family relationships
Harriet Mercer
The word “shrine” somersaults me back to the path of the Camino de Santiago. I have lost count of the faces that smiled up from photos positioned in the hollow of trees, some with little plastic figurines for company, others set in stone next to a sculptural pile of pebbles. Some of the shrines also sheltered a handwritten prayer or a crucifix; most had burnt-out tea-candles.Phoebe Powers imagined her debut poetry collection, Shrines of Upper Austria, “as a shrine: a gathering of objects, words and images important to someone, both as discrete objects and as a composition”. Her second poetry Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Music plays a big part in the life of Dwight, an 11-year-old black lad growing up in early 80s Leeds. He doesn't fit in at school, bullied because he is "slow", and he doesn't fit in outside school, would-be friends losing patience with him.But he does fit in at home, loved unequivocally by a protective mother, somewhat enviously by a bickering sister, and rather reluctantly by a preoccupied father. Like the records he plays on the gramophone, his life is about to spin – and he'll have to hold on to the warmth of family love in a cold world.Zodwa Nyoni's new play for the Kiln Theatre packs Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Rebecca Lenkiewicz's adaptation of August Strindberg's 1900 paean to the power of loathing over loving uses the now familiar trick of dressing characters in period detail while giving them the full range of the 21st century's argot of disdain and distress.Indeed, the spectacular sprinkling of the C-word (indeed, pretty much the A-Z words) here jolts us into the thought that though divorce laws may be more liberal these days, marriages can still limp on with each party secretly (or not so secretly) waiting for the release that only death can bring.Roll in medical interventions that prolong Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’re in New York City, in an upscale loft apartment, with that absence of stuff that speaks of a power to acquire anything. There are paintings on the walls, but we see only their descriptions: we learn that the owner (curator, in his word) really only sees the descriptions, too, and that the aesthetic and artistic elements barely register. The maid has been given the evening off – it’s soon obvious why – and an art dealer flits about nervously waiting for his client to arrive with a view toward arranging a significant purchase. The artist is Black; everyone else, indeed, Read more ...
India Lewis
The title of Katya Adaui’s debut collection in English is taken from one of the 12 short stories it contains: an allusion to the depths hidden below the surface, which is also one of the book’s central motifs.Adaui is the Peruvian author of three books of short stories and a novel, who now lives in Buenos Aires. Here Be Icebergs, translated by Rosalind Harvey, is an elegant, slim volume, which, despite its size, manages to capture the enormity and complexity of familial and personal ties.The opener, “The Hunger Angel”, is an excellent depiction of how we can merge into our family whilst Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It takes some confidence for a first-time feature director to interrupt her essentially realistic first feature with a splash of psychedelic abstraction, but Jacqueline Lentzou doesn’t lack for visual or aural daring. Two-thirds of the way through Moon, 66 Questions, a semi-autobiographical drama written and directed by the Greek filmmaker, an astronomer’s view of a night sky appears. Myriad stars glitter in delicate colours, the image morphing into a silver and gold vortex as low-mixed spectral music plays and a staticky snatch of a telephone call is heard.If a literal interpretation Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For sheer extremes of family dysfunction Theresa Rebeck’s Mad House must be aiming to set new records in American drama. The latest in a line that stretches back to Eugene O’Neill, the plentiful other contenders that have appeared over the decades mean that it’s become a crowded field but, on the cantankerous patriarch front at least, Bill Pullman’s performance as Daniel, Rebeck’s cussed paterfamilias, trumps most of its predecessors for sheer malevolence.And Pullman surely knows it, the wicked glint in his eye that he directs out at the audience as the curtain goes up confirming that, and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Slamming the door on experience comes with repercussions in A Doll's House, Part 2, the thrilling Broadway entry from American writer Lucas Hnath that has arrived at the Donmar as part of an America-friendly season at that address including Marys Seacole (already finished) and The Band's Visit (still to come).In each case, the Covent Garden venue has chosen to take a fresh look at the source rather than bringing over a pre-existing version, which in this case allows for the director James Macdonald to effect his customary wizardry. This veteran of new writing is well-matched to Hnath's Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
You never forget your first Gecko production. I experienced mine almost 20 years ago at the Battersea Arts Centre, when the company performed Tailors’ Dummies, its ingenious surreal show about obsession. This had all the hallmarks that would make Gecko one of our most distinctive physical theatre companies; gravity-defying choreography, a quasi-acrobatic exploration of concepts of the body, and scenes that were as elliptical as they were absurd.From here they went on to create works including The Arab and the Jew, The Overcoat and Missing, enthralling audiences with their bold sculpting of Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s graceful, intriguingly open-ended seventh feature, and her English-language debut, is set on Fårö, the island that Ingmar Berman loved.“This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your innermost imaginings of form, proportions, colours, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections,” he wrote. He lived on the island for 40 years and made several films there, including Through a Glass Darkly, Persona and the TV series that inspired millions of divorces, Scenes from A Marriage.In Bergman Island, the Swedish director is an inspirational presence, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Playwrights return to classical myths for two main reasons – to shine a light on how we live today and because they're bloody good yarns.Marina Carr's re-telling of Clytemnestra's story is boldly innovative in its conception and execution, but it never loses sight of its source material's power – and we wonder how, if "Enough is Enough" didn't work thousands of years ago, how is it going to work now?King Agamemnon needs to do something as his men are mustered for war and the blood is up, but the winds will not come to fill their sails for the passage to Troy. Worse still, a potential Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In Maltese-American Alex Camilleri’s debut feature, it’s a case of follow the swordfish. This terrifically atmospheric, almost documentary-like film – Camilleri cites Italian neo-realism, including Visconti’s La Terra Trema, as an influence – tells the story of Jesmark, a real-life Maltese fisherman (Jesmark Scicluna). It also encapsulates a dying culture.His brightly coloured wooden boat, known as a luzzu, with eyes painted on its bow, has been handed down to him through generations, but making a living on this ancient vessel in the bureaucratic modern world is fraught with difficulty. Read more ...