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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A Museum in Baghdad, Swan Theatre Stratford-upon-Avon
Hannah Khalil’s ambitious new play suffers from information overload
History lesson: A Museum in Baghdad
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
FOCUSING on Baghdad Museum, one of the world’s greatest, which was devastatingly looted in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, this is a play struggling to communicate with an audience sated by news of more recent Middle East crises.
The action deals simultaneously with both the efforts of the indefatigable Gertrude Bell (Emma Fielding), to open the newly created museum in 1926 and those of Ghalia Hussein (Rendah Heywood) to retrieve what was possible after the destruction decades later.
Khalil questions the meaning to be drawn from our understanding of antiquities and what values they can offer to a world ripped apart by violence and suffering.
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