ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
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A Museum in Baghdad, Swan Theatre Stratford-upon-Avon
Hannah Khalil’s ambitious new play suffers from information overload
History lesson: A Museum in Baghdad
[Ellie Kurtz]
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
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GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
FOCUSING on Baghdad Museum, one of the world’s greatest, which was devastatingly looted in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, this is a play struggling to communicate with an audience sated by news of more recent Middle East crises.
The action deals simultaneously with both the efforts of the indefatigable Gertrude Bell (Emma Fielding), to open the newly created museum in 1926 and those of Ghalia Hussein (Rendah Heywood) to retrieve what was possible after the destruction decades later.
Khalil questions the meaning to be drawn from our understanding of antiquities and what values they can offer to a world ripped apart by violence and suffering.
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