Not long after the Nazis came to power, Eberhard Arnold sent a manifesto to Adolf Hitler. The Protestant preacher urged the dictator to “embrace universal love”. With his wife Emmy, Eberhard had founded a radical, egalitarian Christian community in the mountains of central Germany. Now the SS and Gestapo had begun to harass them. Unsurprisingly, the Führer was unmoved. The persecution intensified, and the communards of the Bruderhof fled first to Liechtenstein, then England, Paraguay and the US. Eberhard’s innocent idealism may sound pitiable: a flower beneath a tank. Within a decade, however Read more ...

The Prohibition-era setting of The Great Gatsby brings an appropriately illicit feel to this bold decision to stage an immersive theatre event in the age of Covid. Where, in 1922, champagne was the essential liquid to get any evening going, here it’s hand sanitiser fluid, before you’re led – hopefully wearing a suitably decadent facemask – to a socially-distanced place in the speakeasy where the action will unfold. In a bold opening, the script swoops straight from the novel’s beginning to its end, so that the narrator, Nick Carraway, flags up Gatsby’s death before we meet him Read more ...

Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks’ best-selling First World War novel, has been adapted quite a few times in its twenty-seven years. First came the TV series in 2012, starring Eddie Redmayne and Clémence Poésy; then there was Sir Trevor Nunn’s 2010 stage production for the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. This new digital Birdsong coincides with the anniversary as well, but otherwise it’s quite unlike the others – and, indeed, unlike any other pre-pandemic play.The effort to produce a socially distanced show must have been monumental. Brought together in less than six weeks, Read more ...

Has anyone else noticed how fulltime this streaming thing has become?  Those who were of a mind to (and who never slept) could find enough cultural output to satisfy 24/7, especially if one adds to the free offerings that crop up by the week the ongoing back catalogue made available on sites such as Marquee TV or Digital Theatre, and the like. While those platforms continue to roam freely across productions and even art forms, each week brings with it a fresh supply of intriguing fare. This week's lineup includes curiosities from the very different minds of Andrew Lloyd Webber and David Read more ...

A century on, the années folles of Paris between the wars do not cease to excite readers and writers of all varieties. Alex George’s latest novel, The Paris Hours, draws on the myriad charms the interwar period has to offer, condensing them into a single day in 1927. We follow his four protagonists on their separate ways through the crisscrossing city streets until they come together in the most dramatic of dénouements. If these four leads are fictional, though, the author reminds us that this is still the Paris of Hemingway, Proust, Ravel, Stein and so many others by littering his narrative Read more ...

Alexander Tolotukhin’s debut film places the viewer into a microcosm of the first world war and frames the experience with a peculiar musical device. Spliced between grainy images of trenches, artillery strikes and field hospitals are shots of a contemporary orchestra preparing and then performing the soundtrack to the film. It is as though the tragedy of war is being dramatised and memorialised at the same time.The narrative follows a small Russian regiment as they prepare defensive strongholds against an oncoming German battalion. During an early gas attack, the main character Alexey ( Read more ...

These days, Bloomsbury rests in a state of elegant somnolence. The ghosts of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell linger on in the shabby gentility of Russell Square and its environs, the bookish institutions that are the bones of the place conferring tranquility, despite the many students and tourists. But so much for appearances – radicalism is the bricks and mortar of Bloomsbury’s university buildings and Georgian terraces, which in the early 20th century were home to countless figures who thrived in society's margins, among them artists and writers, academics and political thinkers.Francesca Read more ...

“Only in a Man’s World” is a snappy pop-funk nugget with an Eighties feel. There’s a kinship with Peter Gabriel and “Once in a Lifetime” Talking Heads. Its lyrics though are something else. They begin by asking “Why should a woman feel ashamed?” and go on to address why necessary items associated with periods are deemed a luxury by the tax regimen. “Things would be different if the boys bled too.” Rather than polemic, it comes across as exploring the double standards inherent to the state.That Field Music’s seventh album proper is about more than its musical framework is made obvious by “Only Read more ...

The greatest war films are those which capture the terrifying physical and psychological ordeal that soldiers face, along with the sheer folly and waste of it all –  Paths of Glory, Come and See, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, most recently Dunkirk. Sam Mendes’ 1917, which has just won two Golden Globes and could well triumph at the Oscars, joins their ranks.Inspired by the stories of his late grandfather, who fought in the First World War, Mendes has forged a film that combines the contrivance of a race-against-time thriller with the verisimilitude of documentary, astonishing Read more ...

“I don’t think I have the right to influence her,” says an older character of her daughter in For Services Rendered, W Somerset Maugham’s 1932 anti-war drama. If only all elder statesmen and women felt the same about the youth. Tom Littler’s revival at the Jermyn Street Theatre makes great use of an intimate space, but the first half is a slog and only a few of the large cast make their mark. The setting is appropriately idyllic: a garden in rural Kent (the village’s name is Ramblestone, naturally), late summer 1932, the gentle thwocks of a game of tennis drifting over the fence. Eden Read more ...

Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s Tolkien follows the same formula of many literary biopics, with a tick-box plot of loves, friendships and hardships that forged the writing career of one the 20th Century’s greatest fantasy writers.We open at the Western Front, as a feverish Tolkien doggedly makes his way through the trenches with trusty companion, Sam (Craig Roberts) – a proto-Samwise Gamgee, complete with West Country accent - looking for his schoolfriend, Geoffrey Smith (Anthony Boyle). Blasts of German flame-throwers transform into dragons, and caped cavalry officers shape-shift into Read more ...

While Bach's and Handel's Passions have been driving thousands to contemplate suffering, mortality and grace, this elegy for black lives lost over a century ago also chimes movingly with pre-Easter offerings. First seen in Southampton last year as a commission by 14-18-NOW marking the centenary of the First World War, it relives through song, dance and word the fate of the 618 men of the South African Native Labour Corps who drowned in the English channel when their ship, the SS Mendi, collided with a much larger vessel in thick fog.The very fact that few of us will not even have heard the Read more ...