Reviews
The Manchester Review

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 […]

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The Manchester Review

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 […]

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The Manchester Review

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 […]

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Ian Pople

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 […]

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The Manchester Review

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, […]

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The Manchester Review

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? […]

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The Manchester Review

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 […]

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The Manchester Review

Julia Holter, Gorilla, reviewed by Luke Healey

You’ve probably heard something about Julia Holter by now. The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter’s most recent album Have You In My Wilderness (2015) landed top spot in end-of-year lists compiled by Mojo, Uncut and Piccadilly Records, and singles “Feel You”, “Silhouette” and “Everytime Boots” have been rotated on BBC radio. 2013’s Loud City Song, Holter’s first […]

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The Manchester Review

Zelda Chappel, The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat (Bare Fiction) £8.99, reviewed by Ken Evans

Zelda Chappel, The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat – (Bare Fiction, £8.99), reviewed by Ken Evans Zelda Chappell’s poems takes a jagged-edged penny to the ‘Scratch Card’ of love and relationships and never rub through more than two in a row – always there is loss, diminution, a relinquishing. She is adept at grounding yearning […]

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Lucy Burns

Steve Roggenbuck at The Eagle Inn, reviewed by Lucy Burns

As part of my current project of ‘working on anything except my PhD’, I’ve been revisiting a conference paper I gave last year. The paper was on internet poetry and cuteness (and will hopefully resurface at some point) and uses Steve Roggenbuck’s poetry and the anthology, The Yolo Pages (Boosthouse, 2014) to make a claim […]

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The Manchester Review

CRIME: Hong Kong Style season, HOME, preview and interview with Andy Willis by Laura Swift and Joel Swann

CRIME: Hong Kong Style at HOME, February – April 2016 Chinese New Year celebrations in Hong Kong usually begin and end without making international headlines, but this year was different. On the evening of February 8th, the heavy-handed policing of street vendors in Mong Kok gave rise to the violent stand-offs that are now being […]

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The Manchester Review

Lee Machell, On Paper, OBJECT / A, reviewed by Ashley McGovern

Lee Machell: On Paper, December 11 2015 – February 13 2016, OBJECT / A, Friends’ Meeting House There is something essayistic about the title of Lee Machell’s latest show at Manchester’s Object A gallery. On Paper sounds like the laconic lead-in to a short treatise on the notorious fear of the plain blank sheet that […]

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The Manchester Review

William Wantling, In the Enemy Camp: Selected Poems 1964 -1974 (Tangerine Press) £12.00, reviewed by Doug Field

William Wantling, In the Enemy Camp: Selected Poems 1964-1974 (Introduction by John Osborne, Foreword by Thurston Moore). “I can make good word music and rhyme,” declares the narrator of William Wantling’s “Poetry,” “and even sometimes take their breath away—but it always somehow turns out kind of phoney.” A veteran of the Korean War, a criminal and […]

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Ian Pople

Stephen Payne, Pattern Beyond Chance (Happenstance) £10.00

Stephen Payne Pattern Beyond Chance (Happenstance, £10.00) ‘Stephen Payne’s academic background is in psychology’ says the first line of the blurb on the back of Payne’s Happenstance collection.  And this book is quite often about the scientist as poet.  It is broken down into four sections:  Design; Word; Mind & Time – so asking the […]

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The Manchester Review

Macbeth, HOME, reviewed by Laura Swift

Macbeth, A HOME, Young Vic and Birmingham Repertory Theatre co-production in association with Lucy Guerin Inc., HOME, February 2-6 By the time Macbeth (John Heffernan) learns that his wife has died, he is already slumped against the wall. The rest of the cast stand in the shadows upstage, panting after a frenetic sequence of hypnotic […]

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The Manchester Review

A Girl is a Half Formed Thing, The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild

A Girl is a Half Formed Thing, Quay Theatre, The Lowry, February 4 2016 The debut novel by Eimear McBride was a literary cause celebre when it was first published back in 2013, having first been rejected by a number of publishers. McBride has said it took six months to write and nine years to […]

