WILL STONE is frustrated by a performance that chooses to garble the lyrics and drown the songs in reverb
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Visual virtuosity illuminates a Darwin for beginners
Eager: Bradley Foster as Charles Darwin
[Mark Douet]
RITA DI SANTO points out the social experience of exploitation and oppression that inform the popular winners at this year’s festival
PETER MASON is tickled by a new book and exhibition that mine the rotten anachronism of the monarchy for laughs
A Nazi zeppelin whodunnit, death amidst detoxification, a twistaholic’s delight, and noir fiction for criminals
STEVE JOHNSON salutes the mellifluous tones and clear-minded political message of a uniquely relevant Birmingham-born singer-songwriter
STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
The Wider Earth
Natural History Museum, London
SHREWSBURY is very proud if its most famous son, Charles Darwin.
A statue of the venerable scientist, replete with magnificent beard, dominates the entrance to the library, a shopping centre has been named in his honour — he'd have been touched, I’m sure — and Quantum Leap, a travesty of municipal sculpture was erected to celebrate the bicentenary of his birth. A lesson, as if one were needed, in the hubris of Tory-dominated local government
So as a native of the town I was quite at home in the opening scenes of David Morton’s play The Wider Earth. In it, Darwin – not the bearded, established naturalist but an eager and bright young graduate in Bradley Foster's characterisation – journeys through the Shropshire countryside in 1831.
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PHIL KATZ applauds the biography of a man of principle that is a vibrant excavation of the radical tradition itself
RICHARD MURGATROYD is disappointed by an ambitious survey that fails to get to grips with the relationship between human consciousness and nature