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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Devastating theatre offers a totalised view of humanity
ANGUS REID recommends a production that explores the urgent need to be reacquainted with the dangers of repression and the difficult path to selfhood
CONSUMMATE: Lorn MacDonald as Sigismundo
[Ryan Buchanan]
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
Life Is A Dream
Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
THREE centuries before psychoanalysis, Spanish playwright Pedro Calderon proposed his own “interpretation of dreams.”
After a trauma that has disposed of the father and left the mother in charge, the thing she most fears has been locked away. This is the price of courtly stability and a fragile peace in the realm.
Life Is A Dream opens when the trapdoor is flung back and the unconscious emerges to take revenge in the form of a snarling humanoid, a bundle of primitive drives supercharged by sex and aggression.
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GORDON PARSONS is blown away by a superb production of Rostand’s comedy of verbal panache and swordmanship
WILL STONE applauds a fine production that endures because its ever-relevant portrait of persecution
MARY CONWAY is stirred by a play that explores masculinity every bit as much as it penetrates addiction
ANGUS REID recommends an exquisite drama about the disturbing impact of the one child policy in contemporary China