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The Manchester Review

barbarians: A Trilogy by Hofesh Shechter, HOME, reviewed by Tristan Burke

HOME, Thursday 28th January Hofesh Shechter’s barbarians is a postmodern work in the strict sense. Its dance and music are constructed by bricolage and pastiche and these serve as the hyperactive, playful backdrop against which he explores anxieties about the possibilities of making art and particularly about the difficulty of depicting love. This intellectualism is […]

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The Manchester Review

Sarah Corbett, And She Was (Pavilion) £9.99, reviewed by Annie Muir

Sarah Corbett, And She Was (Pavilion, £9.99), reviewed by Annie Muir   Whether it’s used as the refrain in the titular Talking Heads song or as the central narrative device of Genesis, the word ‘and’ holds the English language together like braces worn by teenagers to close the gaps in their teeth. In Genesis, as […]

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The Manchester Review

The Revenant (2016), dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater

When you went to see a film at The Cornerhouse you could feel secure in the fact that it had already received an important seal of approval. The Cornerhouse didn’t just show any film. It had to be considered a little bit special, and a little bit different, to make it onto the silver screen. […]

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The Manchester Review

The Hateful Eight (2016), dir. Quentin Tarantino, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater

The Hateful Eight, dir. Quentin Tarantino, HOME, January 17 2016 Few films receive the levels of interest and attention that a new Quentin Tarantino release does. Over the last couple of months you’ll have seen the images everywhere. Samuel L. Jackson and Kurt Russell standing in the snow with their guns firmly grasped in their […]

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The Manchester Review

Roseacre, HOME, reviewed by Peter Wild

Roseacre, HOME; January 15-17 I find myself in HOME: Manchester’s newest theatre-cinema-eatery, the bolder and brasher stepchild of that cultural staple, the Cornerhouse. I am sitting on the kind of chairs you find arranged in a school hall before the latest iteration of the Nativity (and it’s a full house, to the extent that we […]

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David Cooke

Matthew Sweeney, Inquisition Lane (Bloodaxe Books) £9.95, reviewed by David Cooke

Inquisition Lane is Matthew Sweeney’s eleventh collection and his second since moving to Bloodaxe with Horse Music in 2013. Both collections are substantial volumes weighing in at over ninety pages each with Inquisition Lane containing some sixty poems, while its predecessor had seventy. Normally, such copiousness would set alarm bells ringing, but with Sweeney one’s […]

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Ian Pople

Carl Phillips, Reconnaisance (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux) $23.00

Carl Phillips has long been feted as a subtle and dexterous technician.  In a New Yorker review, Dan Chiasson pushes Phillips forward as a ‘candidate for the author of the most interesting contemporary English sentences’.  A Phillips poem may consist of anything between 10 and 15 lines, each part of one or two long sentences.  Such sentences […]

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The Manchester Review

Mona Arshi, Small Hands (Pavilion Poetry) £9.99, reviewed by Ken Evans

Mona Arshi’s debut collection Small Hands won the Forward Prize for best first collection, and her relatively short poetic CV is a comet-tail of successes: Magma Competition prize 2012, joint winner of the Manchester Poetry prize 2014, an award in the Troubadour – she has traced a brilliant trajectory in a short time. Having heard her […]

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The Manchester Review

Daniel Sluman, the terrible (Nine Arches) £9.99), reviewed by Ken Evans

A blood-spatter or tainted x-ray? The vivid front cover of Daniel Sluman’s second collection from Nine Arches, the terrible, (even the title sounds cut from its meaning), alerts you that this volume deals with what Sluman describes as the ‘dark underbelly of our relatively comfortable lives.’ If the endlessly dividing cell that is contemporary poetry […]

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The Manchester Review

The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Lowry, reviewed by Annie Dickinson

