1940s
Ismene Brown
This powerful play’s immediate backstory, with Moscow sentencing its author to eight years’ jail and its director going into forced exile, is not its immediate theme – and all the better for it, for how can anyone yet make any authentic dramatic reflection on Putin’s war on Ukraine?But there’s no doubt of the current war’s absolute relevance to Dmitri Glukhovsky and Maxim Didenko’s address of a hideous episode of World War Two, the murder of some 200,000 Polish Jews from Lodz by the SS, with help from Jews themselves.Normally Glukhovsky’s reputation rests on his bestselling Metro2033 Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
You can imagine the thought processes that brought Kenneth Branagh’s latest adventure as Poirot, his third, to the big screen.“Memo to self: Find an Agatha Christie/Poirot story that hasn’t been done to death already, in fact isn’t well known at all so isn’t an automatically ‘spoiled' plot. Make it (inexpensively) exotic but still ‘period’ by moving the location to Venice in 1947, which looks very much like La Serenissima in 2023, minus the human sea of tourists following a guide holding up an umbrella. And there are still no cars and street furniture, and definitely no e-scooters, to CGI out Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Writer Peter Bowker apparently had plans to make six series of World on Fire, but the arrival of Covid after 2019’s first series threw a spanner in the works. Anyway, here’s the second one at last, and it’s a little strange to find that this encyclopedic saga of the Second World War has only advanced as far as the autumn of 1940.Bowker’s plan was to stitch together a panorama of the war told through the stories of a range of characters across different continents, and this time we find ourselves visiting Manchester, Paris, Berlin and the Egyptian desert. Familiar characters return, including Read more ...
Robert Beale
The BBC Philharmonic ended its 2022-23 season in Manchester with a programme that might have been chosen as a showpiece for virtuosity.There was orchestral virtuosity in the form of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, pianistic virtuosity in the shape of Steven Osborne playing Britten’s Piano Concerto, and a kind of compositional virtuosity in an eight-minute burst of Ethel Smyth – “On the Cliffs of Cornwall” from her opera, The Wreckers.All this was delivered by conductor Ben Glassberg with an up-and-at-’em energy and determination that defied the heat and humidity of a summer evening in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Diary of Anne Frank became a Broadway play and has formed the basis of a lengthy catalogue of films and TV series, but the name of Miep Gies is rather less well-known. Yet without Gies the Anne Frank story might never have reached the wider world, since it was she who helped the Frank family, along with four other Dutch Jews, to remain in hiding and evade capture by the Germans from July 1942 until their luck ran out in August 1944.It was Gies, too, who kept Anne Frank’s diary safe after its author was arrested by the Gestapo, and who gave it to Anne’s father Otto when he returned to Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As the UK undergoes yet another political convulsion, this time concerning the threshold for ministers being shitty to fellow workers, it is apt that Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the challenges of being good in a dysfunctional society hits London. Anthony Lau’s co-production between the Lyric Hammersmith, ETT and Sheffield Theatres also catches a ride on the cultural zeitgeist, since it shares elements of its aesthetic with the multi-Academy Award winning movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Rather like that film, I suspect this show will divide audiences.We open on Georgia Lowe’s Read more ...
Gary Naylor
People can’t find the food they want in the shops. Nobody has enough money. Public services are under pressure. And there’s a big Royal occasion to take our minds off things.England 2023? Nah, England 1947, as rationing applies to meat and fruit rather than toilet rolls and lemonade and it’s Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s wedding rather than their eldest son’s coronation that is bringing out the bunting. Based on the much-loved Alan Bennett film, A Private Function, and 12 years on from its West End run, Betty Blue Eyes is the tale of a pig that’s not kosher, and nor is the situation Read more ...
Graham Fuller
If post-war baroque cinema had been a school or movement rather than a style, its male icon would have been Anton Walbrook. Before Max Ophüls cast the suavely menacing Austrian actor as the master of ceremonies in La Ronde (1950) and as King Ludwig I in Lola Montès (1955), he starred as a German soldier who sells his soul for success at cards in the chilling supernatural drama The Queen of Spades (1949).The year before Walbrook had played Lermontov in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes. His Herman in The Queen of Spades is another gimlet-eyed obsessive, but Walbrook knocked Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Seventy-eight years ago, on January 27,1945, Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army. The iconic images of the ovens with charred skulls and emaciated survivors peering through barbed wire were filmed by Russian cameramen over the following weeks and not on the day itself. And from the very beginning, there was a degree of staging in what the world was shown.The troupe of children who marched between the electrified fences were dressed for the camera in the striped uniforms of adult prisoners, which they had never worn under the Nazis. The emotional power of those images – Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Like families, nations have secrets: dirty linen that they prefer not to expose to the light of day. Patriotic myths need to be protected, heroic narratives shaped, good guy reputations upheld. In 1942, the USA rounded up Japanese-Americans and locked them away in the badlands of the Midwest and promptly forgot about them – and then worked hard to keep it that way in the decades that followed. It’s likely you didn’t know that and it’s no accident if so.One such intern was George Takei – Star Trek’s Mr Sulu and, in his extraordinary second life, liberal activist supreme on social Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It’s a long way from the dank chill of an English winter to the stultifying heat of a New Orleans summer, but we’ve been here before at this venue. Five years on from their award-winning Summer And Smoke, Rebecca Frecknall is back in the director’s chair and Patsy Ferran in the lead role for Tennessee Williams’ exploration of frailty and fear, A Streetcar Named Desire. The play (or, perhaps, the movie) has achieved the ultimate mark of iconic status, its very own parody episode in The Simpsons, so even those who have see neither version of this slice of Southern Noir will have Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’re reminded, in a grainy black and white video framing device, that, as late as the summer of 1941, the USA saw World War II as just another European war. As brilliantly illustrated in Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America, not only was such indifference to the rise of fascism more widespread than feels comfortable to reflect upon, but so, too, was a sympathy extended to the Nazis in their psychotic mission to make Germany great again.It was against that complacent background that Lillian Hellman wrote Watch on the Rhine, a seductive call to arms that knew its audience of New York’s Read more ...