MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Exploring identity and female solidarity
On the eve of France’s 1940 surrender an intriguing gathering takes place at Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas’s renowned Paris salon
Juliet Stevenson’s hard-edged Hellman carry the core of the play
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Little Wars
Union Theatre
Southwark
IN SIMILAR fashion to Caryl Churchill’s 1980s Top Girls, Steven Carl McCasland’s Little Wars brings together a group of famous women from history in a notional dinner party. The critical difference is that this fictional gathering, here of contemporary literary luminaries, could actually have happened.
This online revival — set in the Paris apartment of modernist guru Gertrude Stein and her partner, Alice Toklas, a virtual salon renowned for its gatherings of emerging artists and writers — happens in 1940 with France on the point of surrender.
Invitees include fellow Jewish Americans, playwright Lillian Hellman and the acerbically witty poet and critic, Dorothy Parker. They are joined by Muriel Gardener, a Jewish American psychologist working as an anti-Nazi operative getting Jews out of Germany, and, least likely, the very English Agatha Christie.
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