World War Two
Nachtland, Young Vic review - German black comedy brings uneasy humour and discomfiting relevanceThursday, 29 February 2024If Mark Twain thought that a German joke was no laughing matter, what would he make of a German comedy? That quote came to mind more than once during Patrick Marber’s production of Marius von Mayenburg’s 2022 play, Nachtland. I know it’s... Read more... |
Occupied City review - unquiet Nazi crimesTuesday, 13 February 2024![]() “I feel as if I am live reporting from a shipwreck,” Dutch-Jewish journalist Philip Mechanicus wrote en route to his concentration camp murder. Steve McQueen’s four-hour reverie on Amsterdam’s Nazi occupation teases out the scars of that arbitrary,... Read more... |
The Zone of Interest review - garden gates of deathFriday, 02 February 2024![]() The jokey serious point in Mel Brooks’s The Producers is that you shouldn’t be able to make a musical set among Nazis. But if you shouldn’t make a musical, can you make any fiction?The renowned chronicler of the death camps, Elie Wiesel, said that a... Read more... |
The Most Precious of Goods, Marylebone Theatre review - old-fashioned storytelling of an all-too relevant taleTuesday, 30 January 2024![]() As last week’s news evidenced, genocide never really goes out of fashion. So it’s only right and proper that art continues to address the hideous concept and, while nothing, not even Primo Levi’s shattering If This Is a Man, can capture the scale of... Read more... |
Masters of the Air, Apple TV+ review - painful and poignant account of the Eighth Air Force's bombing campaignThursday, 25 January 2024![]() “Are they all like that?” asks a shaken Major Bucky Egan (Callum Turner), after he’s completed his first bombing mission over Germany as a guest of the US Eighth Air Force’s 389th Bomb Group. They’ve been battered by flak and lacerated by German... Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: A Celtic storm brewingWednesday, 20 December 2023![]() “Nothing is stronger than true love,” a young laird says to a headstrong young woman in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), his voice heard above the sounds of wind and waves. She replies, “No, nothing.”Even as... Read more... |
Stranger Things: The First Shadow, Phoenix Theatre review - formidable stagecraft unlocks new depths to the popular seriesFriday, 15 December 2023![]() Stranger Things has shown us over four seasons that the alternate dimension known as the Upside Down can be the seat of many things: terror, mystery, camaraderie, compassion. As it turns out, it can spawn great theatre, too, for Stephen Daldry’s... Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: the glueman comethSaturday, 11 November 2023![]() The shop assistant turned World War Two Land Army girl Alison Smith, clad in a summer dress on the sabbath, steps through a glade onto a hilltop track above the village of Chillingbourne in Kent. It’s the same road once taken by medieval... Read more... |
Dance First - the travails of Samuel BeckettSaturday, 04 November 2023![]() Dance First takes its title from a line in Samuel Beckett’s most famous work Waiting for Godot. “Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards,” says the tramp Estragon of Pozzo’s slave Lucky, who then proceeds to do both in a typically absurd... Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: Spy mastersTuesday, 31 October 2023![]() Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell are, almost certainly, Britain’s greatest directors. Hitchcock was slightly older, and entered the film business earlier; in fact, Powell worked as a stills photographer on Hitchcock’s Champagne and... Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: Battleships and ByronSaturday, 28 October 2023![]() Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made a glorious run of movies from The Spy in Black (1939) to The Small Back Room (1949). Yet the duo’s reputation went into steep decline in the 1950s, and they began to encounter difficulty in... Read more... |
Michael Powell interview - 'I had no idea that critics were so innocent'Tuesday, 24 October 2023![]() Michael Powell fell in love with his celluloid mistress in 1921 when he was 16. It’s a love affair that he’s conducted for 65 years. At 81, he’s not stopped dreaming of getting behind the camera again. At Cannes this year he hinted at plans to make... Read more... |
