novel will be familiar with its themes of war, extreme suffering, ageing, memory, fidelity and infidelity, as it roves over the decades from World War Two to the late Eighties.Flanagan based much of the book on his father’s experiences as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese, forced to work as a slave labourer building the Burma railway, and his experiences are rendered in hellish detail by director Justin Kurzel in cahoots with screenwriter Shaun Grant. Kurzel’s younger brother Jed composed the show’s haunting and regretful soundtrack, a key Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Having played Sherlock Holmes’s politically involved older brother Mycroft in the BBC’s hit crime series Sherlock, Mark Gatiss may not be an obvious candidate to now follow in the footsteps of the famous detective. But with his new murder mystery series Bookish, set in London in the aftermath of World War Two, the creator, writer and star of the six-part show has finally become a sleuth himself.“The period is very unusual,” he says over Zoom from Rimini, where the historic crime drama had its world premiere at the inaugural edition of the Italian Global Series Festival. “ Read more ...
Heather Neill
The National Health Service was established 77 years ago this month. Resident doctors are about to strike for more pay, long waiting lists for hospital treatment and the scarcity of GP appointments continue to dog political conversation, while the need for reform of the system provides a constant background hum. The idea for a national health service free at the point of need was always ambitious and remains challenging, but the NHS has become a cross between a religion and a beloved – if problematic – family. And it still deserves to be celebrated as it is here, even ending with Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Andreas Dresen directs socially engaged realist films that invariably relay personal and political messages; the result can be tough but is usually tender at heart.His Dogme 95-influenced Grill Point (2002), winner of the Silver Bear in Berlin, follows two couples in crisis. Cloud 9 (2008) and Stopped on Track (2011), both Cannes prize-winners, addressed sex in old age and dying respectively. Gundermann (2018) is a biopic of the East German singer-songwriter and Stasi informant Gerhard Gundermann. The real-life Guantánamo drama Rabiye Kurnaz vs George W Bush (2022) depicts the eponymous Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but Tate Britain’s retrospective of Edward Burra manages to achieve just this. I’ve always loved Burra’s limpid late landscapes. Layers of filmy watercolour create sweeping vistas of rolling hills and valleys whose suggestive curves create a sexual frisson.Take Valley and River, Northumberland 1972 (pictured below right), for instance. A spring emerges from a fold in green hills that resemble limbs. The landscape doubles as a body, with an inviting recess nestling between parted thighs.These pastoral Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“It is so disgraceful, what happened there,” says Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, in a comment that is the understatement of the century. She is referring to the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis in concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was held prisoner.Six million Jews were murdered in the camps, but Lasker-Wallfisch survived because she was a musician. She describes the “welcoming” ceremony in which arrivals were “stripped of every vestige of human dignity”. Stark naked, they had their heads shaved and a number tattooed on their arms.But the woman conducting this identity- Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Myra Hess was one of the most important figures in British cultural life in the mid-20th century: the pre-eminent pianist of her generation and accorded “national treasure” status as a result of the wartime lunchtime concert series at London’s National Gallery, which she singlehandedly masterminded through 1,698 concerts between 1939 and 1946.This new biography, the first for nearly 50 years, is meticulously researched and richly illustrated: Jessica Duchen brings to her task not just the biographer’s curious eye but a music critic’s ear and discernment.Hess had to battle prejudices Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwrights who work for decades often acquire a moniker. In the case of Howard Brenton, who began his career as a left-winger in the turbulent 1970s, the name is The History Man. Over the past decade, or so, he has written brilliantly about historical figures such as, among others, Anne Boleyn, Charles I, Lawrence of Arabia – and many more.Now it’s the turn of Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, two titans of the allied side in the second world war. Churchill in Moscow reunites Brenton with Tom Littler, the successful artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre in their sixth Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Another new release opens with the sounds of people in bed playing over the credits, but these are not Babygirl’s sighs of a woman faking sex but the angelic breathing of three young sisters sharing a bed in the snowy Alto Adige.It’s 1944, and Italy’s conscripts are starting to desert. Two such arrive in a mountain village in the Vermiglio comune: local man Attilio, who is borne there on the back of a Sicilian, Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico, pictured bottom with Martina Scrinzi). Attilio’s extended family ignore the mutterings of local men who see Pietro as a shameful deserter, a “mummy’s boy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having carved a swathe of terror and destruction through the Axis forces in North Africa, the SAS return for a second series (again written by Steven Knight, and with another rockin’ soundtrack featuring the likes of The Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary”, Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” and Magazine’s very apt “Shot by Both Sides”).With the SAS’s founding father, David Stirling, a prisoner of war in the medieval pile of Forte di Gavi, command of the unit has passed to Paddy Mayne, played with a kind of barely-controlled madness by Jack O’Connell. Now the unit is tasked with being the point of the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Patriotic Italian films set during the Fascist war effort are understandably rare UK releases. Submarine commander Salvatore Todaro (Pierfrancesco Favino) was, though, an honourable warrior-poet who director Edoardo De Angelis seeks to separate from wider currents.Roaming the Atlantic in October 1940, his lone wolf sub Comandante Cappellini sank a Belgian merchant ship during an exchange of fire. Contravening orders, maritime law and morality made him take 26 survivors onto his cramped vessel and sail them to neutral waters, staying on the surface and exposed to attack.De Angelis introduces Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Picture this: framing the stage are two pearlescent clouds which, throughout the performance, gently pulsate with flickering light. Behind them on a giant screen is a spinning globe, its seas twinkling like a million stars.Suddenly, this magical image is rent asunder. Thunder and lightning shake the heavens and torrential rain cascades down in stair rods. Spotlights flash and dance through billowing smoke while Laurie Anderson serenades the tempest on her violin and Kenny Wollesen lashes symbols and drums into a clamorous frenzy. The Apocalypse!DEATHLY HUSH.Anderson breaks the silence. “Hi, Read more ...