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MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a three-hander that broaches big themes, but doesn’t transcend dry academia
On a Dark Night With Enough Wind by Lilla Pennant
Evocative accounts of life on the edge in rural Wales
DAN GLAZEBROOK eavesdrops on the bourgeois intelligentsia and the stories it tells itself at this moment of crisis
JAN WOOLF is bowled over by a major retrospective for the YBA artist
LEO BOIX, ANGUS REID and MARIA DUARTE review Night Stage, Two Women, Kim Novak’s Vertigo, and Fuze
KATHRYN JOHNSON recommends the work of Norman Kaplan that was a tool in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa
GAVIN O’TOOLE welcomes a bold feminist subversion of classic folktales that are ubiquitous in the Irish imagination
LILLA PENNANT’S real-life stories from the remote north Wales villages of Tremeirchion and Sodom — drawn from conversations she had with old residents back in the 1970s and ‘80s — have about them the faint whiff of witchcraft and paganism, allied to a nicely crafted atmosphere of rain and wind on the hillsides and moors thereabouts.
What they don’t have, though, is a great deal of substance. Despite vague allusions to long-held secrets that Pennant might be able to uncover, nothing much is ever revealed, at least in terms of old-time magic or druidic practices.
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