Other Business
NO PICNIC
Andrey Zvyagintsev may just be the most important film-maker to come out of Russia since Andrey Tarkovsky. But whereas Tarkovsky’s cinematic vignettes, suffused with unforgettable poetic imagery and symbolism often take a while to unfold in the mind, Zvyagintsev’s social commentary has a more immediate impact, including a firmly contemporary political one. Nevertheless, there […]
SO LONG, LEONARD
Leonard Cohen has died; and for those of us who came of age in the sixties, and found his melancholy words and music an effective counterbalance to the raucous rock that otherwise permeated our lives and threatened out eardrums, it is a sad day, and a reminder of our own fragile mortality. The man himself […]
GRIEF CENTRE STAGE
Grief is a hard act to conjure, and sustain for well over an hour centre stage; and Kristin Scott Thomas, trying hard to disguise her dainty frame and fine features with a grubby shift and bedraggled hair, is clearly experimenting with a variety of registers in her interpretation of Sophocles’ Electra at the Old Vic. […]
STRAYING OFF-PISTE
Roman Polanski must have salivated when he first heard of the 2010 off-Broadway production of David Ives’s play Venus in Fur. Polanski, of course, couldn’t see the original production in person, since he is still subject to an arrest warrant in the USA, having absconded nearly forty years ago when faced with an almost certain […]
THE LESSONS OF HISTORY
The conclusion of the Confederations Cup football in Brazil last Sunday has removed the immediate focus of popular anger at spendthrift authorities. But with ample time to go before next year’s World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympics, whose cost has sparked these massive protests, the Brazilian authorities might do well to heed the lessons […]