MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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Europe ahead of its time
Written 25 years ago, there's an unnerving prescience to this brilliant play in the era of Brexit, says JAN WOOLF
Trainspotters: Characters in David Greig’s Europe
New releases from Mountain, Soul Asylum and Michael McDermott
ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
Europe
Donmar, London
THIS fine production of David Greig’s play by the Donmar’s new artistic director Michael Longhurst is set in a shabby train station on the point of closure in an anonymous Mitteleuropa border town.
All its charm and cultural identity are gone and its inhabitants — whose accents, interestingly, are northern British — yearn for work or escape.
They are becoming nowhere people from a nowhere place trying to grasp a sense of their future, as are two refugees from war-torn former Yugoslavia. The father sleeps on the station seats, with his head resting on his adult daughter’s lap, while she stares desolately into space.
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