Reviews on The Review

Donald Davie described Larkin’s poetry as a ‘poetry of lowered sights and patiently diminished expectations.’ By setting his version of Graham Greene’s novel in the summer of 1964, Rowan Joffe sets the film at a moment when society was moving between that lowered vision, and the newer world of the ‘swinging sixties’. Thus, Joffe [...]

Beloved of Cannes, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films are deeply arthouse.  Since Blissfully Yours from 2002 won ‘Un Certain Regard’, Weerasethakul’s films have won prize after prize at festivals all over Europe, and Uncle Boonmee won the director the Palme Dor, this year. Weerasethakul is one of those directors for whom linear narrative seems an impediment rather [...]

This wonderful film is held together by a mesmerising central performance from Jennifer Lawrence and immaculate direction by Debra Granik.

The story is well-known by now. Lawrence as Ree Dolly is the seventeen-year old who holds her family together. Her mother is a catatonic depressive, and Ree has two younger siblings, Sonny, her [...]

In Mamet’s coiled spring of a play, four real-estate agents are locked in a battle for survival. Each month as they compete to sell plots of undesirable land, the man with the biggest sales wins a Cadillac and the man with the smallest gets the sack.
 

This month’s man on top is Ricky Roma (Richard Dormer). Slick and cocksure [...]

Having counted George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four among my favourite books since the age of 13, I was concerned that over-familiarity might mar my enjoyment of Matthew Dunster’s new stage adaptation.  After three hours’ immersion in this powerful and affecting show, however, I was overwhelmed by empathetic exhaustion, sadness and resignation, alongside deep admiration for the [...]

Manchester’s 24:7 theatre festival, which showcases new writing, directing and acting talent, is now in its fifth year, this time staging an impressive 21 hour-long performances across its seven days.  For writing and directing team Claire Urwin and Guy Jones it represents a second opportunity to stage their single act play No Wonder in Manchester [...]

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 its audience’s [...]

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 [...]

“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.”
 
He was [...]

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’ petitions, Jan puts his whole faith [...]