RON JACOBS welcomes a timely history of the Anti Imperialist league of America, and the role that culture played in their politics
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Beyond Brecht
ANGUS REID watches two productions at the EIF that deal in different ways with the consequences of war
Adrien Barazzone, Beatriz Brás, Baptiste Coustenoble and Natacha Koutchoumov in As far As Impossible; Kim Kum-mi in The Trojan Women
[Andrew Perry/Jess Shurte]
STEVE ANDREW appreciates a passionate account of the Scottish Club during the ‘lost decade’
By telling the story of a lawless frontier town from the point of view of the Lakota, Chinese labourers, prostitutes and displaced prospectors, makes for a potted history of capital, suggests ALEX HALL
TONY BURKE speaks to Gambian kora player SUNTOU SUSSO
MARIA DUARTE recommends a British boxing biopic about the stormy relationship between Nazeem Hamed and his trainer Brendan Ingle
ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review Good Night, and Good Luck: Live from Broadway, Becoming Victoria Wood, Hamnet, and Song Sung Blue
CHRIS SEARLE speaks to Filipino-US saxophonist JON IRABAGON about the threat of AI in the time of Musk and Trump, and how an artist can respond
HARD on the heels of the NT show Grenfell: In The Words Of The Survivors comes another astonishing epic of verbatim theatre, As Far As Impossible (★★★★★), Tiago Rodrigues’s rendition of interviews with humanitarian aid workers from the Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontiers.
Like in Grenfell, actors play multiple interviewees and the result is so urgent and compelling that it is tempting to see this very contemporary convention as heralding a new genre in political theatre and a next step after Brecht.
This theatre has learned from the East German master. The “distance” of actor from role is immediately established, allowing a man to play a woman or, controversially, a white woman to play a black woman. The performance is simply enactment; the words themselves are evidence.
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