Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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Imperial decline
An RSC adaptation of Robert Harris's novels about power politics in ancient Rome loses something in translation from page to stage, says GORDON PARSONS
Power play: Imperium Part II
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
Imperium Parts I and II
The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
MIKE POULTON, adapter of Robert Harris’s trilogy of novels narrating the life of the great Roman orator Cicero, clearly recognises the problems anyone dramatising a novel has to cope with.
There's not only often the weight of plot detail involved, he's said, but also the demands on the linear narrative progression in theatre where, unlike in the novels, audiences cannot check back on incidents and characters.
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GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin
GORDON PARSONS meditates on the appetite of contemporary audiences for the obscene cruelty of Shakespeare’s Roman nightmare
GORDON PARSONS recommends an ideal introduction to the writer who was first to give the English a literary language
GORDON PARSONS welcomes a graphic biography of George Sand, the most popular French novelist in 19th-century Britain
