Latest editorial
ANGUS REID urges us to understand the persecution of Jason Arday from a political and historical perspective, and to see the victim in human terms
More light on the darkness
A revival of Bertolt Brecht’s chilling portrait of life under the nazis needs a clearer focus, says LEN PHELAN
Re-releases of the classics Gypsy Rhumba and Buena Vista Social Club, and a stunning album by Palestinian artist Faris Ishaq
Nothing, says ANDY HEDGECOCK, can rescue this undistinguished amalgam of ponderous melodrama and shallow philosophical speculation
JAMIE BRITTON invites readers to visit 3,500 locals as part of a marathon artistic pub crawl
JOHN GREEN welcomes a valuable and incisive analysis of a world become hyperpolitical but without the mass movement institutions to represent it
Fear and Misery of the
Third Reich
Union Theatre, London SE1
4/5
BERTOLT BRECHT’S reputation in this country rests largely upon productions of plays such as The Life of Galileo, Mother Courage or The Caucasian Chalk Circle, works in which he employs epic theatre techniques to “make the familiar strange” and thus lay bare the underlying contradictions of societies based upon ruling class exploitation and the ideological mechanisms underpinning it.
Written in the same period as these great works, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich is something of an exception in its abandonment of parable and historical revisionism to speak directly to audiences about contemporary events.
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As antisemitism spread across Europe and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, Benny Leonard and Jack ‘Kid’ Berg became symbols of hope and resilience, writes JOHN WIGHT
GORDON PARSONS recommends an entertaining account of the years between Germany’s defeat in WWI and Hitler’s seizure of power
GORDON PARSONS salutes the apt return of Brecht’s vaudevillian cartoon drama that retains the vitality of the boxing or the circus ring