Wolf Alice | Etihad Stadium | June 19th Wolf Alice is hardly what you would call an opening act, but then the Foo Fighters aren’t just any band to open for. Following West Yorkshire indie darlings The Cribs, Wolf Alice played an hour-long set for the some 60,000 fans and small flock of birds that […]
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War Horse | The Lowry
War Horse | The Lowry | 16 – 30 June 2018 After 8 years in London’s West End and several sold out tours across the UK, the National Theatre’s production of War Horse has undoubtedly become a British phenomenon. Part of the story’s charm is that it relies on a heavy dose of nostalgia for […]
The Drill | HOME
The Drill | HOME | 15–16 June 2018 Do you know how to save a life? Do you know how to administer CPR when all around you are losing their heads and blaming it on you? Whether a rehearsal or the real thing, The Drill serves as a reminder that it may take more than […]
David Calcutt, The last of the light is not the last of the light, reviewed by Ken Evans
The last of the light is not the last of the light by David Calcutt, Fair Acre Press: £9.99 David Calcutt’s first full collection from small, independent press Fair Acre, is pre-occupied with rites of passage, and above all, death, and the transformative power it thrusts upon us. The book opens with a quote from […]
Happy Days | Royal Exchange | Samuel Beckett
Happy Days | Royal Exchange | May 25th – June 23rd We find ourselves in the Royal Exchange, in the company of Maxine Peake again, having seen her Hamlet, her Miss Julie, her Skriker, her Queens of the Coal Age. For Beckett’s Happy Days, we find her buried, at first, up to her middle, and […]
Swan Lake / Loch na hEala | Lowry Theatre: Week 53
Week 53 | The Lowry | Swan Lake / Loch na hEala | Michael Keegan-Dolan & Teac Damsa Swan Lake / Loch na ehEala won the Irish Times Theatre Award in 2017, and came to the Lowry as part of the 12-day Week 53 ‘Festival for the Curious’. Michael Keegan-Dolan is considered a leader in […]
Long Day’s Journey Into Night, reviewed by Sima Imsir Parker
Long Day’s Journey Into Night | HOME The famous first sentence from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina has perhaps been repeated too many times already, ‘”Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Nonetheless, it is almost impossible not to remember when thinking about Eugene O’Neill’s prime work, Long Day’s Journey into Night. Perhaps due to autobiographical details of […]
Richard Scott, Soho, reviewed by Nell Osborne
Richard Scott | Soho | Faber & Faber Richard Scott’s debut poetry book, Soho, comes after his pamphlet Wound won the 2016 Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets. Whilst reading it on the bus, I overheard a woman tell her friend that she hopes her baby son will ‘turn out gay’ so they can ‘watch […]
Of Mice & Men at 02 Ritz
Of Mice & Men | 02 Ritz | April 23rd Of Mice & Men, on tour round Britain at the moment, are a fairly new, high energy, American metalcore quartet – not, as I originally thought, a staging of John Steinbeck’s classic novel of the same name (in my defence, Of Mice and Men was […]
Araf, dir. Didem Pekün, reviewed by Dr. Clara Dawson
Stills from ‘Araf’, courtesy of artist, 2018. Araf | Berlinale Film Festival | Forum Expanded For the 13th year of its running, the Forum Expanded of Berlinale (14-26 February) took the title ‘A Mechanism Capable of Changing itself’, inviting expressions and explorations from documentary filmmakers of the specific agency of cinema. The curatorial team consisted […]
Miss Saigon at Palace Theatre
Miss Saigon / The Palace Theatre / Manchester Miss Saigon is well known for its gigantic set-pieces and Manchester’s Palace Theatre stage does not disappoint in delivering a large dose of razzle dazzle for this revival tour production. Big numbers. Great songs. Fantastic costumes. Impressive lighting and set design. Miss Saigon has a lot to […]
Embrace at Manchester Ritz
Embrace / Manchester Ritz / 31 March 2018 You stay around long enough, someone will call you a survivor, as if you’ve made it through something and come out the other side, scarred and battleworn and all the more impressive for it. Embrace formed in 1990 – if you can believe that – although they […]
Opera North’s Un Ballo in Maschera
Un Ballo in Maschera at The Lowry, Salford Saturday, March 10th I had first seen Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball) during the hedonistic days of my Erasmus year in France, spookily almost exactly five years ago to the day. For a student, the cost of a night of culture in the faded […]
Opera North’s Don Giovanni
