Reviews

The Painted Bird ★★★

The Painted Bird ★★★

At the 2019 Venice Film Festival, 12 members of the audience attempted to escape The Painted Bird screening, lashing out and falling up the stairs in the process. Why? Because this horrifying drama exposes the absolute worst of mankind, as collected from survivor testimony, shown…

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Leopoldstadt ★★★★

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Leopoldstadt ★★★★

My Stoppard journey began more than 40 years ago with the heady cocktail of verbal fireworks, erudition and wit that is his 1966 play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Now it seems it is to end, with what the great playwright suggests is his last play, as he navigates his own…

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Yallah: Haim Botbol

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Yallah: Haim Botbol

The concert was opened by the warm-up act 3yin (pronounced ‘eye-in’), a sextet of London-based musicians playing Iraqi, Egyptian and other Arabic or Judeo-Arabic music on Western and Arab instruments. Did I say warm-up? More like ‘heat-up’, as this enthusiastic group of…

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Rendezvous in Bratislava ★★★★

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Rendezvous in Bratislava ★★★★

“We had the biggest party in the darkest time,” declares one of the gloriously evocative numbers in Miriam Sherwood's self-styled ‘grandad cabaret’. Rendezvous in Bratislava is a love letter to her late grandfather Jan ‘Laco’ Kalina, a Slovakian Jewish satirist, joke collector, cabaret creator…

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Falling in Love Again ★★★

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Falling in Love Again ★★★

There’s a pleasing synchronicity to Ron Elisha’s take on the abdication of Edward VIII and how no less a femme fatale than Marlene Dietrich might have tried to change history by getting him to ‘fall in love' again. The play arrives onstage just as royals seeking to abdicate their duties…

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Rags the Musical ★★★★

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Rags the Musical ★★★★

With book by Fiddler librettist Joseph Stein (sympathetically revised by David Thompson), it’s clear that Rags might represent the future of Anatevka’s plucky emigrants. Designer Gregor Donnelly loads piles of battered suitcases around the action as another boatload of…

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Refuge and Renewal

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Refuge and Renewal

I was first made aware of Wales-based curator Peter Wakelin’s plans for this ambitious exhibition in early 2018. When, having heard about my own plans for the Insiders/Outsiders festival, he contacted me in the hope that we might collaborate. Since there seemed an evident…

Jojo Rabbit ★★★★

Jojo Rabbit ★★★★

I’m not sure if Marmite was available in wartime Germany, but Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit certainly divides audiences and critics. A coming of age comedy whose 10-year-old hero fails in his aspirations to become a ruthlessly efficient member of the Hitler Youth, despite having Adolf…