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 […]
Yesterday, Jasmin Vardimon Dance Company, Peacock Theatre, London
I don’t like dance performances which require you to read the programme in order to understand what’s going on. I didn’t buy a programme (mostly, to be honest, because the drinks were so expensive at the bar I didn’t have any cash left). So when the lights came up on a girl towering above a sea […]
June Tabor – RNCM, 20/11/2008
Yeats supposed that we make rhetoric out of the quarrel with others; but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. When I first started listening to folk music, it was Irish and very much concerned with the quarrel with others. It was dedicated to the wronged and with the search for finding some way of […]
Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, London
Francis Bacon is presented, in his third Tate Britain retrospective, as a straightforwardly thematic painter: the exhibition’s ten chronologically-arranged rooms consistently refer the viewer to the Cold War, World War 2, the illegality of homosexuality, the decline of organised religion. Although Bacon regularly objected to any narrative readings of individual paintings, he becomes here the story of […]
Leva Krumina, Nobody, The Whitworth, Manchester
There’s the upstairs and round and about to walk through of Finland, Japan and (most interesting to me actually) the UK, but it happens to be this gallery first, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia (places I’m not sure exactly where they are) – and immediately I’m given pause and, well, transported. And not least by this medieval […]
Herbie Hancock at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
Herbie Hancock, unlike Miles, has never been afraid to revisit his back catalogue and this Sunday’s concert in Manchester was a trip down memory lane. However, as we know, revisiting is usually rather more than revamping. This evening’s concert started with ‘Actual Proof’ from Hancock’s second Headhunters’ album, Thrust, And for a while in […]
Late Rothko, Tate Modern, London
Poor Mark Rothko. An intensely private individual whose brooding canvases are enough to reduce one to existential uncertainty (why is that painting moving?), has been rendered banal by over-reproduction of his works – a framed, poster-sized reproduction of sunshine yellow and burnt orange hanging on the wall is as predictable an element of a dinner […]
Cold War Modern, Design 1945-1970, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Five years ago the V&A attracted bumper crowds for its Art Deco exhibition, with sellout crowds flocking to see the eclectic mix of everything from footage of Josephine Baker dancing to radio sets the size of an average sideboard. Using the same template of a mix of everything from cars to posters, the museum has […]
Antigone, The Royal Exchange
Antigone may not share the fame of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, but it forms a worthy close to the trilogy of Theban plays; whereas Oedipus is, to some extent, the unwitting plaything of the gods, both Antigone and Creon, Oedipus’ successor as king, find themselves locked in a human-manufactured dilemma. After a battle in which both […]
Quiet Chaos (2008) dir. Antonio Luigi Grimaldi
While Pietro (Nanni Moretti) and his brother Carlos (Alessandro Gassman) are playing a keenly contested game of beach tennis, they hear cries from the sea. Ignoring advice from men on the shore that the sea is too dangerous, they plunge in and save two drowning women. When they return the women to the beach, the […]
Chris Woods, Dangerous Driving (Comma Press), reviewed by Lynne Taylor
This is the second collection from Chris Woods following Recovery. In Dangerous Driving, he continues to observe, looking inwards as well as out. In his pared-down style, Woods journeys using unassuming vocabulary. The reader is a happy passenger: has a feeling of being in the safe hands of someone who is confident of his vehicle […]
Anne Rouse, The Upshot: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books)
Anne Rouse’s The Upshot comprises poems from her first three books, presented in reverse order of publication. At the front of the book, there is a group of new poems that she has called ‘The Divided’. Rouse has always been a miniaturist; her poems seldom stray over the page, and this tendency has become more […]
Pierre Martory, The Landscapist trans. by John Ashbery (Carcanet Press) £12.95
There’s nothing but a book in a foreign language. Somebody read it and shut it on the table, Forgot it, went away. (‘Without Rhyme or Reason’) In the introduction to this collection of the translations he has been publishing since the mid-sixties, John Ashbery addresses the implied tragedy of this image: “And after I began […]