Manchester’s 24:7 theatre festival, which showcases new writing, directing and acting talent, is now in its fifth year, this time staging an impressive 21 hour-long performances across its seven days. For writing and directing team Claire Urwin and Guy Jones it represents a second opportunity to stage their single act play No Wonder in Manchester […]
Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pro Eto – That’s What trans. by Larisa Gureyeva & George Hyde (Arc Publications)
The eyes of Mayakovsky’s lover and muse, Lily Brik, bore out at you from the cover of this important new edition of Mayakovsky’s long poem, Pro Eto. Lily Brik occurs elsewhere in the book; in the text, which she haunts, but also in the astonishing photomontages for the poem by Alexander Rodchenko, which are published […]
Jerichow, (2008) dir. Christian Petzold
(Edinburgh International Film Festival) German feature Jerichow made its UK debut at 2009’s Edinburgh International Film Festival on 19 June, and is arguably more appealing and straightforwardly enjoyable than many of the more high-profile premieres screened there so far. Benno Furmann plays brooding ex-soldier Thomas, deep in debt and with few prospects, who moves into […]
Away We Go, (2009) dir. Sam Mendes
(International premiere, Edinburgh International Film Festival) Coming just four months after the UK release of his last film, Revolutionary Road, Away We Go is something of a departure for respected film and theatre director Sam Mendes. The compositional beauty and sinister, or, at least, restless, undertone for which he is renowned have been replaced with […]
Katyn (2007), dir. Andrzej Wajda
The iconic beginning to this film – Polish refugees run from both sides onto a bridge, one side running from the Russians, the others running from the Germans, and the equally iconic, relentless slaughter which end the film, will be well known to anyone who has looked at the reviews of this remarkable document. Equally […]
Basil Bunting, Briggflatts (Bloodaxe Books) £12.00
In 1979, Donald Davie wrote that ‘Briggflatts is where English poetry has got to, it is what English poets must assimilate and go on from.’ Why hasn’t that happened? One reason for the critical occlusion of Bunting is that late-modernism itself can be a bit of a cul-de-sac. On the DVD that accompanies the text, […]
Manic Street Preachers, Venue Cymru Llandudno, 26 May 09
One of the great things about living in Manchester is its closeness to contrasting day-trip destinations. So when the trend for big bands to tour less obvious, often seaside, locations offered the option of The Manic Street Preachers plus afternoon tea in genteel Llandudno, I didn’t take much convincing. Arriving just as the band took the […]
Mark Wallinger curates The Russian Linesman; Leeds City Art Gallery
In our era of shows curated with an exhaustive, almost claustrophobic, focus on a single artist or art movement, Mark Wallinger’s show The Russian Linesman at Leeds Art Gallery is a rare beast. Touring after a stint at the Hayward in London, the show takes in sculpture, painting, drawing and video art, and ranges in […]
Reality Hack: Hidden Manchester, Urbis, Manchester
Urbis’s latest city-themed exhibition offers a peak at the startling beauty of some of Manchester’s neglected vistas. Photographer Andrew Paul Brooks has sought high and low for scenes of enchantment tightly woven into the city’s fabric. The result is an impressively presented, if slightly blinkered, survey of hidden Manchester. With his camera, Brooks has documented […]
James Fleming, Cold Blood (Jonathan Cape) £16.99
Ian Fleming is reputed to have said that he wrote the James Bond books for warm-blooded, heterosexuals to read on trains. In Cold Blood, his nephew James Fleming takes that one step further by writing a book that will not only appeal to the same readership, but whose subject is warm-blooded, heterosexual and actually on […]
Encounters at the End of the World (2007), dir. Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog’s new film is a documentary about workers on a scientific research base in Antarctica. It has many of the hallmarks of his previous documentary work, including stunning panoramic shots, the vaguely creepy off-camera voice that sounds like it could be enticing Hansel and Gretel to come into the gingerbread house, and, of course, […]
John Updike, Endpoint and Other Poems (Hamish Hamilton) £12.99
