Theatre

Trevor Griffiths and 1945 revisited

Sadly, the work of Trevor Griffiths, one of the political playwrights who emerged in the Sixties, is nowadays neglected. The BBC, for whatever reason, seems reluctant to re-broadcast his work. I want to highlight his 1981 TV drama Country . The action focuses on a gathering of the wealthy Carlion family where they discuss who will take over the brewery business that has made them fabulously wealthy. The family patriarch, Sir Frederic Carlion (Leo McKern), is getting old, needs to retire, and favours his son Philip Carlion (James Fox). However, James seems hardly “business material”: he works...

Worker solidarity against apartheid

In 1984 the Irish Adminstrative and Distributive Trade Union (IDATU) passed policy for a boycott of South African goods. They instructed their members not to handle goods produced in the state, which from 1948 to 1994 mandated white-black segregation (apartheid). A young shop assistant Mary Manning, refused to serve a customer a grapefruit in Dunnes stores in Dublin. Result: an almost three-year strike, first against her suspension and then for the Irish government to boycott South African goods. Strike! , at Southwark Playhouse until 6 May tells the story of the young women and one man who...

Sylvia without the politics

Sylvia at the Old Vic has some good qualities. As a musical it is well written and well performed. The songs are catchy, even if sometimes, at such a tempo, the audience will struggle to catch all the words. And despite the odd fluff or somewhat overbearing sound, the cast do very well to keep up with it. Hip-hop, soul and funk-inspired songs and a largely black cast will evoke inevitable comparisons to Hamilton . And some of the casting choices did leave me confused. Almost the entire cast is not made to look like the figures they are playing, different hair etc. The period clothing is...

Ambedkar, Pankhurst and political awakening

Playwright Sonali Bhattacharyya may be known to some readers as a member of Momentum’s national coordinating group (elected as part of the Forward Momentum grouping ). Judging by her Two Billion Beats , which has just finished a second run at the Orange Tree Theatre in SW London, her generally wider fame as a writer is well-deserved. (Last year Bhattacharyya's Chasing Hares , about factory workers’ lives and organising in West Bengal, was on while I was involved in discussions about setting up the India Labour Solidarity campaign . Somehow I didn't go in the end, and hope it will return soon.)...

Lampooning love

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change , which ran last week at the Network Theatre, London, presents a sequence of comical vignettes of different stages of relationships and romance. Highlighting the problems of relationships in capitalist society, the show immediately draws comparisons between gender roles and attitudes, with the men possessing overbearing egos, while the women are waiting at home for telephone calls, or for the final seconds of a football match to arrive. The musical ran for 12 years off-Broadway in New York in 1996-2008. This production intertwines scenes of heterosexual...

The Good Soldier Schwejk

Jill Mountford reviews The Good Soldier Schwejk (and His Fortunes in the World War) - written by Jaroslav Hasek, published 1923, adapted and directed by Christine Edzard, Sands Films, 2017. Currently being shown in Rotherhithe, London, and soon to be released on DVD. Christine Edzard has made it her mission to revive interest in what was possibly the first satirical comedy about the absurdity of war. She adapted The Good Soldier Schwejk (sometimes spelt Svejk, pronounced Shvake) to mark the centenary of World War I. It is about a naive and foolish patriot, unquestioningly loyal to the Austro...

“They steal the roses from our cheeks”

A ten-week strike involving recently unionised women home-workers is the subject of Neil Gore’s latest production. “‘Rouse, Ye Women” is a folk-ballad opera telling the stirring story of the Chainmakers’ Strike of 1910 through uplifting songs sung by Bryony Purdue as Mary MacArthur, and Rowan Godal as “Bird”, a downtrodden chainmaker. With only a guitar and banjolele, a simple but evocative set, and an imaginative use of lighting, the audience are quickly transported to a backyard outhouse in Cradley Heath. This foot tapping, hand clapping, chorus sing-along performance is an inspiring play...

Jackie Walker's questionable allies

“Anti-Semitism is a crime. Anti-Zionism is a duty” read the banner in front of the stage at Jackie Walker’s performance of her one-person show “The Lynching” at the Edinburgh Fringe in early August. Walker is currently facing Labour Party disciplinary charges over allegations of antisemitism. She describes her play as “the one-woman show about a real-life witch-hunt: an attempt to destroy Jeremy Corbyn and an entire political movement.” According to the play’s publicity, the play tells you “what they wouldn’t let Jackie Walker tell you.” Who “they” are is not defined. Nor is there any...

Rezso Kasztner and Zionism

Was Rezso Kasztner, leader of the Budapest-based Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee during the Nazi occupation of Hungary, a hero who saved the lives of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust? Or was he a collaborator who knowingly played an indispensable role in assisting the Nazis in the deportation and murder of nearly 500,000 Hungarian Jews in a matter of weeks? To answer that question Paul Bogdanor has examined previously unused documentation, including Kasztner’s private papers, and evidence provided by Kasztner himself in two libel trials held in Israel in the...

The patriotic traitor

The title of Jonathan Lynn’s new play The Patriotic Traitor could refer to either of the play’s two protagonists. One, Marshall Philippe Pétain, betrayed France to the Germans in 1940, while believing all the time that he was doing so in order to save the country. The other, his disciple and close friend Charles de Gaulle, was branded a traitor by the Vichy regime and sentenced to death when he fled the country for exile, to take on leadership of the Free French forces. The play, which just opened at the Park Theatre in Finsbury Park, is a tour de force. The venerable Tom Conti is so good as...

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