David Morley has had more than his fair share of prizes recently; this year the Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry for his Selected Poems. This beautifully presented pamphlet continues the writing Morley has done using vocabulary from Romani, for which Morley has made a project of bringing Romani back into the mainstream of […]
A Streetcar Named Desire, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Ruari Paton
A Streetcar Named Desire, The Royal Exchange, September 8 2016; directed by Sarah Frankcom. In Tennessee Williams’ 1947 play, a Southern belle, Blanche DuBois (Maxine Peake), is forced to move into the small and squalid New Orleans home of her sister, Stella Kowalski (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), and brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski (Ben Batt) after losing her […]
The Shawshank Redemption, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Shawshank Redemption, The Lowry, May 5 2016; adapted by Owen O’Neill and Dave Johns, directed by David Esbjornson. Hope springs eternal. Any of Stephen King’s constant readers (as the author himself likes to call them) will recognise that three-word phrase. It is the mantra by which Andy Dufresne, protagonist of King’s 1982 novella […]
Now Listen To Me Very Carefully, HOME, reviewed by William Simms
Bootworks Theatre presents Now Listen To Me Very Carefully, HOME; June 7 2016. Now Listen To Me Very Carefully charts Bootworks Theatre Artistic Director Andy Robert’s self-diagnosed obsession with James Cameron’s 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgement Day. According to Robert’s stage persona, he has seen the film 238 times, and upon entering the theatre he […]
The Poems of Basil Bunting, (Faber) £30.00, reviewed by Ian Pople
The Poems of Basil Bunting edited with and introduction and commentary by Don Share. In 1952, Basil Bunting visited T. S. Eliot with a view to getting Eliot to publish his Poems 1950. This volume had been published in America by one of Pound’s acolytes, Dallam Flynn, although Bunting had little involvement with the book, […]
Love Supreme Jazz Festival 2016, reviewed by Ian Pople
Love Supreme Jazz Festival 2016: Glynde Place, July 1-3. Suggesting that Love Supreme drifts further and further from its ‘jazz fest’ status is a bit like complaining that cats are fickle, or that policemen keep getting younger. But the auguries weren’t good: Brexit, the wettest June on record, the M25 at its customary crawl past a […]
Leabhar na hAthghabhála, Poems of Repossession, ed. by Louis de Paor (Bloodaxe Books) £15.00
Louis de Paor’s bilingual Leabhar na hAthghabhála, Poems of Repossession, is the first major anthology of Irish language poetry for a quarter of a century since Dermot Bolger’s Bright Wave: An Tonn Gheal (Raven Arts Press, 1986) and An Crann Faoi Bhláth, The Flowering Tree (Wolfhound Press, 1991), edited by Declan Kiberd and Gabriel […]
Amali Rodrigo, Lotus Gatherers, reviewed by Ian Pople
Amali Rodrigo, Lotus Gatherers,(Bloodaxe Books, £9.95). The blurb to Amali Rodrigo’s first collection, Lotus Gatherers, comments ‘the lotus flower embodies the promise of purity and transcendence because it rises clear out of the muddy mire of its origins. It represents both abstract realms and the concrete phenomenal world. The lotus root is also an aphrodisiac.’ […]
Adam Buxton at Manchester Opera House, reviewed by Ed Chapman
Live at the Opera House – with Adam Buxton, Manchester Opera House; May 25 2016. This event promised one of those hard-to-believe, all-star line-ups that only ever happen in London. And so it proved, with three-quarters of the bill changing. While the reconfigured line-up may not have had quite the star power originally offered, this […]
The Night Watch, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Night Watch, The Royal Exchange; May 19, 2016 (Photograph by Richard Davenport) The Night Watch, in Sarah Waters’ 2006 novel at least, investigates a range of important societal injustices that existed in England around the time of the Second World War. The novel does a thorough job of documenting the issues faced by conscientious […]
Carlos Acosta: A Classical Farewell, The Lowry, reviewed by Hazel Shaw
Carlos Acosta: A Classical Farewell, The Lowry; May 13, 2016 One of the most striking things about this performance on Carlos Acosta’s farewell tour is how little of it he spent on-stage. Not that I’m complaining, the evening was ably filled by the company of Cuban dancers touring with Acosta, and every one of the […]
The Book of Khartoum: a city in short fiction, eds. Raph Cormack & Max Shmookler (Comma Press) £9.99, reviewed by Ian Pople
