Spur of the Moment, Deaf Dog Productions, HOME, Manchester, 15-17 January 2015 For the last few years the Re: play festival has sought to bring the best local fringe theatre of the previous 12 months back to the stage. Manchester’s thriving theatre scene features so many small venues and up and coming theatre companies that […]
New Collections from Arundhathi Subramaniam and Brian Bartlett, reviewed by Ian Pople
Arundhathi Subramaniam When God is a Traveller (Bloodaxe) £9.95 Brian Bartlett Ringing Here and There: A Nature Calendar (Fitzhenry & Whiteside) $19.00 Arundhathi Subramaniam’s When God is a Traveller is both a PBS Choice and, as a result, is on the T.S.Eliot award list. Brian Bartlett’s Ringing Here and There has received a slew of […]
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, National Theatre, The Lowry, Manchester, 18th December 2014 – 10th January 2015. It isn’t often that you can say that the stage itself stole the show during a theatre production, but in the case of The National Theatre’s adaptation of Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident you could […]
Two Collections from Roy Fisher, reviewed by Ian Pople
Roy Fisher Interviews through Time, ed. Tony Frazer, (Shearsman Books, £9.95) Roy Fisher, An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013, (Shearsman Books, £12.95) It is often suggested that Roy Fisher the interviewee is a somewhat slippery customer. Kenneth Cox remarks in an essay on Roy Fisher’s poetry that reading an interview with Fisher is like […]
She Stoops To Conquer, The Lowry, reviewed by Sarah Jane Vespertine
She Stoops To Conquer, The Lowry, Manchester 9th-13th December 2014 The Northern Broadsides production of She Stoops To Conquer is, quite frankly, adorable. It’s a little bit Blackadder the Third crossed with Two Pints of Lager, largely camp and enormously entertaining. The ‘northernisation’ that Northern Broadsides do so well, moving the setting from the West […]
Slava’s Snow Show, The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
Slava’s Snow Show, The Lowry, Manchester, 9th-13th December 2013 A shock haired man in a mustard coloured onesie stands gazing sadly out at the audience. The capaciousness of his outfit allows him to seemingly grow and shrink, albeit with possibly the saddest expression on his face ever worn by a man. Minutes pass. The man […]
New Collections from Louise Glück and Joshua Mehigan, reviewed by Ian Pople
Louise Glück Faithful and Virtuous Night (Carcanet Press) £9.95 Joshua Mehigan Accepting the Disaster (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) $23.00 Louise Glück has an astonishing record in the US having been awarded almost every poetry prize there is. Her last book, Poems 1962-2012, was garlanded with praise in every review it received. In the UK, this […]
MR13 Editorial: Manchester and the Other George Osborne
The arts and culture in Manchester have long been grounded in industrialists’ philanthropy and generosity, which have helped to nurture considerable audiences for art, literature and music, audiences who have understood that the arts have a role to play in the ways in which the city has been continuously transformed. The city’s history of philanthropic […]
Three Poems
Kingdom When the kingdom falls apart the turning leaves will perform acrobatics, when the kingdom falls apart it will resemble a fancy dress party with skeletons and ghosts. When the kingdom falls apart it will be on a Wednesday morning, heavy rain, thick white cloud and a light that is particular to the time of […]
Out in the Yard
Out in the Yard The terrible elephant paws at the ground like a new, drunk kitty. But it’s normal to be thrown out of parties, I say. Just don’t outstay your welcome. But what’s a caprioska without lime? We make similar mistakes, the elephant and I. We play good cop bad cop in the afternoons. […]
A Peepshow with Views of the Interior of a Dutch House 1655-60
(after an artwork by Samuel Van Hoogstraten) How we like this eavesdropping with alternating eyes, and how he planned just what we’d see from either side. The dog would always be looking at us, the cat, arching its back, and the conspiratorial busts were above all this, either fixed or floating, depending on where you […]
Tea Party
It was my friend Lewis’s fault. Actually, he’s not a friend, just a person I do some consulting with, a K-street Kommando, more Facebook friend than friend-friend. Lewis was the one got the American Ambulance Assoc. to switch to Patton Boggs LLP, and parlayed that into a Venn Strategies gig. We’re talking a person has […]
Excerpt from In Real Life
Somehow Paul finds himself teaching creative writing. He is thirty-one years old. He is going bald. He is wearing black skinny jeans and a pale blue shirt and a pair of smart, real-leather shoes. He is standing in a large room on the first floor of a university building, holding a marker pen, about to […]
Three Poems
Ode to a Magnolia Tree magnolia denudata Impatient as always, you blossom in the cold March air, even before your leaves have set: impetuous hostage to late frosts, the unfinished business of winter – but what do you care, you want to cut free, feel the sun on your face, to flaunt your big creamy […]
Two Poems
THE MIDDLE AGES We were tipping over like aging trees, our roots rising, shaggy with dirt. Had we missed the storm that did the damage? What had lifted us into brittle clock hands, whittled us into slivers, rocked our boats over into murky numbness? Were we not soldiers in the active army, were we not […]
