Xi Chuan and Jennifer Lee Tsai at the Manchester Literature Festival This Saturday at the Anthony Burgess Foundation I had the opportunity to hear the poems of Xi Chuan, who is currently a professor at Beijing Normal University and Jennifer Lee Tsai, a fellow of the national poetry mentoring scheme, The Complete Works III. The event […]
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Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinene, with Gemma Cairney, Manchester Literature Festival at the Central Library, Oct 12th 2018, reviewed by Christine Walker
Review: Slay In Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible, at the Central Library The Central Library, on St Peter’s Square, Manchester was set to host, as part of the Manchester Literature Festival, a night with the young and well-received authors of Slay In Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible, Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinene. The […]
Zaffar Kunial, Richard Scott & Hannah Sullivan at the IABF, Manchester Literature Festival, Oct 13th, reviewed by Suzi Clark
Faber New Poets: Zaffar Kunial, Richard Scott & Hannah Sullivan The International Anthony Burgess foundation saw a great turn out for the Faber New Poets event: a stunning book launch for the work of new voices in poetry, celebrated as part of the Manchester Literature Festival. Unfortunately, only three of the poets were able to […]
24 Stories with Kathy Burke and others, MLF at the Dancehouse, reviewed by David Adamson, The Dancehouse Theatre, 10th October 2018
Review: 24 Stories with Kathy Burke and others, Manchester Literary Festival When catastrophes such as the Grenfell Tower fire happen, in the aftermath news reports tend to describe them as ‘an unspeakable tragedy’. While that adjective is fitting in regards to the trauma of the affected and the difficulty in describing such horror, there […]
A Celebration of Muriel Spark, with Jackie Kay and Alan Taylor, Manchester Literature Festival at Cosmo Rodewald Theatre, Centre for New Writing
The Scottish writer Jackie Kay is third modern Makar, the Scottish poet laureate, whose work is known for its humour and exuberance. Who better to celebrate that other grand dame of Scottish letters, Muriel Spark? Kay was joined on stage at the Cosmo Rodewald campus venue on Tuesday by literary journalist and Spark biographer Alan […]
Nicolai Houm and Arno Camenisch, Manchester Literature Festival at IABF
In the redbrick engine house at the Anthony Burgess Foundation we find Norway’s ‘Most American Author’ and one of Switzerland’s most widely translated novelists. They are both mountain men: they ski, they snowboard, they go to the mountains for isolation and tranquillity, but also to procrastinate. For Nicolai Houm and Arno Camenisch, skiing is ‘the […]
National Theatre’s Macbeth | The Lowry
Macbeth | The Lowry | October 4th, 2018 Macbeth, like many of Shakespeare’s tragedies, is known for its brutal deaths. Rufus Norris’s National Theatre production of Macbeth, which has started a UK tour this week in The Lowry, Salford, after a run in London earlier this year, gives the audience its fair share of brutal […]
David Crosby | Palace Theatre | September 15th
David Crosby | Palace Theatre | Manchester | 15 September, 2018 David Crosby, former Byrd, formerly of Crosby, Stills and Nash (and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young), is, possibly thanks to the fact that many of his former band mates are no longer talking to him, these days touring with his son, James Raymond, Canadian […]
Nick Laird | Feel Free | reviewed by Gurnaik Johal
Nick Laird | Feel Free | Faber & Faber £14.99 There’s a SoundCloud recording of Nick Laird reading ‘Feel Free’ that I stream once in a while when I can’t sleep. It’s about a parent on night-feed duty, half-awake, half-dreaming. Listening to the reading, the rhythms and rhyme create a kind of lulling effect and […]
Peter Green’s Translation of Homer’s The Odyssey | reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Homer: The Odyssey, trans. by Peter Green | University of California Press £24.00 Historian, translator of Greek and Latin poetry and, in former lives, wartime serviceman in the Far East, journalist and historical novelist, Peter Green is the Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. His translation of The […]
The HandleBards’ Twelfth Night | Ordsall Hall | reviewed by Laura Ryan
The HandleBards’ Twelfth Night Ordsall Hall, Salford | July 26th Two words in particular tend to strike fear into the heart of any introverted theatre-goer: audience participation. It was hinted before the commencement of the first act of this rather raucous rendition of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night that some of us would be called upon to […]
Acid Mothers Temple | Bluedot Festival July 22nd | reviewed by Ronan Long
Acid Mothers Temple | Bluedot Festival | July 22nd 2018 One of the stranger acts in the shadow of the telescope this weekend was Acid Mothers Temple, a group that resolutely defies style, genre and most other standards of classification in popular music. Formed in 1995, Acid Mothers Temple are a group of experimental musicians mainly […]
Wolf Alice | Etihad Stadium | June 19th
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 […]
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 […]