The Khartoum I knew in the early ‘80s, was a dry, sprawling low-rise city, where the dominant mode of transport was still the horse and cart. The Hilux pick-up bus, known locally as a ‘box’ had started to become more commonplace, bouncing over the vaguely tarmacked, sandy roads that ran even in the city centre. […]
Twelfth Night, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
Twelfth Night, HOME; May 11 2016 There are a few ways to do Shakespeare. Fans of the bard will be familiar with a fair few of them. From the standard stick to the script and stick the actors in clothes that look a bit like those they wore in the 1500s, to the modernise the […]
An Evening with Chris Packham, The Lowry, reviewed by Emma Rhys
An Evening with Chris Packham: Growing Up Wild, The Lowry; May 9, 2016 I arrived at the Lowry early and was lucky enough to spot Chris Packham in his natural environment – or at least, natural to most of his species – eating lunch at the Tower Coffee Shop. He didn’t notice me. Perhaps if […]
Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century , HOME, reviewed by Şima İmşir Parker
Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century, Home, 30 April 2016 – 3 July 2016. “The melodramatic body is a body seized with meaning” writes Peter Brooks in “Melodrama, Body, Revolution.” Body is not only a sight branded with meanings and symbolism, but also a sight where resistance becomes possible through the […]
CRIME: Hong Kong Style season, HOME, reviewed by Laura Swift and Joel Swann
CRIME: Hong Kong Style season, HOME, February 4 – April 7, 2016 HOME’s ambitious season Crime: Hong Kong Style featured some twenty films over the course of two months, including films ranging from forgotten classics like The Swallow Thief, to international blockbusters such as Police Story, to several UK premieres. The season can be judged […]
Anthony Caleshu, The Victor Poems (Shearsman) £9.95, reviewed by Ian Pople
Anthony Caleshu’s extraordinary book, set in polar regions, appears at first glance to riff on two other poets, T.S. Eliot and W.S. Graham: T.S. Eliot for those lines from ‘What the Thunder said’ in which the two walking ‘up the white road’ appear to have a ghostly third walking with them. In Eliot’s notes for […]
Melos Press pamphlets, reviewed by Ian Pople
A.C.Bevan, The Encyclopaedist; Nicolas Murray, The Migrant Ship; Jo Dixon, A Woman in the Queue, (Melos Press, £5.00). A.C.Bevan’s The Encyclopaedist is subtitled ‘A ready reference in 16 volumes’. The contents page somewhat belies that subtitle as the sixteen poems in the pamphlet are each given an alphabetical designation, beginning with A-AU, and ending with […]
Kate Tempest in conversation with Dave Haslam, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
Kate Tempest in conversation with Dave Haslam, HOME, April 17 2016 Something feels a little bit special before the event even gets going. There’s a buzz in the room. You look around as Kate Tempest’s Everybody Down plays through the speakers and you see that the audience is made up of an interesting mixture of […]
Always (Crashing) season, HOME, reviewed by Tristan Burke
Always (Crashing) season, HOME, March 18-31, 2016 The gap in the literary landscape left by J.G. Ballard’s death in 2009 is still very much with us. He was probably the single most important post-war English novelist, and he opened up the scope and style of the English novel far beyond the sentimental, bourgeois realism that […]
King Lear, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Annie Dickinson
King Lear, The Royal Exchange, dir. Michael Buffong, April 1 – May 7, 2016 With a play like King Lear, William Shakespeare’s formidable tragedy of madness, a divided kingdom, and children turned against their parents, expectations are inevitably going to be high, and director Michael Buffong’s co-production with Talawa Theatre, the Royal Exchange, and Birmingham […]
Irvine Welsh, The Dancehouse, reviewed by Fran Slater
Irvine Welsh in conversation with Kevin Sampson, April 3 2016 (Photograph of Irvine Welsh & Kevin Sampson, copyright Manchester Literature Festival) Entering The Dancehouse on this wet Sunday evening was a strange experience. We were here for a reading from a new novel and an onstage interview with its author, but the size of the […]
L’elisir d’amore, Opera North at The Lowry, reviewed by Ashley McGovern
L’elisir d’amore, The Lowry, March 17 2016 The collaboration between harried librettist Felice Romani and the celebrated composer Gaetano Donizetti resulted in a trio of operas about three wildly different women. Overall, they seemed to favour melodrama, beginning with a tragic Tudor mistress in Anna Bolena (1830) and finishing on a lusty high with the […]
