STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
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Touching base with social change
GORDON PARSONS recommends an evocative exploration of how working-class attitudes have evolved over time in Britain
Stage managed: Black Friday, 2014
[Powhusku/Creative Commons]
TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
The bard recalls advice received 50 years ago from his TRB muse, and sorts out appropriate legislation for football club ownership
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Facing War, Kontinental ’25, Bugonia, and Relay
MAYER WAKEFIELD is frustrated by a production of Ibsen’s classic study of an anti-heroine that fails to elucidate her motivations
PETER MASON tunes his ear into the domestic affairs of a Carribbean couple with a troublesome son
Me Me Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England
by Jon Lawrence
(Oxford University Press, £25)
BASED on the testimony of a wide range of interviewees from the immediate post-war period to more recent times, the social studies in Jon Lawrence’s book are drawn from contrasting areas — Bermondsey and England’s first “new town” Stevenage in the 1940s and 1950s, Luton and Cambridge in the 1960s and Tyneside and the Isle of Sheppey in the 1970s and 1980s.
One of the many illustrations in Me Me Me features a photograph of shoppers battling to secure the knock-down “bargains” on 2014’s Black Friday, a stage-managed event used by the media to show how traditional community spirit has given way to a relentlessly rising tide of selfishness and greed.
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