STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
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Theatre and Books with Gordon Parsons
TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
The bard recalls advice received 50 years ago from his TRB muse, and sorts out appropriate legislation for football club ownership
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Facing War, Kontinental ’25, Bugonia, and Relay
MAYER WAKEFIELD is frustrated by a production of Ibsen’s classic study of an anti-heroine that fails to elucidate her motivations
PETER MASON tunes his ear into the domestic affairs of a Carribbean couple with a troublesome son
IT SEEMS strange to realise that live theatre, with its shared audience experience, is so long ago. But two plays early in the year uncannily chimed with the present.
In February, Juliet Gilkes’s new play The Whip at the RSC’s Swan Theatre in Stratford seemed to presage the Black Lives Matter movement.
Uncovering the inevitable political shenanigans behind the 18th-century abolition of the slave trade — fought as passionately as the Brexit conflict — it followed the parliamentary battles over compensation demanded by the slave owners for freeing the 80,000 slaves in Britain’s West Indian colonies. It incurred a debt to the nation only cleared five years ago.
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MARY CONWAY recommends a play that some will find more discursive than eventful but one in which the characters glow
GORDON PARSONS recommends the biography of the German polymath whose life provides an interesting take on a revolutionary age
MARY CONWAY applauds a worthy revival of the US 1939 classic drama that studies the dehumanising consequences of affluence
A manifesto for change, feminism in the digital age and a wordless play by Palestinians