Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense, The Lowry, November 4-8 2014 What-ho! Welcome to this review of Perfect Nonsense, a play(full!) adaptation of PG Wodehouse’s third Jeeves and Wooster novel, The Code of the Woosters, that draws attention to itself as a manufactured entertainment for a large audience as seriously as anything Bertolt Brecht ever […]
Austin Smith and Robin Robertson, reviewed by Lucy Burns
Austin Smith, Almanac (Princeton UP, $12.95) Robin Robertson, Hill of Doors (Picador, £14.99). Austin Smith’s debut collection with the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets is an impressive testament to rural life in north-western Illinois. Almanac is arranged concentrically around the family dairy farm and its surrounding landscape, reaching as far as Virginia, South Dakota and […]
The Dumb Waiter, The King’s Arms, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Dumb Waiter, Ransack Theatre, The King’s Arms, Salford, 6th-15th November 2014 As soon as the ticket collector led us down a narrow staircase and into a candlelit cellar, there was a sense that this adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter (1959) might just be a little bit special. Waiting for us in a […]
Colin Harper, Bathed in Lightning: John McLaughlin, the 60s and the Emerald Beyond (Jawbone Press) £14.95
John McLaughlin is a guitarist who for many, I would suggest, rose with little trace in the 1960s, until the complete revelation which was his debut album Extrapolation¸ in 1969. McLaughlin’s next move was to conquer America and dominate a particular style of jazz-rock guitar, in the seventies and beyond. In seventies, McLaughlin played with […]
Othello, The Lowry, a preview by Fran Slater
Everybody knows the story of Othello, right? ‘The green eyed monster’ and ‘the beast with two backs?’ Often seen as one of Shakespeare’s big four, this tale of jealousy, paranoia, and otherness features themes that have become no less relevant throughout the ages. In fact, almost exclusively among the Bard’s many plays, it could be […]
Secret Theatre: Show 6, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Fran Slater
Show 6, The Lyric Hammersmith Secret Theatre Company, Royal Exchange, Manchester, 30th October – 1st November 2014. It’s difficult to really provide a plot outline for The Secret Theatre Company’s Show 6. In many ways, it was difficult to fathom exactly what the plot was. But I’ll try. Two ‘users’ of an unmentioned drug have […]
Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2), The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2), Royal Shakespeare Company, The Lowry, Manchester, 21st-22nd October 2014 You find us in The Lowry on consecutive nights watching the RSC’s production of Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 (the RSC currently in the midst of a six year journey through all 36 of Shakespeare’s play, their latest outing […]
The Events, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Events, an ATC Production, dir. David Greig, HOME (Number 1 First Street), Manchester, 22nd-25th October, 2014 Following the massacre of her multicultural church choir, village priest Claire (Derbhle Crotty) is struggling to deal with a multitude of mixed feelings and unanswered questions. Having witnessed a particularly brutal killing in the church’s music room, survivor […]
Iris, Three Minute Theatre, reviewed by Fran Slater
Iris, Manana Productions Three Minute Theatre, Manchester, 9th-11th October, 2014 Iris is the first play from Manana Productions, a new theatre company founded by writer and actress Rebecca-Clare Evans and director Natalie Kennedy. Based on real events, it is a hard-hitting and unflinching consideration of the effects of domestic violence that is likely to leave […]
Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby, The Lowry, reviewed by Iain Bailey
Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby, a Royal Court Theatre and Lisa Dwan production in association with Cusack Projects Ltd, at The Lowry, Manchester, 23rd-27th September 2014 This trilogy of late plays by Beckett is organised around three striking images. Not I has its lips, teeth and tongue isolated by a narrow horizontal column of light. […]
James Acaster, Recognise The Lowry, reviewed by Jonny Rodgers
James Acaster, ‘Recognise’ (with support from Stuart Laws), The Lowry, September 21 2014 At first, the flyer for James Acaster’s new show ‘Recognise’ unnerved me. From his solemn look you could be forgiven for mistaking him for a brooding solo musician rather than a stand-up. Aren’t successful comics supposed to smile on their flyers or […]
Romeo & Juliet, HOME (Victoria Baths), reviewed by Fran Slater
