Germany
Robert Harris: Munich review - reselling HitlerSaturday, 16 September 2017
Robert Harris’s first book about Hitler told the story of the hoax diaries which seduced Rupert Murdoch and Hugh Trevor-Roper. After Selling Hitler (1986) came Fatherland (1992), another fake story about the Führer. In that alternative history the... Read more... |
John le Carré: A Legacy of Spies review - the master in twilight moodSunday, 10 September 2017
Over his long career – 23 novels, memoirs, his painfully believable narratives adapted into extraordinary films (10 for the big screen) and for television – John le Carré has created a world that has gripped readers and viewers alike. He has... Read more... |
'The kaleidoscope of an entire lifetime of memories'Thursday, 07 September 2017
When director Bruce Guthrie first gave me the script for Man to Man by Manfred Karge, I was immediately mesmerised by the language, each of the 27 scenes leapt off the page. Some are a few short sentences, other pages long; every one a... Read more... |
Prom 10 review: Aurora Orchestra, Collon – a revolution taken to heartMonday, 24 July 2017
When a trail-blazing orchestra takes on a world-transforming work, it would be pointless to leave the staid old rules of concert etiquette intact. Not only did the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon stretch their repertoire of symphonies... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: LolaTuesday, 18 July 2017
“I would love it,” Lola (Barbara Sukowa) sighs, warned of a world without morality. “My problem is that they don’t let me in to take part.” In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1981, 1950s-set reworking of Sternberg’s Dietrich-creating Weimar classic The... Read more... |
The Mentor, Vaudeville Theatre review - having fun with artistic integrityWednesday, 05 July 2017
German writer Daniel Kehlmann’s light-touch 90-minute comedy is a chic satire on the slippery business of making art – and especially on the difficulty of assessing it. Whose judgement matters, after all? This production now in the West End was... Read more... |
Die Walküre, Grange Park Opera review - imaginative and intelligentFriday, 30 June 2017
Grange Park Opera is aiming big. The company is in a new venue, the grounds of West Horsley Place in Surrey, where they have built themselves a spectacular new opera house in less than a year. The building is not yet complete, but is close enough to... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: The Sorrow and the PityTuesday, 27 June 2017
All the accolades heaped onto this documentary in the near 50 years since it was made are wholly deserved. Over 251 minutes, Marcel Ophuls weaves together an extraordinary collection of interviews and archive to tell the story of France during the... Read more... |
Terror, Lyric Hammersmith review – more gimmick than dramaFriday, 23 June 2017
Can the theatre be a courtroom? A good public place to debate morality and to arrive at profound decisions? You could answer this with a history lesson that ranges from the ancient Greeks to more recent tribunal plays in the 1960s and 1990s. But I’... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Göttingen: Handel for allSaturday, 03 June 2017
"Love is in the air," croons or rather bellows presenter Juri Tetzlaff, getting his audience of adults and children to bellow back the wordless refrain, arms swaying above their heads. Mezzo Sophie Rennert, dragged up as noble Lotario, and soprano... Read more... |
CD: DJ Hell - ZukunftsmusikSaturday, 27 May 2017
Helmut Geir has been around the block multiple times but, like an electro-sonic Batman, always pops up just when he’s needed. Never much moved by fads, the Bavarian DJ-producer has always kept a foot in pre-house music styles, notably punk, Eighties... Read more... |
Frantz review - François Ozon in sombre mood: it worksSaturday, 13 May 2017
François Ozon’s Frantz is an exquisitely sad film, its crisp black and white cinematography shot through with mourning. The French director, in a work where the main language is German, engages with the aftermath of World War One, and the moment... Read more... |
