MARIA DUARTE is swept along by the cocky self-belief of a ping-pong hustler in a surprisingly violent drama
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Soviet Signs and Street Relics by Jason Guilbeau
Poignant reminders of an optimistic Soviet past in Google-derived images
(Left to right, from top) Zernograd, Russia; Vasylkiv, Ukraine; Jalal-Abad, Kyrgyzstan; Vorkuta, Russia; Novovorontsovka, Ukraine; Yakovlev fighter plane in Novosibirsk, Russia; Vorkuta, Russia; Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ukraine and Shatki n/Nizhny Novgorod
STEVE ANDREW recommends a lively and often moving guide to once vibrant spaces that have been abandoned or swept away
GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
WHILE “travelling” across the former territories of the Soviet Union by using Google Street View, photographer Jason Guilbeau zeroed in on images that fired his imagination.
He then stripped them of their navigational markers to eliminate visual interference and has come up with a mode of “travel” in which the sensorial experience of smells, weather, tactile sensations and sounds, including that of human voice, are absent.
But does it matter? Evidently not to Guilbeau, who seems unconcerned by the distance in both time and space to the subjects invoking his curiosity.
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MICHAL BONCZA, MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review The Other Way Around, Modi: Three Days On The Wing Of Madness, Watch The Skies, and Superman
RON JACOBS recommends a painstaking study of the communists and revolutionaries who congregated in Moscow after 1917
NICK WRIGHT delicately unpicks the eloquent writings on art of an intellectual pessimist who wears his Marxism lightly
GAVIN O’TOOLE recommends a book that examines the ‘invisible’ cultural cross-fertilisation that has bypassed the globalisation peddled by the West