Don Giovanni at the Lowry, Salford Wednesday, 7 March 2018 Opera North’s staging of Mozart’s Don Giovanni is a charged mixture of moving parts, pared down scenery with dramatic lighting and comic puppetry. Madeleine Boyd’s set plays with stages within stages and frames within frames that create movement, depth, and distance that leaves just enough […]
Feel Free, Zadie Smith, reviewed by Gurnaik Johal
Feel Free, Zadie Smith, Pengiun Random House In her second collection of essays, Feel Free, Zadie Smith proves once again to be an essential writer of our times. The wide-ranging subject matter of the book shows Smith as an acute observer of the world and an astute critic of culture and art. Each piece, whether […]
The Final Year, dir. Greg Barker, reviewed by James Chonglong Gu
Aired at HOME MCR, the on-the-fly documentary The Final Year, directed by Greg Barker, provides us with an unprecedentedly intimate insider’s look at the inner workings of the Obama administration in its last months; the not-so-distant past that gave way to the new Trump-era. In 2008, when the exhilarating news broke that Barack Hussein Obama […]
The Post, dir. Steven Spielberg, reviewed by David Hartley
With the current political pressures being exerted on news media in the US, cinematic comfort-blanket Steven Spielberg seems super-delighted to have emerged with such a timely film. In interviews, he’s pitched The Post as a rallying cry for the embattled news media of today; the posters shouting STREEP and HANKS like they are totemic warriors […]
Glass Mountain at Jimmy’s, reviewed by Tessa Harris
Glass Mountain, at Jimmy’s, February 11th, Manchester Sunday night at Jimmy’s was unmistakably northern. Classy acts with interesting sounds, all four bands were worth braving the sleet for. Headliners Glass Mountain (Bradford they told us) were preceded by Shallow Waters from Wigan, Violet Contours from York, and Dakota Avenue from Salford. While Jimmy’s wasn’t packed, […]
#Me Too Anthology, edited by Deborah Alma, reviewed by Ken Evans
#MeToo Anthology: A Women’s Poetry Anthology, editor Deborah Alma, (Fairacre Press). In Bernard MacLaverty’s novel, Midwinter Break, the author describes a tour bus ride to Buchenwald concentration camp. A wasp buzzes down the hot bus with shut windows. None of the tourists – pensive, afraid even – dare raise a hand to swat it, sensitised […]
Darkest Hour, dir. Joe Wright, reviewed by David Hartley
Joe Wright’s biopic of Winston Churchill comes along at a sticky moment for this troubled isle as we slip slowly but assuredly towards the uncertain shadows of our post-Brexit landscape. Our national identity, such as it is, feels thrillingly buoyant for some, and never more soulless or hollow for many others. So, how might our […]
Robert Desnos, Surrealist, Lover, Resistant, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Robert Desnos, Surrealist, Lover, Resistant, translated and introduced by Timothy Adѐs (Arc Publications, 2018) £19.99 pbk Others will review this sumptuous volume in the light of a knowledge of Desnos’s poetry. I can only comment on how it strikes someone almost completely new to his writing. What you want from a translation will partly depend […]
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri dir. Martin McDonagh, reviewed by David Hartley
With the proclamation of its title and the weathered defiance of Frances McDormand’s thousand-yard stare, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a film which demands attention. And it has garnered it, both from the critics and the Academy, as it edges ahead as the Oscars’ frontrunner, and deservedly so, perhaps. It’s by no means an […]
Conor O’Callaghan, Live Streaming, reviewed by Joe Carrick-Varty
Conor O’Callaghan, Live Streaming (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2017) Live Streaming (2017), O’Callaghan’s fifth collection of poems comes off the back of a six-year poetic absence in which he published a novel, Nothing on Earth (2016). Moving away from the self-reflexively metaphorical poems in Fiction (2005) such as ‘Coventry’ and ‘Gloves’, this book is more […]
Lachlan Mackinnon, Doves, reviewed by Maryam Hessavi
Lachlan Mackinnon, Doves (Faber, £14.99). Doves is Mackinnon’s fifth collection of poetry. Following on from his last collection Small Hours, shortlisted in 2010 for the Forward Prize for Poetry, his new work marks a departure from a previously more delicate style. Doves is more forthright. In its style it is concerned most noticeably with form […]
Samuel Lee, A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore, reviewed by Natasha Stallard