Alessia Cara, Sound Control, reviewed by Marli Roode
Alessia Cara at Sound Control, March 24 2016 After the gig, we went to a bar. I was worried about how I’d write about what’d just happened. My friend Zoe was worried about the state of the world, about the youth of today, about being out of touch and over the hill. She was worried […]
The Beanfield, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Beanfield, April 2 2016 Have you heard of the Battle of the Beanfield? I don’t mind admitting that, until last night, it wasn’t something that I was aware of. Some of you will be agreeing with me, I’m sure; while others, those who do know about the terrible events that unfolded in a field […]
The Herbal Bed, The Lowry, reviewed by Ruari Paton
The Herbal Bed, dir. James Dacre The Lowry, 30th March 2016 In the summer of 1613 Susanna Hall (Emma Lowndes), the daughter of William Shakespeare and wife of local doctor John Hall (Jonathan Guy Lewis), is publicly accused by her husband’s former student Jack Lane (Matt Whitchurch) of having an affair with close family friend […]
Rosie Jackson, The Light Box (Cultured Llama) £10.00
Rosie Jackson The Light Box Cultured Llama £10.00 The Light Box is a very handsome book. The cover features one of Stanley Spencer’s Resurrections and the print is good and clear with very little bleed over the pages. The poems inside are equally handsome and well written and Spencer features in those. Spencer put […]
Mariah Carey, Manchester Arena, reviewed by Marli Roode
Mariah Carey, March 18 2016, Manchester Arena (Photograph by David La Chapelle) Mariah is late. There is no support act – who is worthy of supporting Mariah? – and so we wait. So far, everything about the night reminds me of a hen do. Or, more accurately, a parody of a hen do on a […]
Tony Curtis, Approximately in the Key of C (Arc Publications) £8.09, reviewed by Peter Viggers
Tony Curtis Approximately in the Key of C (Arc Publications) Tony Curtis was born in Dublin, his latest collection Approximately in the Key of C, is a work of seeming ease. The key of C is thought to be the simplest of keys because it has no sharps and no flats, though Chopin apparently regarded the scale as […]
The Encounter, HOME, reviewed by Laura Swift
The Encounter, Complicite/Simon McBurney, HOME, March 17th 2016 In 1969, the National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre travels deep into the Amazon rainforest, alone, to find and document the Mayoruna people, a nomadic tribe who, in 1969, have had barely any contact with the rest of the world. In his eagerness to document them, Loren follows […]
Così fan tutte, Opera North at The Lowry, reviewed by Emma Rhys
Così fan tutte, The Lowry, Salford Quays, 16–18 March 2016 Così fan tutte – the politically incorrect title translated variously as ‘Women Are Like That’, ‘They’re All the Same’, or the preferable, ‘The School for Lovers’ – is an Italian opera composed by Mozart in 1790 to a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. Commissioned by […]
Karthika Nair, Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata (Arc) £12.99, reviewed by Ian Pople
London has just been through one of its public engagements with the Mahabharata. Thirty years after his acclaimed nine-hour version of the original text, Peter Brook has just brought a short play called ‘Battle’ to the Young Vic; the reviews were very mixed. In January, at London’s Round House, the choreographer Akram Khan staged his […]
Endgame at HOME, reviewed by Tristan Burke
Thu 25 Feb 2016 – Sat 12 Mar 2016 There is a moment in Endgame where Clov, the worn out, abused servant of the imperious Hamm, looks through a telescope at the audience and announces that he can see ‘A multitude…in transports…of joy’. The joke isn’t quite that the play is so deathly boring, miserable, […]
Husbands and Sons, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Peter Wild
Husbands and Sons, dir. Marianne Elliott, The Royal Exchange, 23 February 2016 Tha knows, doesn’t tha? What to expect from Derek Herbert Lawrence. Tha knows. Cloth caps. Mining towns. Put upon lasses with frownin, frowzy faces. Aye, tha knows. Tha knows what life is like on’t hard edge. Tha knows what it’s like, doesn’t tha? […]
GoGo Penguin, Band on the Wall, reviewed by Lydia Walker
“Listening to jazz is not just recognising Gillespie or Coltrane, it’s recognising the philosophy of collective reinvention…and becoming part of it.” Funnily enough, I hear this quote by New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff on BBC Radio 6 the morning I am anticipating watching GoGo Penguin’s sell-out hometown show: one of two consecutive sold […]