history
aleks.sierz
What is with the National and history plays? On the large stages of this theatre, the main fare is historical accounts of contemporary problems. Maybe the programmers here imagine that their audiences, like T S Eliot’s humankind, “can’t bear very much reality”. History always has a nostalgic glow. So instead of commissioning a new play about the current war in Afghanistan, the flagship venue is staging American playwright J T Rogers’s drama about the Soviet Union’s 1980s occupation and the covert war, waged by the CIA, to stop the reds by any means necessary. But does this historical account Read more ...
howard.male
“Do you realise what you’re letting yourself in for?” is surely the worst thing to say to someone in order to put them at their ease, especially when they are about to step into the subconscious unknown. But down-to-earth fireman Neil Clarke took these words from hypnotist Trevor Roberts in his stride. His main concern - if it turned out he had lived a previous life - was that he was “a nice bloke and not some sort of murderer”. But no, this wasn’t a Mitchell and Webb sketch.It was the opening scene of a serious documentary on past-life regression. However, as this half-hour journey into the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The American Dream is a great subject for theatre. Not only is it a powerful myth that animates millions, but it is also vulnerable to being subverted by generations of playwrights. Like an aged boxer, it is liable to being floored by a well-aimed punch. In Bruce Norris’s new play, which premiered in New York earlier this year and opened in London last night, comedy is the kick that topples the great giant of the American Dream.The theme of Clybourne Park is race and property. As one character says, “The history of America is the history of property.” In the first act, set in 1959, we are Read more ...
josh.spero
By complete coincidence, this afternoon I tuned in to Air Force, Howard Hawks's 1943 propaganda picture: chiselled young airmen fill a B-17 "flying fortress", dropping their payloads over Japan, both a news service and wish fulfilment for domestic audiences. Their sharp, sweaty features glow in the firelight. Their commanders are tough but fair. Their bombs fall crisply, in a noble cause. This is not that film.
In Bombing of Germany, you saw how well Hawks rewrote history. Surviving members of B-17 crews talked about Operation Thunderclap, the all-out air assault on Dresden, Leipzig and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Yesterday channel’s ongoing “Spirit of 1940” season has provoked a giant surge in its viewing figures, another reminder of the grip World War Two still exerts on large chunks of the British public. The Battle of Britain in particular has become a self-contained historical moment emblematic of what the British regard, or at least used to regard, as their finest characteristics – patience, courage, stoicism and a dogged refusal to accept bullying European dictatorships. Maybe we haven’t quite let go of that last part. Perhaps the story of our Boys in Blue in the late summer of 1940 gains Read more ...
Ismene Brown
English National Ballet turns 60 next week, and nowadays just enduring has to be enough. Smelling of greasepaint and tour buses from the very first, it also smelled of stars - Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin who began it, Rudolf Nureyev and Natalia Makarova who created splendid productions for it, and extraordinary late-career performances by Lynn Seymour. Stars have been born in ENB too, even if they burst into full gleam elsewhere - Trinidad Sevillano, Tamara Rojo, and more than likely the young lad who is ENB’s latest find, Vadim Muntagirov, who danced last night in Cinderella.This Read more ...
josh.spero
What was originally a coincidence of reviewing – two dispatches from the Dark Ages, Treasures of the Anglo-Saxons on BBC Four and Domesday on BBC Two – in fact turned into a remarkably instructive diptych of how and how not to make history programmes for the television.In reverse historical order, Domesday is the exemplum of what not to do, which is turn an average idea for In Our Time on Radio 4 into an hour-long documentary for the television. This is the greatest sin: when given time on the television, fill it with interesting pictures. There is nothing – almost nothing at all – in this Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Two giants of dance died last year: Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham. Right now audiences aren’t being deprived of seeing why their names are written permanently in lights in dance history (Bausch’s company performs in Edinburgh and London later this year, Cunningham’s is in London in October), but after 2011 they may be. Cunningham’s company will close, while Bausch’s will be in its last of an uncertain three-year grace period. It was in this light that Frances Byrnes made a remarkable programme broadcast last night.A world that carries on with rotten Swan Lakes and interminable Lloyd Webber Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
My surname came to Britain with the Normans, and I must say that my forebears have had a bad press in their adopted homeland. From Hereward the Wake to Robin Hood, Anglo-Saxon legends have depicted us as despotic and cruel, whereas we were great builders of castles and cathedrals, brilliant horsemen and tip-top administrators, as well as being despotic and cruel. Anyway, it was good to have the refreshingly un-youthful and un-strident Professor Robert Bartlett (more Norman names) giving us his authoritative account of the antecedents and legacy of 1066 and all that. It’s about time we Viking- Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It's very hard to ever know what to expect from Alan Moore, the Mage of Northampton. The author of era-defining comics like Watchmen, V For Vendetta and From Hell has long maintained that art and magic are one and the same, and since the mid-1990s his works have often tended to be long and complex explications of various occult principles, which while eye-opening can often lose readers in all their baroque unfoldings. However, his 1996 novel Voices of the Fire, showed his writing could work powerfully untethered from the panels of comics, so I was cautiously optimistic for his new prose-art- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This, Heinrich von Kleist’s last play, was completed not long before he committed suicide, aged 34, in 1811, when the map of Europe - and indeed that of his native Prussia - was changing with indecent frequency. It is loosely (very loosely) based on the real Prince of Homburg and events at the Battle of Fehrbellin in 1675, and with its leitmotif of honour, duty and loyalty to the Fatherland, it is no wonder that the play was appropriated (with suitable adjustments) by the National Socialists in the 1930s (it was a favourite of Hitler's apparently) and then fell out of favour in German Read more ...
fisun.guner
Rupert Everett knows who he is: he is English, he’s a toff and he’s a poof, thank you very much. And that’s just about all you need to know to tell you that, as a breed, they’re pretty damned sure of themselves, these English toffs, poofs or not. But he’s also a pretty memorable actor. Yes, really. Let me try to convince you. I once saw him – and this must have been just before Another Country hit the big screen, for his name didn’t mean much to me then – on stage in Webster’s The White Devil. He looked cute enough in his period costume, but his energy was a thunderbolt. Not only did he Read more ...