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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Beyond Brecht
ANGUS REID watches two productions at the EIF that deal in different ways with the consequences of war
BRECHT
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
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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