Reviews on The Review

Lost Memory of Skin conveys the reader out of their comfort zone and into that area that all good fiction aspires to inhabit, full of challenging ideas and questions that brook no easy answers.
In the opening scene, the central protagonist, the Kid, visits a Florida library and asks to use the internet. This may not [...]

The combination of Alice Russell’s smokey tones and the South American inflected drive of Combo Barbaro proved irresistible to the packed house at Manchester’s Band on the Wall, on Friday.  Combo Barbaro put together by the Worcester-born but Colombian resident, Will ‘Quantic’ Holland, contained a Colombian percussionist, a Peruvian keyboard player, long-time Russell collaborator, Mike [...]

How to hold life in a language – it’s the poet’s task. This, Jones’s first short collection, is a good raid on the inarticulate, complete with buckets, boxes, bottles and sarcophagi within which to contain his finds. ‘It’s a matter of where you tread’ opens the first poem, which nicely contains read, the speaker going [...]

Andy Warhol: Late Self-Portraits is one of the smallest exhibitions I’ve seen recently. Being generous, it extends over two rooms of Sheffield’s Graves Gallery, but one of those rooms is in fact devoted to pictures of, and interviews with, people who knew Warhol. Nevertheless, the one room of self-portraits – paintings and photographs from the [...]

Lawrence’s play The Daughter-in-Law is widely held to be one of the most important British plays written between the 1890s and the 1950s. Productions are not exactly ten a penny, so this one by Library Theatre at the Lowry was very welcome. Though excellent in some respects it did show that we still don’t have [...]

The Jury in Cannes were obviously feeling that films should be on the slow side last year.  Having given the Palme D’Or to Terence Malick’s ‘Tree of Life’, they gave the Grand Jury Prize to this very, very slow, exquisitely shot film from Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan.  Ceylan’s film lives almost entirely in real time.  [...]

Charting the travails of a call-centre salesman suffering under a demented boss, Socrates Adams’ enviable debut takes its place in a line of bleak workplace satires that runs from ‘Bartleby’ through to Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, something like Douglas Coupland but far more surreal and far, far funnier.
The novel begins with Ian, the hapless narrator, [...]

Chad Harbach’s hefty first novel is one of the major stories of this year’s literary scene: nine years in the making, sold for the kind of sum usually reserved for celebrities, and trailing laudatory quotes from luminaries such as Jonathan Franzen and Jay McInerney. It is then, something of a surprise to discover how dull [...]

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 [...]