The Revenger’s Tragedy, dir. Anne Thuot, The Lowry, 19-21 November Produced and performed by the Belgian physical theatre company FAST ASBL, The Revenger’s Tragedy is less a performance or even an adaptation of the Jacobean revenge tragedy of the same name than a stark anatomization of its treatment of women. The 1606 play, now generally thought […]

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The Manchester Review

Ben Aitken, Dear Bill Bryson (Not Bad Books) £9.99, reviewed by Callum Coles

Ben Aitken’s Dear Bill Bryson (Footnotes from a Small Island)* follows the titular American’s 1995 tour of this fair Isle’s quaint villages, towns, cities,  pubs, roadside cafes, bus terminals and Wigan. It is, in the words of its author, a “less funny version of the original.” As a fan of Bryson myself, I confess that […]

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Simon Haworth

Shuntarō Tanikawa, New Selected Poems trans. by William I. Elliot and Kazuo Kawamura (Carcanet Press) £12.99

Shuntarō Tanikawa’s New Selected Poems is a comprehensive, arresting and insightful survey of the Japanese poet’s career from his first collection, Ten-Billion Light Years from Solitude (1952), through to the quite recent Kokoro (2013), and many intriguing points between. In total the book covers twenty-two of Tanikawa’s immensely varied collections, with abbreviated portions from each […]

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The Manchester Review

Pomona, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Fran Slater

Pomona, dir. Alistair McDowall The Royal Exchange (October 29 – November 21) Pomona is now a famous part of Manchester. An inexplicable wasteland in the space between Manchester City Centre and Salford Quays, accessible from only a few choice entrances, it has become a place that certain people in this city are willing to fight […]

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Ian Pople

Tariq Latif, Smithereens (Arc Publications) £6.00

Tariq Latif’s three previous Arc volumes have shown considerable dexterity over a variety of subject matters.  The first of these is, clearly, that of what it means to be an Asian writer, writing in English in contemporary Britain.  His last book, The Punjabi Weddings, noted some of the aftermath of the Rushdie affair.  In the […]

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The Manchester Review

An Ape’s Progress, Manchester Literature Festival, reviewed by James David Ward

Dave McKean, introduced tonight as “the man who wears many hats”, is a constant collaborator, working with everyone from Grant Morrison to Heston Blumethal, and is best known for his longstanding partnership with Neil Gaiman. He has produced accomplished pieces across a number of art forms, from his graphic novels, to his painting, to his […]

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The Manchester Review

The Oresteia, HOME, reviewed by Peter Wild

The Oresteia / HOME / 28 October 2015 2015s third production of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia (there have been productions at the Almeida and the Globe in London) sets itself apart by running with Ted Hughes’s adaptation, which clocks in at some two hours less than the original and propels its audience through what can only […]

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The Manchester Review

Moya Cannon, Keats Lives (Carcanet) £9.99, reviewed by Annie Muir

Just as Keats himself is more famous for his untimely death than the events of his life, Keats Lives is a book primarily concerned with the continuance of lives after death. Published this year, Cannon’s fifth collection of poetry begins with a sonnet: ‘Winter View from Binn Bhriocáin’. The title immediately presents a highly symbolic […]

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The Manchester Review

1984, Northern Ballet at The Palace Theatre, reviewed by Elizabeth Mitchell

1984, Northern Ballet, The Palace Theatre, October 15 2015 As a cultural colossus of a novel, reworking 1984 will never be easy in any media. With modern ballet being better known for its abstract movement than defined storytelling, it must be one of the hardest. Although doing a better job than many others before him, […]

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The Manchester Review

Golem, HOME, reviewed by Emma Rhys

Golem, HOME, First Street, Manchester, 7–17 October 2015 Memorable tunes, exquisite performances, and stunning visuals the likes of which I’ve not seen in theatre before. Produced by performance company 1927, whose speciality is combining performance and live music with animation and film, Golem is a wonderful spectacle – entertaining and funny with a subtext of […]

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