RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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Spaced-out by Solaris
ANGUS REID goes on a hallucinatory journey inspired by one of the great science-fiction novels
Chekhov meets Alien: Keegan Joyce and Polly Frame in Solaris
[Mihaela Bodlovic]
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
Solaris
Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
AS NEWS breaks that astronomers have discovered the new watery planet K2-18b, this co-production by the Lyceum and Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre bring us the story of scientists sent to investigate just such a planet and how it all goes wrong.
The ocean on Solaris is sentient and it toys with the spacemen by sending them replicants designed by their own repressed memories. The question is — are the scientists mad, or is this the way an alien might choose to make contact?
Writer David Grieg and director Matthew Lutton have created a compelling adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 sci-fi classic novel, later given cinematic life in versions by Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbegh.
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