The cover of John Updike’s final book bears two phots of the author: the one on the inside of the fly leaf is taken by his wife Martha, and shows a smiling Updike, presumably caught in an unguarded moment of familial intimacy; the Jill Krementz photo that forms the cover is a more familiar Updikean […]
A Number, Caryl Churchill, The Library Theatre
Caryl Churchill, A Number, The Library Theatre until May 9 Caryl Churchill’s 2002 play deals with a contentious issue, human cloning, but is as interested in making cloning into a metaphor as it is in ethics and science. The play’s success depends on a difficult balance between argument and feeling, exploring ideas and manipulating […]
Duplicity (2009), dir. Tony Gilroy
With a name like Duplicity and two big Hollywood leads, this film makes no secret of its genre. A spy thriller aimed squarely at a mainstream audience I approached it with some apprehension, being renowned for my failure to follow recent Bonds, Bournes and even Batmen. A couple of encouraging reviews and the fact that […]
The Burning Plain (2008), dir. Guillermo Arriaga
There are some writers whose work is identifiable within the space of a couple of sentences. Guillermo Arriaga makes his directorial debut with The Burning Plain, but it’s a film that’s also almost instantly identifiable, bearing as it does the same hallmarks as the numerous films he’s written. Anybody who’s seen Babel, The Three Burials […]
Glenn Brown at Tate Liverpool; George Always, Portraits of George Melly by Maggi Hambling, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
The paintings in room one of Glenn Brown’s exhibition at Tate Liverpool are versions of sci-fi sublime: science fiction landscapes with cities on planets, swirling gas-clouds and nebulae with space stations. These are huge wall-sized canvases; often enlarged from small air-brush cartoons in sci-fi magazines. Brown’s debts to the romantic sublime of John Martin are […]
Glen Duncan, A Day and A Night and A Day (Simon & Schuster) £14.99, 241pp
The time of Glen Duncan’s new novel A Day and a Night and a Day is post-9/11 and America is nervy. Augustus Rose, a mixed race sixties radical, has infiltrated a group of extremists in the hope of avenging the death of his lover Selina in a fictional 2002 bomb in El Corte Ingles in […]
Rodchenko & Popova, Tate Modern, London
The posters for last year’s Royal Academy exhibition From Russia bore a Matisse painting as their crowd-grabbing image. In doing so, they were, unwittingly or not, reflecting the unspoken theory that most of the decent art in Russia is actually non-Russian, the spoils of World War Two. Russians, it seems, are allowed to do novels, […]
Tobias Hill, The Hidden (Faber and Faber) £12.99
This fourth novel by poet and novelist, Tobias Hill is as illuminated and finely crafted as you would expect from a writer who can move between both forms with equal success. This is a novel that delivers, perhaps too well: one is conscious of the writerly-ness of this, and at times the technical joins and […]
Macbeth, The Royal Exchange
Taut, precise and horrifically exacting; an up-to-the minute rendition of this bloodiest of plays, where the weird sisters are the ghosts of young women raped and murdered in the opening scenes and McDuff’s Nintendo playing son is slaughtered, real time, over the kitchen sink as his mother watches. She fights and screams as we know […]
Let the Right One In – Låt den rätte komma in (2008), dir. Tomas Alfredson
For many years, two things associated with Sweden – the prospect of assembling flat pack furniture, and anything to do with ABBA – have been enough to make me break out into a cold sweat. So I approached the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In with some trepidation, especially as the average horror […]
L’Empreinte de l’Ange – Mark of an Angel (2008), dir. Safy Nebbou
L’Empreinte de l’Ange is due to be released in the UK on May 22nd this year, but it was shown on 16th March as part of Bradford International Film Festival’s programme of Premieres and Previews. Billed as ‘one of the coming year’s outstanding French dramas’, the film features outstanding performances from Catherine Frot (The Page […]
Mother, Mine (2008), dir. Susan Everett
Mother, Mine is a short film by Leeds-based director Susan Everett. In November, it won the ‘Best Yorkshire Short Award’ as part of the Leeds International Film Festival. Now, it is showing at the Cubby Broccoli Cinema in Bradford as one of six films shortlisted for the Shine Short Film Award (part of the Bradford […]
