Aging rockers hiding in a trailer, a headbanging competition in a broken down car, floating wigs, ski slopes and fake snow, a bubble machine, and some strangely impressive and multifunctional inflatables. In an extremely bizarre way, La Mélancolie Des Dragons kind of had it all. In other ways, this almost insane mix of components, along […]
Dark Arteries, Rambert at The Lowry, reviewed by Elizabeth Mitchell
Rambert, ‘Dark Arteries,’ ‘The Three Dancers,’ ‘Terra Incognito’ at The Lowry, September 30 2015 A word of warning: ever since I saw Mark Baldwin’s ‘Eternal Light’ aged 15, I have dreamt of being in the Rambert. There was just something about the so cleverly choreographed and very balletic Contemporary dance, with the huge side of […]
So Here We Are, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Şima İmşir Parker
So Here We Are, dir. Steven Atkinson, The Royal Exchange Pidge (Sam Melvin), Pugh (Mark Weinman) and Smudge (Dorian Jerome Simpson) are sitting on a container representing a Southend sea wall, trying to remember who wrote Peter Pan. Is it Walt Disney or Barry someone? Or perhaps Walter Barry? This is right after the funeral […]
Welcome to Night Vale, Albert Hall, reviewed by James D Ward
Welcome to Night Vale Albert Hall, Manchester, 24/09/2015 Podcasts are simply radio for our on demand times, so it’s appropriate that one of the more popular shows purports to be the broadcasts from a community station situated in an otherworldly part of the American Midwest. Welcome to Night Vale, with its mix of […]
The Crucible, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Jon Greenaway
The Crucible, dir. Caroline Steinbeis – The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester First performed in 1953 Arthur Miller’s play has quickly become a cultural touchstone, becoming a fixture of GCSE and A-Level syllabi and beloved by undergraduate and repertory theatre companies for its wide casting and political themes. Therefore, the challenge or any new production is to […]
Swan Lake, Birmingham Royal Ballet at The Lowry, by Elizabeth Mitchell
Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Swan Lake, The Lowry, September 23 2015 With Swan Lake being such a classic, it ways runs the danger of being a safely enjoyable but slightly dull way to spend an evening. However, David Bintley has once more pulled it out of the bag with his energetic direction of Peter Wright’s masterpiece. […]
Petite Noir, Deaf Institute, reviewed by Marli Roode
Conventional wisdom has it that Manchester is a city dedicated to telling and retelling its own story. That every weekend, countless clubs play music made in the city – made by the city, it starts to feel like – and everyone dances like Ten Storey Love Song hasn’t been on the playlist every weekend for […]
The Room, Joshua Brooks, reviewed by Emma Rhys
The Room (by Harold Pinter), Joshua Brooks, Princess Street, Manchester, 28–30 September 2015 I would highly recommend you take 50 minutes out of an evening next week to scratch your head and hold your breath at the absurdity and intensity of a Pinter play. This depiction of The Room has been thoughtfully considered and excellently […]
By Far The Greatest Team, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
By Far the Greatest Team – The Lowry Mixing football and theatre is an interesting but risky move. On paper, the high drama of both forms of entertainment should lend themselves to an exciting combination, the opportunity to bring two of our nation’s favourite pastimes together to create something original and hopefully at least half […]
Don Paterson, 40 Sonnets (Faber and Faber) £14.99
As one might expect from the self-explanatory and rather straightforward title 40 Sonnets, the fundamental concern of Don Paterson’s new collection of poetry is that particular form. It is a deceptive title however, very probably deliberately so, as those descriptors are not very applicable to the poems contained within the book. The modern precedent for […]
Interview with Luke Norris, So Here We Are, The Royal Exchange, by Şima İmşir Parker
So Here We Are is the recipient of the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting 2013, the biggest national competition for playwriting. It is a play by a young writer, Luke Norris, who pens plays and scripts in addition to his bright acting career. Goodbye To All That was his debut play in 2012, which was first […]