Romeo & Juliet, a HOME production at Manchester’s Victoria Baths, 10th September-4th October 2014 From the very second the show began, it was clear that this would be no bog-standard Shakespeare adaptation. Taking place in the one-hundred-and-eleven year old setting of Victoria Baths, Walter Meierjohann’s take on Romeo and Juliet really did make the most […]
Hamlet, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Peter Wild
Hamlet, Royal Exchange, Manchester, 11th September-25th October, 2014 To begin with: an admission of my own ignorance. When, some months ago, I first espied the poster currently glorying the Royal Exchange, Maxine Peake, that brilliant, severe, intelligent actress last seen here by us as Strindberg’s Miss Julie, staring out from beneath a frowning forehead above the […]
The Best British Short Stories 2014, ed. by Nicholas Royle (Salt Publishing) £9.99, reviewed by Sarah-Clare Conlon
The fourth in this now popular annual anthology series, just out from 15-year-old independent publishing house Salt, rounds up 20 stories by different authors, offering an insight into how varied the short fiction landscape in Britain is right now. The task of editor Nicholas Royle (author of the critically acclaimed First Novel, about a lecturer […]
Rhys Darby at The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
Rhys Darby, The Lowry, July 18 2014 Still best known as Murray from Flight of the Conchords, Rhys Darby has, in recent years, been making something of a name for himself outside of Australia as a stand-up – and his comedy is as affable, as gentle, as cosy and warm as you suspect Rhys himself […]
War Horse, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
War Horse, adapted by Nick Stafford, in association with the Handspring Puppet Company (The Lowry, 23 July – 20 September 2014) After a previous successful appearance at The Lowry, The National Theatre’s adaptation of War Horse began a nine week run at the venue on Wednesday July 23rd. Based on Michael Morpurgo’s 2007 novel of […]
New Collections from Gerður Kristnỳ and Sigurður Pálsson, reviewed by Ian Pople
Gerður Kristnỳ Bloodhoof, trans. Rory McTurk (Arc Publications) £9.99 Sigurður Pálsson Inside Voices, Outside Light trans. Martin S. Regal (Arc Publications) £10.99 If Icelandic literature means much to the sometimes translation resisting readership in the UK, it means the Sagas. More recently, however, Icelandic writers have contributed to the vogue of Scandi-Noir in the novels […]
#micropoem14 competition
#micropoem14 competition “‘Tis moonlight, summer moonlight” Emily Jane Brontë Poetry in 140 characters? What would Brontë have made of tweet poems? Following the success of last year’s micropoetry competition, the Centre for New Writing and the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at The University of Manchester ran a micropoem14competition. The competition, which was themed around the […]
Icarus, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
Icarus, produced by Square Peg Theatre and directed by Michael White (The Lowry, 3-4 July 214) Icarus is the second production from physical theatre company Square Peg. They have a close relationship with The Lowry following their entry for the Pitch Party competition at the 2013 re:play Festival. Although they didn’t win on that occasion, […]
David Gray: The Lowry, Manchester
Rewind fifteen years and you’d find David Gray enjoying something of a heyday. White Ladder was well into platinum sales and, after three previous albums that had performed disappointingly, this small singer from Sale was suddenly something of a superstar. He was at every festival. On every television show. The album was one of those […]
Love Supreme Jazz Festival, reviewed by Ian Pople
Love Supreme Jazz Festival: Glynde Place, 4 – 6 July Love Supreme, now in its second year, promised bigger and better and, in some ways, delivered. The weather forecast wasn’t promising, and the driving drizzle that swept over the campsite on Friday night/Saturday morning didn’t bode well. Fortunately, Saturday was comparatively clear and the sunshine […]
MR12 Editorial
Welcome to the twelfth issue of The Manchester Review. This issue features our usual blend of top quality work from new and established poets and fiction writers. We are delighted to publish wonderful new stories and poems from our old friends James Robison, Peter Fallon, Ian Pople, Gerard Fanning and Rebecca Perry, and we are […]
Two Poems
CECIL HURWITZ, TADHG O’DRISCOLL Around 1943, Cecil, you dropped what you were doing Just to follow me here into the history section With my arms full to the brim with heavy Robert Fisks, Him that tries to make everything right, him that In old age thinks the world would be much better If people could […]
Who Wants Tortoise?
