- Anne Boleyn, at Shakespeare’s Globe, London
Posted on 22 Aug 2011 in Blog-Theater, Theatre
Despite the subject matter, and the evident success of the play, the particular style of performance the Globe encourages seemed to throw the play off kilter a few times. There was too much “playing at naughtiness”, an easy iconoclasm feeding off the sense that jokes about sex are risky and daring in a play about the Renaissance in Shakespeare’s “own” theatre.
- Butley, at the Duchess Theatre, London
Posted on 19 Aug 2011 in Blog-Theater, Theatre
Where West’s incarnation as Detective McNulty was part of a sprawling, panoramic vision of a social and political system in crisis, Butley hones in on one man frenetically working his own destruction in an academic office. Gestures are made towards student radicalism and changing mores, but Butley’s existential battle is conducted on viciously hand-to-hand terms.
- The 39 Steps at the Criterion Theatre, London
Posted on 18 Aug 2011 in Blog-Theater, Espionage, Great Britain, Theatre
The fact that it can now boast of being the longest-running comedy currently in the West End suggests that it taps pretty successfully into a tradition as firmly British as Hannay himself: a need to mock the idea of hearty “Britishness”, even as we celebrate it at one remove.
- Book Review: The Craigslist Murders by Brenda Cullerton
Posted on 26 Jul 2011 in Books, Crime Fiction, Fiction Reviews, Humor, Mystery, Satire, Thrillers
An interior “desecrator” who despises the bored super-rich housewives who can afford her services, she lives amongst people for whom money has dissolved away the real world, and takes her revenge by smashing their heads in with the poker which she carries wrapped in a yoga mat.
- Book Review: Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones
Posted on 05 Jul 2011 in Books, Economics, Great Britain, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics, Sociology
But wherever it originated, the word conjures up an instant picture of young people in cheap sportswear, swigging alcopops, brandishing knives and selling each other drugs whilst getting their fifteen-year-old girlfriends pregnant. They are a favourite subject for the right-wing tabloids, and where the term “chav” is found, the words “feral”, “benefits” and “underclass” will often be somewhere in the vicinity, not to mention “lifestyles funded by your taxes!”
- Theatre Review: Frankenstein at the National Theatre, London
Posted on 08 Mar 2011 in Performing Arts, Theatre
There are some terrific “There’s something in the sack!” or “What’s that climbing down the wall?” moments, and Danny Boyle really knows how to deploy a flash of lightning. Steering clear of too much mad-scientist “It livessss!” stuff allows him to direct this part of the show with the kind of punch which movie-goers will remember from his film Shallow Grave.
- Opera Review: Anna Nicole at the Royal Opera House, London
Posted on 24 Feb 2011 in Music, Opera, Performing Arts, Theatre
Anna Nicole zipped herself up in a bodybag, surrounded by a crowd of camera-headed creatures which had been stalking her all the way through the second act, peering at her and sorting through piles of rubbish on the stage. The sudden blackout at the end produced a pause, then elated applause.
- Book Review: Heartstone: A Matthew Shardlake Tudor Mystery by C.J. Sansom
Posted on 27 Jan 2011 in Fiction Reviews, Great Britain, Historical Fiction
Matthew Shardlake the lawyer and his friend Dr. Guy Malton represent the arrival of the professional classes. Landless but educated, open-minded, progressive and paid by the case, they bear a striking resemblance to the heroes of many modern thrillers.
- Book Review: Port Mortuary by Patricia Cornwell
Posted on 21 Dec 2010 in Fiction Reviews, Mystery, Thrillers
Whatever her faults, you can’t criticise Patricia Cornwell for sticking in a rut. Port Mortuary, her latest novel about the forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, uses a new narrative device to explore fresh plot territory. But the resulting book is exceptionally difficult to like.
- Theatre Review: Blood and Gifts at the National Theatre, London
Posted on 21 Sep 2010 in Performing Arts, Theatre
Pop music functions as a metonym for the cultural appropriations and misunderstandings which occur onstage. Is an intelligence asset who can be bought with Tina Turner records a hopeless simpleton, or simply asking for payment in the currency which will gain him most prestige amongst his fighters? Does a song’s meaning belong to the pampered stadium rockers who recorded it, or the man who died on the “dark desert highway” it describes? And did The Eagles accidentally write an epitaph for the various nations who have tried to conquer Afghanistan over the last few centuries?
- Book Review: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman
Posted on 08 Jul 2010 in Fiction Reviews, Religion
The premise of Philip Pullman’s new book is brilliant. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ offers us a version of the gospel narratives in which not one, but two boys were born to Mary. Jesus grew up to be a millenarian preacher, who prophesied the coming of the Kingdom of God, whilst his brother Christ skulked around in the background, recording and (more often) distorting his brother’s words for posterity.
- Book Review: Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch
Posted on 09 Mar 2010 in History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Sociology
Voodoo Histories isn’t an attempt to tell everyone to chill out and stop worrying about what people in authority are up to. Rather, it attempts the trickier task of explaining why a set of conspiracy theories do not hold water on close examination, and accounting for how they differ from traditional historical explanations – what is specifically “conspiracist” about them.
- The Scarpetta Factor by Patricia Cornwell
Posted on 04 Nov 2009 in Crime Fiction, Fiction Reviews, Mystery
She’s developed an enjoyable way of beginning novels in the middle of a story, letting her audience watch the characters carry out conversations and actions which they don’t yet understand, but which will be unravelled as the book continues. This must be an even harder trick than it looks, and The Scarpetta Factor is driven by the reader’s need to find out what the heroes know, as well as what the villains have done.
- Democracy: 1,000 Years in Pursuit of British Liberty by Peter Kellner
Posted on 22 Sep 2009 in Great Britain, History, Non-Fiction Reviews
Magna Carta, that legendary document which is so frequently referred to in discussions of freedom, and which permeates our cultural history from Rudyard Kipling (“What say the reeds at Runnymede?”) to Tony Hancock (“Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?! Brave Hungarian peasant girl…”) was produced by a power struggle between the military aristocracy and the monarchy. Any resulting “liberty” for ordinary people was a waste product of the medieval warlord industry.
- Waiting for the Etonians by Nick Cohen
Posted on 28 Jul 2009 in Great Britain, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics
Nick Cohen is undoubtedly one of Britain’s finest living polemicists, and Waiting for the Etonians will be a genuine treat for readers who have come to rely on his rigorous thinking, stylish phrase-making and carefully controlled rage. The book’s subtitle, Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England, reflects his despair at the current state of left-wing (or “left-ish”) thinking in Britain, which he sees as almost irrevocably compromised by post-modernism, cultural relativism and the focus-group politics of New Labour.
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