MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
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A Museum in Baghdad, Swan Theatre Stratford-upon-Avon
Hannah Khalil’s ambitious new play suffers from information overload
PIC CAP History lesson: A Museum in Baghdad Pic: Ellie Kurtz
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production that panders – if inadvertently – to Western prejudice against China
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a history that excavates the enormous role played by agricultural workers in recent times
ALEX HALL recommends a book that places empirical evidence at the heart of understanding racism
FOCUSING on Baghdad Museum, one of the world’s greatest, which was devastatingly looted in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, this is a play struggling to communicate with an audience sated by news of more recent Middle East crises.
The action deals simultaneously with both the efforts of the indefatigable Gertrude Bell (Emma Fielding), to open the newly created museum in 1926 and those of Ghalia Hussein (Rendah Heywood) to retrieve what was possible after the destruction decades later.
Khalil questions the meaning to be drawn from our understanding of antiquities and what values they can offer to a world ripped apart by violence and suffering.
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