Samuel Lee, A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore (Math Paper Press, $16.00). What’s the difference between a supermarket in Singapore and New Haven, Connecticut? In Samuel Lee’s debut collection ‘A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore’, the Singaporean poet and Yale student wanders the aisles of his native city along with the organic stores […]
Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lord and Commons, reviewed by Chad Campbell
Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lord and Commons, (Faber & Faber, £12.99). Ishion Hutchinson’s second book, House of Lords and Commons, was published by FSG in America, and released here, in the U.K., by Faber & Faber in November. The book’s reputation precedes it: winner of a National Book Critic Circle Award and top of sever […]
Collabro, The Bridgewater Hall, reviewed by Simon Haworth
Collabro, with support from Phillipa Hanna & special guest Carly Paoli), The Bridgewater Hall, 30 November 2017. Collabro arrive at the Bridgewater Hall towards the end of their third long UK tour. Since wining Britain’s Got Talent in 2014 the group have toured internationally and released three highly successful albums (Stars (2014), Act Two (2015) […]
BBC Philharmonic at the Bridgewater Hal, reviewed by Simon Haworth
BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Ludovic Morlot; The Bridgewater Hall, 25 November 2017. The world premiere of Arlene Sierra’s Nature Symphony tonight offers the audience a rare opportunity to hear the composer’s work performed in the UK. Brought up in Miami and New York but now resident in London, Sierra has collaborated with Ludovic Morlot and […]
The Florida Project dir. Sean Baker, reviewed by David Hartley
The latest in an emerging genre of a kind of post-Obama American social realism, The Florida Project lands us smack bang in the sticky heat of a Floridan summer in the run-down outskirts of the Magic Kingdom. Disneyland is a looming presence kept mostly off screen, but gaudily implied by the structures of our Orlando […]
Ian Marriott, The Hollow Bone, reviewed by Ian Pople
Ian Marriott, The Hollow Bone (Cinnamon Press, £8.99). The blurb on Ian Marriott’s first book does a good job of summing up the contents, ‘Meditative, spare and precise…suffused with a vital, shamanic sensibility.’ Marriott’s poems are often very short, with short lines in the kind of free verse which is happy to have different line […]
Shanta Acharya, Imagine: New and Selected Poems, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Shanta Acharya, Imagine: New and Selected Poems (Harper Collins Publishers India, INR 399). Shanta Acharya was born and educated in India, where she completed an MA in English before writing a DPhil on Emerson at Oxford and becoming a visiting scholar at Harvard. She’s worked for the investment bankers Morgan Stanley in London. She’s written […]
Metamorphosis, The Lowry, reviewed by Simon Haworth
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (Splendid Productions/Kerry Frampton), The Lowry, 16 November 2017. Nobody is sure whether the performance has started. The house lights are still on. There is generic light jazz muzak playing through the sound system at a tasteful volume. The three actors, if they are the actors, are waving and pointing at the […]
Jennifer Egan at the Manchester Central Library, reviewed by Henry Cockburn
Jennifer Egan, hosted by Katie Popperwell at the Manchester Central Library. It starts out like any other highbrow reading. Lights down low, jazz, a room full of chattering literati (some of them refusing to take off their fedoras). Then Egan and Popperwell walk out and…silence. We’re meant to be clapping right? The audience are looking […]
Sir András Schiff at the Bridgewater Hall, reviewed by Simon Haworth
Sir András Schiff, The Bridgewater Hall (International Concert Series), 13 November 2017. As one of the leading interpreters of Bach’s (amongst many other composers’) keyboard works, Sir András Schiff needs little to no introduction. His is a career littered with awards, recognition, residencies, influential recordings and impressive performances throughout the world. Playing in Manchester as […]
The Hallé at the Bridgewater Hall, reviewed by Simon Haworth
The Hallé at the Bridgewater Hall, conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth; 9 November 2017. Tonight’s concert, with the all-purpose Ryan Wigglesworth at the helm as the Hallé’s Principal Guest Conductor, offers two works by Mozart, namely the Aria for Soprano, Piano and Orchestra ‘Ch’io mi scordi di te?…Non temer, amato bene’ (K. 505) and Symphony No […]