1920s
Adam Sweeting
Previous works by screenwriter-director Martin McDonagh, which include In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, might give you an inkling of the perverse and tantalising mindset that lies behind The Banshees of Inisherin… but then again, perhaps not. You could call it a drama, or a comedy or a tragedy. You might even call it a parable.The little stub of plot around which McDonagh has built his narrative is bafflingly simple. It’s 1923. Colm and Pádraic live on a tiny island off the coast of Ireland called Inisherin. They’re long-standing friends, and every evening they go to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Buster Keaton made his name in a series of two-reel shorts made from 1917 onwards; The Saphead, from 1920, was his first starring role in a feature film.It’s in no way comparable to the classics which Keaton produced and directed in his mid-1920s purple patch, the wordy screenplay cobbled together from a pair of popular stage plays and the film directed in workmanlike fashion by Herbert Blaché, who wasn’t familiar with Keaton. Douglas Fairbanks was originally slated to star, recommending his younger colleague for the part of Bertie Van Alstyne when he found himself unavailable.That Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Will Erich Korngold, the great cinema composer, ever be recognised as a great composer for the live theatre? Probably not, at least until the prejudices that did for him in his lifetime – the prejudice against film and popular music and the prejudice against Jews – are fully corrected in practice as well as in people’s minds. Korngold, happily, is on the way back, though it has taken a long time. Die tote Stadt should, if justice be done, clinch his return.This terrific opera, first staged in Hamburg in 1920 when Korngold was 23, admittedly created its own problems from the start. It was the Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
When Bliss, a new play adapted from an Andrei Platonov short story by Fraser Grace, made its debut in Russia in early 2020, Cambridge-based company Menagerie were told that their production was “very Russian”.I’m no expert on Russian culture, but I would agree – in a good way. Paul Bourne’s production for the Finborough Theatre takes a while to warm up, but still packs a poignant punch.Nikita Firsov (Jesse Rutherford) has returned home from the Civil War to a post-apocalyptic landscape: rural Russia in 1921. There’s no food and almost no people. The price of stealing grain is execution, and Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Mancunian tribute to Ralph Vaughan Williams – a symphonic cycle shared by the BBC Philharmonic and Hallé – reached its conclusion with the Eighth Symphony last night. But, unlike most concerts in the RVW150 sequence, in this one (the final performance in the Hallé Thursday concerts series of 2021-22), Sir Mark Elder added an eclectic mix of other composers’ work to the evening. Value for money, without a doubt (main picture: Sir Mark Elder with the Hallé).First up was Stravinsky. The Concerto for piano and wind instruments is a challenge to the ensemble as much as its soloist, and there Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Who was Walter Sickert and what made him tick? The best way to address the question is to make a beeline for the final room of his Tate Britain retrospective. It’s hung with an impressive array of his last and most colourful paintings. Based on newspaper photographs, playbills and publicity shots scaled up for transfer onto canvas, they make a strong argument for viewing Sickert as a modernist – a precursor to artists like Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans and even Andy Warhol, who explore the alienating effects of the mass media on people in the public eye and their followers.By contrast, the early Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Bent Sørensen has christened his new harpsichord concerto Sei Anime: “six souls”. The six concise movements, written for Mahan Esfahani and a chamber-sized orchestra, are modelled, apparently, on the dance movements of a Bach keyboard suite. But as Sørensen explained from the stage – standing next to Esfahani’s gleaming black harpsichord – two further anecdotes explain the name. It’s borrowed from a range of French womenswear, seen in a Copenhagen shop: the audience laughed.But it’s also derived from a mis-spelling on the manuscript of JS Bach’s six partitas and sonatas for unaccompanied Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The hidden history of women artists continues to generate some ground-breaking exhibitions that contribute to a radical re-assessment of art and cultural history. This is a welcome trend, though not entirely without risk, as a new show in Paris demonstrates, and as other exhibitions have managed less convincingly.Pionnières – Artistes dans le Paris des Années folles is an intelligently contextualised and broad-ranging survey of women’s art in the Roaring Twenties, at the Musée du Luxembourg. The show, which focuses on Paris, provides a revealing, if at times erratic, overview of the way Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The night after visiting Tate Modern’s Surrealism Beyond Borders I dreamt that a swarm of wasps had taken refuge inside my skull and I feared it would hurt when they nibbled their way out again.If I painted a self-portrait with wasps escaping from my eyes, nose, ears and mouth it would be a striking image; but would it make me a Surrealist? According to this exhibition, the answer would be a resounding “yes”, since its goal is to chart how Surrealism spread across the globe and how, since the 1920s in Paris, this radical way of thinking has taken root in the collective unconscious ( Read more ...
Robert Beale
There was no overt reference to the world outside in this concert, and yet the poignancy of its content could hardly have been clearer if it had been planned: two symphonies and a song cycle each touched by the tragedy of war.It was the launch event of RVW150, a national and international celebration of the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, stretching from this year well into next, to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth. In Manchester the Hallé and BBC Philharmonic are presenting all his symphonies in concerts over the next 11 weeks, a cycle entitled “Toward the Unknown Region”. And in the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There's a lot of True Crime stuff about, so it's hardly a surprise to see Stephen Dolginoff's 2003 off-Broadway musical back on the London stage, a West End venue for the Hope Theatre's award-winning 2019 production. Whether one needs to see a pair of charismatic child killers given a platform to explain their crimes while the victim, Bobby Franks, is merely a name, his face as absent as it was after the acid was poured all over it – well, you can make your own judgement about that.A serious point maybe, but this is a serious show, the intensity of the two men's relationship enhanced by the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
GW Pabst’s The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927), adapted from the novel by the Russian revolutionary author Ilya Ehrenburg, is a fascinating example of a major movie, vividly rendered by a filmmaker at his peak, that was compromised by its producers’ commercial agenda.Survive though it does as a late-silent-era German classic, Pabst’s sixth feature suffers in comparison with his Joyless Street (1925), the Louise Brooks vehicles Pandora’s Box and The Diary of a Lost Girl (both 1929), and The Threepenny Opera (1931).The arch-realist Pabst was the leading exponent of the socially driven Neue Read more ...