JOE GILL speaks to the Palestinian students in Gaza whose testimony is collected in a remarkable anthology
Of The Sun by Trupa Trupa
MARY CONWAY delights in a rarely performed comedy that recalls a Britain we remember in our bones
JEAN ROBERTS appreciates the way traditional panto can be remodelled into critique of the academy schools system
MARY CONWAY is riveted by a superbly crafted glimpse into the soul of a cast-off US star
MARIA DUARTE is swept along by the cocky self-belief of a ping-pong hustler in a surprisingly violent drama
STEVE ANDREW recommends a lively and often moving guide to once vibrant spaces that have been abandoned or swept away
GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
Trupa Trupa
Of The Sun
(Glitterbeat Records)
TRUPA Trupa (“a corpse’s troupe”) hail from Gdansk in Poland, historically part of the powerful Hanseatic League and birthplace of that philosopher of pessimism Arthur Schopenhauer, iconic actor Klaus Kinsky and the calamitous Solidarnosc.
With an appropriate nod to Schopenhauer, frontman and poet Grzegorz Kwiatkowski has recently described Trupa Trupa’s music — somewhat inspired by Werner Hertzog’s film Fitzcarraldo and Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote — as a “meditative, pessimistic thing.”
Firm friends, the band are wedded to collective and democratic decision-making, reflected in their sophisticated and exploratory rock arrangements, delivered with superb musicianship.
Overlapping voices, beautiful guitar cadences and a spellbinding syncopation of bass guitar and drums captivate with their thoughtful innovation.
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