City Calm Down | The Deaf Institute | May 23rd The Deaf Institute has views. There’s a long bar for leaning, a raised, glass-enclosed platform for those who like to watch from the side like Salieri in Amadeus, a standard pit in front of the raised stage, and a stair-step bleacher gallery where you can […]
Too Many Zooz | Gorilla
Too Many Zooz | Gorilla | May 16th The Wiki-quote that Too Many Zooz are ‘well known for Pellegrino’s characteristic dance moves’ really doesn’t cover licking the full length of a black diamond-encrusted baritone sax. But it does point to how it is hard to tell your friend why they’ve got to come with you […]
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 […]
Three Pamphlets: Ling di Long, Finishing Lines, and The Museum of Truth, reviewed by Ian Pople
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, Ling di Long, Rack Press £5; Ian Harrow, Finishing Lines, Rack Press £5; Nicholas Murray, The Museum of Truth, Melos £5 Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch has been cited as a successor to the ‘narrative’ school of British poetry; a school which perhaps reached its apogee in the writing of James Fenton and Andrew Motion in […]
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 […]
E.J. Koh, A Lesser Love, reviewed by Ian Pople
E.J. Koh, A Lesser Love, Pleiades Press £12.75 E.J. Koh’s A Lesser Love is the prize winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry and comes with back cover puffs from D.A. Powell and Timothy Donnelly. It contains a wide range of poems, registers and style. And it also contains a lot of anger, […]
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 […]
Carl Phillips, Wild is the Wind, reviewed by Ian Pople
Carl Phillips, Wild is the Wind, FSG $23.00 ‘Wild is the Wind’ is one of the great songs from the American Songbook. Originally recorded by Johnny Mathis for the film of the same name, it has picked up a range of interpreters from Nina Simone and David Bowie, to Bat For Lashes, Esperanza Spalding and […]
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 […]
Layli Long Soldier, Whereas, Graywolf Press
Layli Long Soldier, Whereas, Graywolf Press $16.00 The OED defines ‘whereas’ in a number of ways, including ‘Taking into consideration the fact that; seeing that, considering that. Chiefly & now only introducing a preamble in a legal or other formal document’. It also defines it as ‘Introducing a statement of fact in contrast or opposition […]
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 […]
Memorial to the Future, by Volker von Törne, trans. Jean Boase-Beier
Volker von Törne, Memorial to the Future, trans. Jean Boase-Beier, Arc £10.99 Volker von Törne was clearly a very interesting man. The son of an SS unit commander, he dedicated his life to reconciliation, particularly with camp survivors, and became a director of Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (AS) (Action Reconciliation-Service for Peace) and befriended a number […]
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 […]
Opera North’s Madame Butterfly
Madame Butterfly at the Lowry, Salford Tuesday, March 6th Opera north staged Madame Butterfly at the Lowry Theatre this Tuesday as part of their ‘Fatal Passions’ season. The award-winning company has been performing Madame Butterfly since 2007, and Tuesday’s performance saw the return of Annie Sophie Duprels in the titular role of Cio-Cio-San, Peter Savage […]
Simulacra, Airea D. Matthews, reviewed by Ian Pople
Airea D. Matthews, Simulacra, Yale University Press: £14.99 Airea D. Matthews is the 2016 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets; the 111th such of a series whose previous winners have included Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Jack Gilbert. Matthews was chosen by Carl Phillips and his introduction comments that Matthews’ ‘use of wide-ranging […]
Get Out, dir. Jordan Peele, reviewed by David Hartley
What makes Jordan Peele’s Get Out such a curiosity is the strangeness that comes of its organic genre blending. The film feels like it began life as a comedy, evolved into a dark comedy, then evolved again into a horror thriller with a kitschy edge of comedy constantly echoing in. It feels cultivated rather than […]
Call Me By Your Name, dir. Luca Guadagnino, reviewed by David Hartley
I’ve often thought that if the Academy wanted to expand their award categories, a statuette for Best Scene would make for an intriguing accolade. Sometimes a film offers up a moment so exquisite and affecting it can feel as if it is embedding itself deep inside within you, never to be shaken. My case-in-point last […]
Dunkirk, dir. Christopher Nolan, reviewed by David Hartley
It has now been six months since the release of Dunkirk but its nomination for the Best Picture Oscar gives us a chance to return to it for a reconsideration, with a little pocket of distance as a cushion. At the time of release, the film was, for the most part, very warmly received – […]
Lady Bird, dir. Greta Gerwig, reviewed by David Hartley
There is much that is familiar in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. It is a coming-of-age tale about a high school teenager which hits many of the expected narrative beats; there are arguments with parents, deep-talk with teachers, intensely felt loves and devastating break-ups. There’s a school play, a prom dance, a boozy party. But Lady […]
The Shape of Water, dir Guillermo Del Toro, reviewed by David Hartley
To be swept up in the current of Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water is to be bathed in the peculiar comfort afforded by the dark fairy-tale genre: there will be horrors, there will be monsters, but there will also be a magic which is on our side and will carry us safely back […]
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 […]
Phantom Thread, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, reviewed by David Hartley
I entered the world of Phantom Thread on very scant details and I would recommend the same approach for everyone else. Despite it’s subject matter, this is a film with no bluster or pretensions; it simply wants to pin you in place and tell you its story while it soaks you in its variations of […]
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 […]
Andrew McCulloch, Gradual, reviewed by Ian Pople
Andrew McCulloch, Gradual, (Melos Press) £5.00 The centre piece, literally, of Andrew McCulloch’s new pamphlet, Gradual, is a translation of six ‘Holy Sonnets’ attributed to the French playwright, Jean Racine. In a lengthy note at the back of the pamphlet, McCulloch acknowledges the disputed attribution of the poems. The poems also have a somewhat obscure […]
Beatrice Garland, The Drum, reviewed by Ian Pople
Beatrice Garland, The Drum Templar Poetry £10.00 A key note in Beatrice Garland’s debut collection, The Invention of Fireworks, was the tension between stability and change. In that first book, Garland reconciles that tension technically by using an adroit combination of lyric and narrative, working between epiphany and process. Garland’s new book, The Drum, also […]
Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals, reviewed by Ian Pople
Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals, (Pressed Wafer $10.00) Douglas Crase’s The Astropastorals is a slim pamphlet of the ten poems Crase has chosen to publish since he published The Revisionist in 1981. The Revisionist gained immediate praise; its dustjacket had puffs from John Ashbery and James Merrill. David Kalstone introduced a reading by Ashbery and Crase […]