Stalin
Child 44Friday, 17 April 2015"There is no murder in paradise" is the official line of the authorities in 1950s Russia, but nevertheless Child 44 is the blood-drenched tale of a hunt for a mass-murdering paedophile in Stalin's deathly shadow. The source novel was the first in... Read more... |
Silent Planet, Finborough TheatreSaturday, 29 November 2014Russian prisoner Gavriil is telling his psychiatrist a story about a strange and frightening dragon who demands a female sacrifice from the local townsfolk every year. When Gavriil gets to the end of his hot-breathed tale, his doctor drily remarks... Read more... |
David Schneider Makes Stalin LaughMonday, 23 June 2014When Dostoyevsky was asked why he wrote Crime and Punishment he famously replied, “To further my career and get shortlisted for book prizes.” He didn’t, of course. I made that up. But what artist/writer/actor creates a piece of art/writing/acting... Read more... |
The Love Girl and the Innocent, Southwark PlayhouseWednesday, 16 October 2013Southwark Playhouse's new production of The Love Girl and the Innocent is London’s first in over 30 years, and there’s a reason Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s play rarely reaches the stage: it’s a lumpy mammoth of a script, demanding a cast upwards of 50... Read more... |
DVD: 3 Documentaries by Sergei LoznitsaFriday, 20 September 2013The Belarusian director Sergei Loznitsa recently made an impact with the powerful In the Fog, a delicately balanced examination of the pressures at play in World War II Russia. Before that, his international calling card was My Joy (2010), a first... Read more... |
The Flames of Paris, Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Opera HouseMonday, 19 August 2013The Bolshoi left it till last to be most itself, to dance a ballet that is truly of its blood, its seed - its closing on Alexei Ratmansky's The Flames of Paris will leave much happiness in the memory to override the problematic productions of... Read more... |
Opinion: When artists could speak outMonday, 12 August 2013Take note of the title, with its “could”, not “must”. “The word ‘must’ is not to be used to Princes,” quoth Good Queen Bess as echoed in Britten’s Gloriana. Yet that was the verb used by New York writer Scott Rose, guest-posting on Norman Lebrecht’s... Read more... |
DVD: Burnt by the Sun 2Tuesday, 09 July 2013Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun was one of the few good news stories in Russian cinema in the Nineties. Made with his longterm scriptwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov, it picked up a main prize at Cannes in 1994 and the Best Foreign Film Oscar the... Read more... |
Foyle's War, Series 8, ITVMonday, 25 March 2013Always a treat to see the shrewd, penetrating gaze of DCS Christopher Foyle back for one of its all-too-brief runs, though no doubt rationing Foyle's War to short series at long intervals is what has enabled writer/creator Anthony Horowitz to... Read more... |
The Master and Margarita, Barbican TheatreFriday, 23 March 2012The Master and Margarita is a rare beast. Not only is it considered to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, it also regularly tops reader-lists of all-time favourite books. So it’s no wonder that, since its publication in 1966, 26... Read more... |
Collaborators, National TheatreWednesday, 02 November 2011“Smackhead, groin doctor and smut-scribe”: that’s one way in which writer Mikhail Bulgakov is described in John Hodge’s debut stage drama. A kind of wild fantasia spun around incidents from Soviet history, the piece goes on to show how Bulgakov –... Read more... |
DVD: Arsenal & ZvenigoraSaturday, 19 February 2011What a time of ferment of artistic revolution the 1920s were in the Soviet Union. Pioneering arts techniques overlapped for an all-too-brief period with the progressive ideology of communism. Alexander Dovzhenko’s Arsenal and Zvenigora were at the... Read more... |