Reviews on The Review

It’s difficult, unfortunately, to sit through the first twenty minutes of Ralph Fiennes’ modern rendering of Coriolanus without distraction. And these distractions do rather shake the whole project. The first distraction is that the shaven headed Fiennes’ looks uncomfortably like his recent portrayal of Voldemort in the Harry Potter films; a look that tends [...]

The Lowry restaurant overlooking Salford Quays is completely packed. An attractive young waitress whose nametag reads ‘Rachel’ seats me at a table with eight strangers. The small talk commences – everyone is excited about this experimental play, one of six to be selected for the Library Theatre Company’s Re:Play Festival which features the best of [...]

Ian Winterton’s gritty drama about a prostitute trying to hide her shady career while caring for her younger sister was first seen at last summer’s 24:7 festival before moving onto the Edinburgh fringe. The play’s title Sherica is taken from the false name assumed by the leading role as she goes about her secret life [...]

Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson is one of Iceland’s most practiced practitioners of short fiction, dedicating himself to the form long after his peers had moved onto writing novels. He too has now moved onto the longer form, but before he did so he published five volumes of short stories of which Twice in a Lifetime was [...]

Mirja Unge’s debut collection of short stories achieved considerable success when it was published in Sweden. The sixteen stories that make up the collection bear striking similarities and preoccupations. Largely written as first-person narratives, they articulate the female adolescent view on life and relationships.
The prose is sharp and abrupt and Unge does away with [...]

There is a breed of Englishman writing today whose work is very easily reviled; much like the ‘cowpat’ school of English composers of the 40s and 50s. In fact, the sound track to their poems is indubitably the andante second movement of Gerald Finzi’s Cello Concerto. Their writing has little of Finzi’s sometimes overwhelming lushness, [...]

Dreams of a Life: dir. Carol Morley

Dreams of a Life is a mesmerising film. It’s beautiful photography seems almost to belong to a different film, and it’s exquisite pacing and narrative arc show Carol Morley to have an iron control over her film.

In part, the film comprises a series of [...]

When I told my friends that I was going to see The Wind in the Willows, a few asked with disdain, “Is it a Christmas production?” They warned me that ‘tis the season for haphazard affairs thrown together for children who don’t know better and their desperate parents. I went to The Lowry with rather [...]

Sometimes a set of poems seem to emerge with an almost all-consuming inevitability. One such was and is Crow. Another must have been The Ballads of Kukutis on its first appearance in Lituania in 1977; or that’s how it might seem seen though Laima Vincé’s new translation and published by Arc. Both Crow [...]

When Soweto Kinch moved into his ‘free-styling’ rap, he elicited words from the audience that came from the letters of ‘Marsden’.  The Marsden audience, part of the arc of Pennine post hippydom that runs from Hebden Bridge, through Todmorden, and Marsden to Mossley, initially gave him ‘melifluous’, ‘artisanal’, ’sheep’, ‘dung’,  ‘energy’ and, finally, ‘Northern’.  Kinch, [...]