Two Stories
User Group Disco Stanley and I were happy together, happier than anyone should be allowed to be. White-hot joy. So we chose to celebrate our first wedding anniversary by renting a room at the very, very top of a posh hotel – the twenty-first floor. It was amazing being elevated like that, way above the […]
Five Poems
Horae Solitariae One lady, I recall, the relict perhaps of an insolvent rake, would sit and mutter in a temper out of keeping with her age. I saw her once, and others of the damned, take shelter under the same tree from the rain. So anxious to impress, none said a word while overhead the […]
Four Poems
A Lollipop for E.P. Stuck a Chupa Chup into the ground Beside the grave of Ezra Pound Then jumped aboard the vaporetto To lose myself in the Jewish ghetto Looking for the synagogue That kept moving in the Venice fog Like an apparition in the crowd Where Jews were sometimes allowed. […]
Making Guava Jelly
The girls had been eating guavas for weeks. Guava jams, juices, stews, tarts with latticed pastry, every day the kitchen was misty with the perfume of guava. It was the largest crop in years, the branches obscenely laden, bending under the fruit. Nana always believed the dead came out at night to eat guavas. Guayabas, […]
Three Poems
Key To A Map The stammering footpaths pull your eye across the dyslexic geometry of fields, around blue chip meres and spilling woods. A séance tap of dead lanes turning up as potato cobbles under the plough or leaping the M6 levee between hamlets and barns. All day the fast lane hums with ghost herdsmen, […]
A Son in Iraq
After Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front and Heinrich von Kleist’s The Marquise of O “We both know you’re cynical,” my son Danny says. We’re in my studio, tenth floor, big corner of what used to be a factory warehouse. I’m painting his portrait. C-SPAN on my beat old TV with sound down […]
Three Poems
Guitar, Hanga Roa, Easter Island Eight-stringed and night-long strummed, you prove yourself a necessary accompaniment on these longest of evenings. Bigger than a fishscale, smaller than the sky, how do your songs describe you? Wider than a sardine, narrower than the sea. Sing to us of how, in this world of untimely things, a man […]
1922 – Charles Bemis Dies
Polly poked the dead colt with the toe of her boot, lifting and twisting the neck. Shock, most likely. A weak heart in a working animal was rarely discovered until it dropped dead. She knelt down in the wet grass. Scavengers had exposed two of the vertebrae and a solid, tooth-white hip on the left […]
Two Poems
Nostalgia I too lived somewhere. Life had shape I dream of now: journals and Schweppes, candles stubbed in empty bottles of wine, a painted plank on two wrapped bricks lined with midnight blue vials of liniment and balms for her pulverulent arm skin, mornings spent in the afternoons reading L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune. I […]
Two Poems
Rouen The sky is milk in a late Corot at the Beaux Arts. Khaki and mustard reeds fringe a cackling stream. A peasant with a basket in her arms walks out of wetlands that part for her. When the sun comes out, the volume of the crowd appears to rise as if light were sounded. […]
People Zoo Pint-Sized, The Kings Arms, reviewed by Fran Slater
People Zoo Pint Sized, The Kings Arms, Salford, 4th-5th December, 2014 For their debut production, Manchester theatre company People Zoo chose to present three short plays from local writers. Each of Jumbo Shrimp, Let them Eat It, and Captain Awkward shared similar themes of awkward relationships, but other than that, the audience was treated to […]
Wuthering Heights, Contact, reviewed by Fran Slater
Wuthering Heights, Contact Theatre, Manchester, 26th-27th November 2014 I could start by saying that if you’ve ever wanted to see Wuthering Heights narrated by a horse, then this is the play for you. But I won’t. That would make very little sense to anyone. I could start by saying that fans of long, uncomfortable, and […]
The Bartered Bride, The Lowry, reviewed by Sarah Jane Vespertine
The Bartered Bride, Opera North, The Lowry, Manchester, 18th and 20th November 2014. The first and most striking thing about Opera North’s new production of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride is the stage setting. For a reasonably small space, the backdrop of gentle white clouds in a serene blue sky gives a feeling of space and […]
A Farewell to Arms, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
A Farewell to Arms, imitating the dog, The Lowry, Manchester, 13th-15th November 2014 Imitating the dog posit themselves as a theatre company that ‘tests theatrical conventions and brings high-end design and technical and thematic ambition to audiences at small and medium-scales.’ This was all on display during their adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel A […]
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Emma Rhys
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Royal Exchange, Manchester, 30th October – 29th November 2014 Taking our seats around the stage, our eyes immediately settled upon the awaiting scene of Maggie and Brick’s bedroom: the setting of the onstage action for the duration of the play. As I took in the beautifully lit and sumptuous white […]
Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense, The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
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 […]