ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
Latest editorial
Best of 2018: Performance
Love letter to theatre: Wise Children
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, and John Luther Adams
GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
THE NATIONAL Theatre production of Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy, directed by Sam Mendes, was remarkable.
It traces the development of US capitalism through the fortunes of the emigre German-Jewish Lehman brothers, whose mid-19th century enterprise in cotton trading evolved over the next century and a half from a family business, mutually beneficial to farmers and traders, into the ruthless banking empire which collapsed in 2008, throwing the world into financial crisis.
Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley are superb. Portraying a gallery of characters, they give the play an intimacy that complements the national and international corporate power-play at the heart of current global chaos. It'll run in the West End from May onwards.
Similar stories
GORDON PARSONS salutes the apt return of Brecht’s vaudevillian cartoon drama that retains the vitality of the boxing or the circus ring
GEOFF BOTTOMS recommends an inspiring, political and bittersweet account of the munitions factory workers who are the fore-runners of the modern women’s game
GORDON PARSONS is blown away by a superb production of Rostand’s comedy of verbal panache and swordmanship
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today