Three Monkeys (2008), dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan
On the eve of an election, politician Servet (Ercan Keysal), falls asleep at the wheel and kills a pedestrian. He asks his driver, Eyup (Yavuz Bingol) who wasn’t with him at the time, to take the fall. So Eyup goes to gaol with the promise of his salary paid every month, and a lump sum […]
The Flying Troutmans, Miriam Toews
The Flying Troutmans is a quest novel in which the narrator, dysfunctional Hattie, takes her dysfunctional niece Thebes, and dysfunctional nephew Logan, on a journey in a van across America in a bid to find their dysfunctional father Cherkis, because their dysfunctional mother Min, has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. That’s a lot […]
The Pillowman, Leicester Curve
“Writers stopped telling you stories but instead told you how their stories would be told; architects made buildings where all the plumbing was on the outside,” so observed Martin Amis recently concerning postmodernism’s tendency to draw attention to its own artifice, “this turned out not to be such a productive side road for literature.” […]
Six Lithuanian Poets, ed. Eugenijus Alisanka (Arc Publications) 2008, reviewed by Ewa Stanczyk
This anthology of contemporary Lithuanian poetry is a must-read for anyone interested in East European literature. The collection introduces six contemporary Lithuanian poets who mostly made their debuts after 1991 in the years of independence. It opens with Eugenijus Alisanka’s informed introduction on the development of Lithuanian literature from nineteenth century onwards. Here the editor […]
Rock ‘n’ Roll, Tom Stoppard, The Library Theatre
Rock ‘n’ Roll by Tom Stoppard dir. Chris Honer Manchester Library Theatre 13th Feb 2009 – 14th Mar 2009 Max is an old-school Marxist intellectual. Jan is his rock-loving PhD student, returning to his native Prague in ’68 just as the Soviet invasion rolls in. Rather than protest or consent to sign his mates’ […]
Revolutionary Road (2008), dir. Sam Mendes
With Revolutionary Road, director Sam Mendes returns to the territory in which he made his name in film: the polished surfaces and angst-ridden interiors of picket-fenced suburbia. Unlike 1999’s American Beauty though, this film depicts the dark side of the American dream when it was ostensibly at its shiny newest, with protagonists Frank and April […]
Ross Raisin, God’s Own Country (Penguin)
Ross Raisin’s debut novel takes its title from the not always ironic way that Yorkshiremen of a certain age refer to their own county. Set in the wilderness of the North Yorks Moors and narrated by Sam Marsden, a nineteen-year-old whose reliability we are never entirely certain of, it combines elements of comedy, suspense and […]
Che: Part One (2008), dir. Steven Soderbergh
In Walter Salles’ road movie The Motorcycle Diaries, Gael Garcia Bernal portrayed the young Che Guevara as a well-meaning medical student developing a sense of social justice as he rode through South America. In Steven Soderbergh’s Che: Part One, Benicio Del Toro tackles the arguably much more difficult task of portraying Guevara as the iconic […]
Six Polish Poets, ed. Jacek Dehnel (Arc Publications), reviewed by Ewa Stanczyk
Six Polish Poets is the second bilingual anthology of Polish poetry, published by Arc. It is also the fifth volume in the series ‘New Voices from Europe and Beyond’ which brings contemporary world poetry to the English-language readers. The book features a selection of poets who made their debuts in the past two decades; mostly, […]
Mourid Barghouti, Midnight and Other Poems (Arc Publications)
Mourid Barghouti’s first full length collection to be published in the UK is a wonderful book, sprawling, elegiac and elegant. The translation from the Arabic by Barghouti’s wife, Radwa Ashour, is mellifluous and adept, full of lovely felicities in the English, which make the poems come alive in the language they were not written in. […]
Slumdog Millionaire (2008), dir. Danny Boyle
There would be little point in using a space such as this to review a film that is being touted on the sides of buses, were it not for the overwhelming desire to correct the impression that is given on the sides of those buses. This is not a ‘feel-good’ movie! This is not to […]