NICK MATTHEWS welcomes the return of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s music to the repertoire of this years’ Three Choirs Festival
Surrealistic take on plight of migrants
Using magic realism to highlight the problems of migrants does not sit easily with the harsh reality, says SIMON PARSONS
Diyar Bozkur, Safiyya Ingar and Meera Syal in King Troll
[Helen Murray] 
LEO BOIX reviews a caustic novel of resistance and womanhood by Buenos Aires-born Lucia Lijtmaer, and an electrifying poetry collection by Chilean Vicente Huidobro
MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
King Troll (The Fawn)
New Diorama Theatre
THREATENED with traumatic Home Office interviews to prove their 20-year unbroken residency and avoid deportation, sisters Nikita and Riya face insecure futures in a country they call their home.
The play starts out as a naturalistic drama about the injustices encountered by migrants both in the system and with our society in general but takes a surreal twist when they turn for help to a former friend of their deceased mother. Somewhere between Meera Syal’s grandmother in The Kumar’s at No 42 and a crude, socially embittered witch, she offers them a chance of freedom in the form of a magical jar, supposedly capable of producing a servile fawn — a fairy tale advocate or personal genie to solve all their problems.
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