Jee Leong Koh, Steep Tea (Carcanet Press) £9.99
In an interview Jee Leong Koh describes himself as ‘a lyric poet in an anti-lyric age’. He goes on to criticise the lyric ‘I’ in robust, post-modern terms, while defending the lyric itself as ‘answering to some very deep human need for complex music made by the human voice.’ There is a wide variety in […]
Interview with Rachel Redford, The Crucible, The Royal Exchange, by Jon Greenaway
With Caroline Steinbeis bringing a new production of ‘The Crucible’ to the Royal Exchange Theatre in the centenary year of Arthur Miller’s birth, The Manchester Review took the chance to talk to Rachel Redford, up and coming actor and RADA 2013 graduate about her role in the play, dealing with a character who is “so […]
Show Me the Money, People’s History Museum, Manchester, reviewed by Emma Rhys
Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present, The People’s History Museum, Manchester, 11 July 2015–24 January 2016 After viewing this excellent exhibition at the People’s History Museum – containing a wide variety of dynamic works by artists from the eighteenth century to today, as well as economic artefacts and enlightening […]
David Bowie Convention, King’s Arms, reviewed by Fran Slater
Bowie and beer. That should be pretty much all I have to say, shouldn’t it? There can’t be many combinations more promising than a day dedicated to music’s most prolific genius and some dedicated ales brewed specifically for the occasion. There’s a fair few reasons that I can’t just stop there, though. Not least because […]
New collections from Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Jan Wagner, reviewed by Ian Pople
Jan Wagner Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc) £10.99 Hans Magnus Enzensberger New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) £15.00 Two orders of magnitude, you might say: Enzensberger, born in 1929, who has bestrode German poetry since the late 1950s, who was associated with Boll and Grass in Group 47, who grew up in the west, but […]
Donna Stonecipher, Model City (Shearsman Books) £8.95
There has always been a hypnotic, meditative quality to Donna Stonecypher’s writing. Her previous book, The Cosmopolitan, was inspired by Joseph Cornell’s boxes; its delicate self-contained prose poems held small moments up to the light and turned them so that their angles and lights gleamed and twinkled. Model City is divided into 72 numbered sections, […]
Sema Kaygusuz, The Well of Trapped Words (Comma Press) £9.99, reviewed by Şima Imsir
The receipent of the English Pen Translates! Award 2013, The Well of Trapped Words by Sema Kaygusuz is a collection of short stories previously published in her various short story collections in Turkish. The stories in this book have been translated by Maureen Freely, the translator of prominent Turkish writers including the nobel laurette Orhan […]
The Stars are Made of Concrete, The Kings Arms, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Stars are Made of Concrete, Kings Arms, Salford, 26th & 27th July 2015 Anyone who has spent much time on the dole or in the job centre would have cracked a wry smile as they made their way into Salford’s most interesting theatre for The Stars are Made of Concrete. Carol (Jo Dakin) was […]
Shaun of the Dead, The Dancehouse, reviewed by Fran Slater
Shaun of the Dead , The Dancehouse, 22nd – 24th July 2015 It could be argued that you should know what to expect when viewing a stage version of Shaun of the Dead. This would be a different trip to the theatre than many. There were unlikely to be any pretensions, soliloquys would be at a […]
The Skriker, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Peter Wild
The Skriker, Royal Exchange, 1st July – 1st August 2015 Firstofall:imaginewordssoclosetogetherthatyoucan’talwaystellthemapart. You’re in the Royal Exchange, a space transformed, adorned, made out, played out like a Siberian fighting pit, your humble bumble of a reviewer one floor up looking down on a lot of anxious, middle-class people sat at benches wondering, perhaps, what they have […]
Caroline Chisholm: 1972-2015
This post is a tribute to our dear friend and colleague, Caroline Chisholm, a talented writer who passed away, too young, this month. This biography of Caroline was written by her parents for a memorial service held on 13 July 2015. — Caroline was the second of three sisters who were born in Brentwood but never […]
