RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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Anna X, Harold Pinter Theatre London
Mordant critique of an art world infected by neoliberal values
LOST IN A FLOATING WORLD: Nabhaan Rizwan (Ariel) and Emma Corrin (Anna)
[Helen Murray]
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
AN ARTWORK in itself, Anna X opens as an installation, with strobe lighting, electronic music, two dancing actors and surtitles of their clipped, and sometimes misheard, conversation.
The couple, immersed in the high-octane gadfly life of the New York arts and apps scene, are a world away from their origins. Anna (a superb performance from Emma Corrin) and Ariel (a vulnerable Nabhaan Rizwan) are the protagonists of this fine new play from Joseph Charlton, directed by Daniel Raggett.
Its subject matter is the push and pull of shallow and deep identity. Anna, from Ukraine, but posing as a rich Russian, arrives in the city to start an internship with a trendy fashion and art magazine and, of course, wants to open her own art gallery.
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MANJEET RIDON relishes a novel that explores the guilty repressions – and sexual awakenings – of a post-war Dutch bourgeois family
This is poetry in paint, spectacular but never spectacle for its own sake, writes JAN WOOLF
MARY CONWAY recommends a beautifully judged performance that shines a light on the experience of all female war babies and boomers