New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, John Luther Adams
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]
Banksy’s identity may have been published – but was the investigation in the public interest, asks PETER BENGTSEN
RON JACOBS recommends a book that charts the disparate circumstances that defined the lives of two prominent black Afro-Americans — one a communist, the other an anti-communist
CHRIS MOSS joins the hunt in Argentina for the works of Poland’s most enigmatic exile
SYLVIA HIKINS welcomes a survey of successful contemporary worker co-operatives and economy-based co-operative systems
DAVID NICHOLSON recommends the staging of this Wagnerian classic minus one or two insignificant quibbles
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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