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
Timely satire on lessons unlearned from ‘war to end all wars’
Impish: Martyn Jacques
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
The Last Days of Mankind
Leith Theatre, Edinburgh
CONCEIVED for a theatre on Mars, a full performance of The Last Days of Mankind would stretch over 10 days measured in earthly time. Audiences could not bear it, said Karl Kraus of his searing jeremiad inveighing against the madness and futility of war, written in the immediate aftermath of WWI.
Fronted by the Tiger Lillies, whose trademark cadaverous make-up is a perfect fit, an ensemble cast from across Europe plays out the tragedy as macabre vaudeville in the salubrious environs of a bourgeois Viennese cafe.
Between the pitch-perfect songs inciting the audience throughout to die, starve and slave for their country, performed with delicious impishness by Martyn Jacques, the cast effortlessly conjure the jingoistic fervour escalating from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
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