A Love Supreme, 2015, reviewed by Ian Pople
Love Supreme, Glynde Place, Sussex. 3rd – 5th July There is a stunned silence around Glynde Place on the first Monday in July. People wander from the toilet blocks, and back and forth from the Wide Away Café with a pinched look on their faces. It’s not just that someone’s taken their holiday away, […]
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Salford College, reviewed by Alex Pearce
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pendleton Shakespeare Company, Ben Kingsley Theatre, Salford College, 22nd-24th June 2015 Whilst strolling through Buile Hill Park, the clouds gathered, creating a sudden eerie change in the light. My companion asked, ‘Will there be ghosts?’ Not tonight. For we were travelling to see the Pendleton Shakespeare Company – not, presently, a […]
Half a Person, The Kings Arms, reviewed by Fran Slater
Half a Person, The Kings Arms, Salford, 20th June 2015 Perhaps the most special thing about the upstairs theatre at The Kings Arms is its simplicity. In a dark attic with only old pub chairs to sit on, there can be little room for the spectacular settings and props seen in many of Greater Manchester’s more […]
Rebecca Perry, Beauty/Beauty (Bloodaxe Books) £9.95
Rebecca Perry has already garnered a lot of attention and a number of prizes in her short career so far. Her Seren Pamphlet little armoured was a PBS Pamphlet Choice and this book is a PBS recommendation. This book shows just why Perry has gained this recognition, but it is a book I admire rather […]
Michelle Green, Jebel Marra (Comma Press) £9.99, reviewed by L. A. Billing
In Jebel Marra, Michelle Green’s new collection of short stories by Comma Press, we experience Darfur through the eyes of the witnesses: traumatized, broken and defiantly human. We see the desert, refugee camps and mountains of Western Sudan through translators, aid workers, journalists, archaeologists, but most poignantly of all through the displaced, often female victims […]
MR14 Editorial
Welcome to Issue 14 of The Manchester Review. This issue features our usual mixture of exciting, high quality poetry and fiction, from both established and emerging writers. We are particularly pleased to be able to feature, alongside all the great writing, David Summers’ wonderfully deft oil paintings. David, a long time Professor of Art History […]
Two Poems
On Waking Up Your first question, not yet, not quite yet being awake, is not quite out of the question or your mouth and isn’t the fictional where am I? of old stories, but as one or more of your eyes confesses and re-admits light as a matter of […]
Two Poems
(E Major) And she was Grist to his mill And he was Grit to her pearl And she was Salve to his burn And he was Soil to her furrow And she was Touch to […]
Three Poems
The Jennifer Arthur last seen at a posh college dealing ironically: first to go. The Peter who wore out his supports and said, while I tried not to fidget, “They’ll share their words of wisdom, even give you money, but time? Not so much.” Louise who discovered a talent for big and dirty simulations. Paula […]
The Lady Captain’s Prize
Seán and Deirdre were in their sixties now. He’d taken early retirement from the bank and she no longer gave piano lessons, though she went out to golf with such regularity that an elderly neighbour, Mrs Furlong, could not be dissuaded that Deirdre Brennan had a job. They were still Mass-goers, but now went to […]
MILEY CYRUS FAULT
so heavy my head feels like a bag of bricks we used to say that after a night on the town bottle after bottle of CRYSTAL line after line so high we always came down with a bang waking up with a head like a bag o bricks our dingy curtained room migraine bright let […]
Benevolence
Because time is an unfathomable thing I can’t tell you how long I’ve been here, basting in shame, under the mother’s eaves for eight or maybe ten days? I am six or seven again and beholding to her. I know not to give cheek nor answer back. Monday to Thursday it’s the dry end of […]
My Dad’s American
We go up into the grey tower of the concrete stairs and you can smell the carroty smell of everybody’s sweat. I have a drink from my canteen. Wham! Somebody punches my back – water chokes up into my nose. Stephen’s grinning, but he’s so fast he’s already back in line with Indeep and Michael. […]