class system
Tom Fool, Orange Tree Theatre review - testing family valuesTuesday, 22 March 2022
It’s not hard to see, watching Tom Fool at the Orange Tree Theatre, why Franz Xaver Kroetz is one of Germany’s most staged playwrights.Born in Munich in 1946, he’s known for unflinching portrayals of poverty and what it does to people. Directed... Read more... |
Two Billion Beats, Orange Tree Theatre review - bursting with heartThursday, 24 February 2022
“You could read at home,” says Bettina (Anoushka Chadha), Year 10, her school uniform perfectly pressed, hair neatly styled. “You could be an annoying little shit at home,” retorts her sister Asha (Safiyya Ingar), Year 13, all fire and fury in Doc... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: The ServantTuesday, 21 September 2021
Switching between upstairs and downstairs makes your soul melt, in this first of three Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter films, a savage class satire filmed in the freezing winter of 1963. Hugo (Dirk Bogarde) is the obsequious, insinuating butler who comes... Read more... |
The Nest review – intriguing, off-kilter family dramaThursday, 26 August 2021
The Nest is a peculiar animal, hard to nail down, parts family drama and social satire, but with a creepy sense of suspense rippling under the surface that threatens to bust the plot wide open. The fact that it’s written and directed by... Read more... |
Adam Mars-Jones: Batlava Lake review - pride and prejudice in the Kosovo WarFriday, 16 July 2021
For a slim book of some 100 pages, Batlava Lake by Adam Mars-Jones is deceptively meandering. The novella is narrated by Barry Ashton, an engineer attached to the British Army troops stationed with the peacekeeping forces during the Kosovo War.... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Amina Cain on her first novel and her eternal fascination with suggestionMonday, 22 February 2021
Amina Cain is a writer of near-naked spaces and roomy characters. Her debut collection of short fiction, I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues, 2009), located itself in the potential strangeness of everyday thoughts and experience. Her second, Creature (... Read more... |
CLR James: Minty Alley review - love and betrayal in the barrack-yardMonday, 08 February 2021
CLR James came to London from Trinidad in 1932, clutching the manuscript of his first and only novel. He soon found work, writing about cricket for the Manchester Guardian, as well as a political faith, revolutionary Trotskyism, which would inspire... Read more... |
Courttia Newland: A River Called Time review - an ethereality checkTuesday, 05 January 2021
It is near impossible to imagine what the world would look like today if slavery and colonialism had never existed, let alone to write a book on the subject. Courttia Newland sets himself this daunting task in his latest novel, A River Called Time.... Read more... |
Annie Ernaux: A Man's Place review - an intimate portrait, necessarily incompleteTuesday, 01 December 2020
As much as we would like it to, writing can never fully recapture someone who is gone. This we learn all too effectively in A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux, arguably one of France’s most important living authors. The text, released in an updated... Read more... |
Miss Juneteenth review - a ray of Texan sunshineFriday, 25 September 2020
Beauty queen pageants have long been ripe for parody, from their plastic glamour to the Machiavellian competitiveness. Miss Juneteenth opts for a much more nuanced approach, using the pageant as a focal point for a mother and daughter navigating... Read more... |
Naomi Booth: Exit Management review - unwrapping life's unpleasantnessSunday, 13 September 2020
When you try to get rid of something, it comes back to bite you – so says Naomi Booth in her new novel Exit Management. It’s one of those books that you want to read very quickly, its writing slickly modern and its characters compellingly flawed.... Read more... |
Good Manners review - compellingly eerieSaturday, 18 July 2020
Stylish, eerie and unexpectedly moving by the time of its apocalyptic finish, the strangely titled Good Manners makes for a genuine celluloid surprise. Written and directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, this genre-defying Brazilian... Read more... |
