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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Site redesign
Welcome to the new Manchester Review site! Apart from refreshing the design and generally cleaning things up, we’ve moved a few things around. Along with the current issue, you’ll now see our latest reviews on the home page – and the Reviews link in the main navigation bar will take you to a new comprehensive […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Editorial
Some recent literary works about Manchester share a distinctive aesthetic and a fascination with the city’s disappearing histories and new developments. The playwright Alistair McDowall’s Pomona at the Royal Exchange took the Pomona area’s seemingly empty site and re-imagined it as a dystopian fantasy; earlier this year the young Irish theatre company Anú took Angel […]
Early Wilde / Late Wilde
dear Bird your Feathers stretch becomingly Beneath the Settee. i love your Beak more than you Know; and when i go among the Habitats – of the River when home, the Zoos when away – i Smile to think of your Lines. of course I mean this Ambiguously. i like to think your Gold eye Shadow […]