It was a hot summer Saturday and I had to get home to my parents. I’d had an abortion three days earlier and suddenly, urgently, needed milky tea, a super- soft settee and an endless supply of Aldi’s imitation Kit-Kats. ‘I’m thinking of coming to see you,’ I said, already at Kings Cross, my overnight […]
Two Poems
of lake michigan Transl. Eva Bourke the whole night the storm raged around the white clapboard house held together by no more than the thin lamplight of its rooms. the autumnal crowns of the trees next morning like shattered church windows. the abandoned amusement park with the maritime snakes of its rollercoasters: in good summers […]
The Pied Fantail, The Magnolia
The Pied Fantail, The Magnolia Anyone who submits to his own impulses is bound for trouble (inscription at Loha Prasat temple, Bangkok) Accustomed to live under corrugated zinc, in transparent houses, the afternoon is a gated community of silence and butterflies, finches in pairs, moving among the leaves, until the wind and rain return, moving […]
Four Poems
FALSE FRUIT I keep my eye on the love life of these solemn winter crowns and when light becomes various, return to the garden to root and mulch their tubers, like blousy beasts of kale and reed. Raking and turning the sulky pits, I nose them out like truffles, with their albino breath and stage […]
Three Poems
DOG-SITTING My friend’s little dog in my garden, for hours fixated on the top of the brick wall, not at all on the garden itself reminds me how, in a besieged city, less and less I noticed the streets and the people, until only the invisible fence remained. The dogs were, I remember, calmer than […]
Two Poems
Calliopes I was conscious of being handled. I must have died from love, as in the old ways. There was a certain amount of praying and lamenting. I didn’t mind, though I preferred The joking and the drinking. Sooner or later it would all be the same. The first touch was the gentlest. It was […]
Voices
‘Jesus, if I have to watch another PowerPoint presentation I swear I’m going to rip my own head off.’ He was looking at the ceiling, not at anything else, and she was holding his hand under the covers. He liked it that he knew she was there without having to look. ‘Ah, remember what Clooney […]
Three Poems
Pepo Her imaginary friend died on the morning of her eighth birthday and what a lesson to learn as her living friends screech in the garden like mosquitoes, wearing down the grass with their flashing shoes, and the balloons stare back at her with furious eyes. Her cake was a castle she cut into pieces […]
Danton’s Laugh
The power of the image is such that I find it difficult to imagine Danton without his assuming Gerard Depardieu’s visage and physique. And that seems absurd, as it has been nearly two decades since I last saw Andrzej Wajda’s biographical film, in which the French actor plays the eponymous revolutionary. Nevertheless, I still trust […]
Four Poems
A Winter Hymn The snow melt falls like footsteps coming closer. You hesitate — you hear your old friend’s ‘Old too early, wise too late.’ You’ve learned his lesson. He left it that there’s not too much to forgive. You know the earth abounds with benefits and the chance to live on it’s a privilege. […]
Brian
The day Brian got deported we did the only thing we could do, we threw a party. They (the forces of darkness, otherwise known as the Home Office) came for him in the middle of the night and dragged him out of bed, kicking and screaming, from the one bedroom flat he rented in Muirhouse. […]
Mnemosyne TV
Beneath the dark flutter of the griffon’s wings we dream––between gripping and being gripped––the concept of consciousness. ––Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Notebook, 1928[i] Mnemosyne was the Titan goddess […]