Reviews on The Review

Bringing Literature to Life at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, 13th October 2012
By Robert Beck
As a theatre goer and prolific reader, it comes as no surprise that I love it when a story that I have enjoyed reading is adapted to the stage. Yet where does one start in recreating the essence of the [...]

“Literature is not easy but without Literature we are lost.” This message welcomes you into The International Antony Burgess Foundation, and being an English Literature student I wholeheartedly agree. It’s Saturday 13th October and I am attending an event by the Literature festival, “Bringing Literature to Life”. I have no expectations of this event, as [...]

“We are all refugees”
By Jessica Skoog
Review of David Constantine and Pawel Huelle at the
International Anthony Burgess Foundation, October 8, 2012
 
            As I hand my ticket to the event host, I feel an excitement akin to a child going on a carnival ride. There, just beyond the thick black curtain, awaits an experience I’ve never [...]

The Jury in Cannes were obviously feeling that films should be on the slow side last year.  Having given the Palme D’Or to Terence Malick’s ‘Tree of Life’, they gave the Grand Jury Prize to this very, very slow, exquisitely shot film from Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan.  Ceylan’s film lives almost entirely in real time.  [...]

When I told my friends that I was going to see The Wind in the Willows, a few asked with disdain, “Is it a Christmas production?” They warned me that ‘tis the season for haphazard affairs thrown together for children who don’t know better and their desperate parents. I went to The Lowry with rather [...]

Reviewed by Edmund Prestwich

Jane Draycott’s Pearl is a remarkable poetic achievement and fills what has been a frustating gap in our translated literature. There is a translation by J. R. R. Tolkien, but it preserves the formal patterns of the original at the price of syntactical contortions that make it virtually unreadable as [...]

Attack the Block is that increasingly rare thing; a terrific British comedy. It’s a film that balances a sharp, critical social conscience about life for young London boys with no real male role models, with very slickly handled, alien invasion movie. And if that sounds like Shane Meadows meets ET then try to [...]

Two or three thin, reedy notes are looped through the Lyric Theatre’s sound system prior to the evening’s performance of the Donmar’s King Lear, they alternate, sometimes create intervals with each other like strange, invisible wind chimes. Audience members are expectant but seem perturbed, no doubt the desired effect of this pre-performance touch. Two middle-aged [...]

Don Coles, A Dropped Glove in Regent Street (Signal)
Don Coles Where We Might Have Been (Signal)
Born in 1927, Don Coles began publishing poems in 1975 and over the past 35 years has produced ten books which possess a distinctive tone, both casual and observant, while fiercely arranging and sequencing those seeming casual observations to make [...]

Had Purcell and his anonymous librettist been working in the twenty first century, they would have been had up by the Advertising Standards Authority.  There is little or no resemblance between Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream  and this semi-staged opera.  In the late sixties the Purcell Society published a comparison between the Shakespeare and the [...]