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
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Love, Love, Love Lyric Hammersmith London
Caustic comedy on fraught divisions between baby-boomers and Generation X
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
JOHN GREEN relishes the record of a life well lived in the service of the fight for justice and socialism
EWAN KOTZ got to the Jacaranda Baltic in Liverpool only to be taken by strong songwriting of the emerging all-women Lime Garden
ACCORDING to writer Mike Bartlett, families are awful. That’s why London was invented — so that you can move away from them.
FAMILY AT WAR: Love, Love, Love (Pic: Helen Murray)
It's a barb, among many in Love, Love, Love, that draws proper guffaws in what could well be a comedy with tragic themes. It might be a tragedy with lots of laughs. It might not matter what it is — premiered a decade ago, it still has bite.
In it, Rachael Stirling is flamboyant and caustic as Sandra, drinking her own bodyweight in white wine and veering from 1960s hippy chick to power-dressing career woman in 1990 and finally a Chanel-clad divorcee of 2011.
She retains an utter lack of empathy throughout. There’s none for her boyfriend, ditched for a better option, nor for her troubled teenage daughter and bugger-all for her hapless husband.
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MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
DAVID NICHOLSON applauds the return of Azuka Oforka’s stunning drama about slave plantation politics