World War Two
Das Boot, Series 2, Sky Atlantic review - multi-layered war drama goes from strength to strengthWednesday, 10 June 2020
Das Boot made an impressive debut early last year with its entwined narratives of war by land and sea. This second instalment (Sky Atlantic) looks set to be better still, exploring the strata of life under Nazi occupation in the German-run port of... Read more... |
Now is the hour - 103 and trending: Dame Vera Lynn eight decades after her debutThursday, 23 April 2020
Last Sunday evening I was making lentil soup (words I never thought I’d type) when Radio 4’s discussion of wealth, or lack thereof, gave way to a profile of Dame Vera Lynn. She was “trending”, her NHS fundraising duet with Katherine Jenkins of “We’... Read more... |
Flowers for Mrs Harris, Chichester Festival Theatre online review - a warmly open-hearted weepieMonday, 13 April 2020
18 months or so after it opened in Chichester, Flowers for Mrs Harris launches a sequence of streamed productions from the West Sussex venue just in time to allow a new British musical to join the ever-swelling ranks of theatrical offerings online.... Read more... |
Bill Brandt/Henry Moore, The Hepworth Wakefield review - a matter of perceptionTuesday, 03 March 2020
Bill Brandt’s photographs and Henry Moore’s studies of people sheltering underground during the Blitz (September 1940 to May 1941) offer glimpses of a world that is, thankfully, lost to us. A year and a half after the end of the bombing... Read more... |
'You’re Jewish. With a name like Neumann, you have to be'Monday, 24 February 2020
It was during my first week at Tufts University in America, when I was 17, that I was told by a stranger that I was Jewish. As I left one of the orientation talks, I was approached by a slight young man with short brown hair and intense eyes. He... Read more... |
Leopoldstadt, Wyndham's Theatre review - Stoppard at once personal and accessibleFriday, 14 February 2020
It’s not uncommon for playwrights to begin their careers by writing what they know, to co-opt a frequently quoted precept about authorial inspiration. So it’s among the many fascinations of Leopoldstadt that Tom Stoppard, at the age of 82, should... Read more... |
Francesca Wade: Square Haunting - Bloomsbury retoldThursday, 06 February 2020
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... Read more... |
Blomfield, Philharmonia, Salonen, RFH review - sounds of a troubled truceTuesday, 21 January 2020
Concert programmes that set out to tell us a story can prove a mixed blessing. Yes, it’s valuable and stimulating to find ideas, and narratives, embodied in the musical flow. But great pieces, well-performed, have a habit of cutting loose from the... Read more... |
A Hidden Life review - Nazism stoically refusedSaturday, 18 January 2020
Terrence Malick returns to his former greatness following three features of unscripted, all-star poesy, with this sombre biopic of sainted Austrian conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl). A farmer who refused to swear the Hitler... Read more... |
The Wind of Heaven, Finborough Theatre review - a welcome, if strange, Emlyn Williams rediscoverySaturday, 30 November 2019
This is the third Emlyn Williams piece to be presented here in a decade: The Druid's Rest in 2009 was followed by the enormous success of Accolade, directed by Blanche McIntyre, two years later.If it's a truism that neglected plays may well have... Read more... |
White Christmas, Dominion Theatre review - breezy but blandThursday, 28 November 2019
Nostalgia for things that probably never were is an animating theme in politics these days. Much the same feeling displaced to the realm of showbiz, lends a vaguely dampening air to White Christmas, this latest stage retread of the 1954 Bing... Read more... |
World on Fire, BBC One, series finale review - may this fine war drama fight onMonday, 11 November 2019
A bit like all those people on the home front in 1940 (but only a little bit), we sit and nervously wait for news. Is World on Fire (BBC One) still listed among the living? Or even now is someone typing up the letter and sticking it in a brown... Read more... |
