Holocaust
1945 review - Hungarian holocaust dramaFriday, 12 October 2018
Ferenc Török is firmly aiming at the festival and art house circuit with his slow-paced recreation of one summer day in rural Hungary. A steam train stops at a rural siding, two Orthodox Jewish men descend and with minimal speech, oversee the... Read more... |
The Path to Heaven, RNCM, Manchester review - tragedy, truth, passionFriday, 22 June 2018
Adam Gorb’s The Path to Heaven, with libretto by Ben Kaye, is his longest work to date (almost two hours’ running time without interval) and on a story that could hardly be more tragic – the Holocaust. Its premiere at the Royal Northern College of... Read more... |
Mamzer Bastard, Royal Opera, Hackney Empire review - inert Hasidic music-dramaFriday, 15 June 2018
Striking it lucky with a successful new opera is a rare occurrence, though every company has a duty to keep on trying. The Royal Opera hit the jackpot with 4.48 Psychosis, a highly original approach to Sarah Kane's profound and authentic play by... Read more... |
John Gray: Seven Types of Atheism review - to believe, or not to believeSunday, 29 April 2018
To suggest an absence is to imply a presence. Philosophers, novelists, dictators, politicians – as well as almost every “ism” you can think of – take the stage in this absorbing, precisely and elegantly written study of various kinds of atheism. All... Read more... |
Destination Unknown review - Holocaust survivors go backThursday, 15 June 2017
Destination Unknown is a passion project 13 years in production, a documentary featuring moving interviews with a dozen Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution. Elderly men and women describe what happened to them and their families during the war. We... Read more... |
All Our Children review - shameful historical period horrifies anewSaturday, 06 May 2017
How do you tell a story as complex as the eugenics movement, which is pursued afresh in writer-director Stephen Unwin's new play All Our Children? Its idealistic origins lie in Britain with Francis Galton in 1883, before leading to forced... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: German Concentration Camps Factual SurveyTuesday, 02 May 2017
This is an impeccably restored presentation of the 1945 feature-length documentary that was intended to be shown in German cinemas in order to counter any remaining support for Nazism. Backed by the British Ministry of Information, it was overseen... Read more... |
The Promise review - genocide reduced to melodramaFriday, 28 April 2017
The Armenian genocide by the Ottomans during and after World War One killed 1.5 million people and is a wound that won’t heal for Armenians, though modern-day Turkey continues to insist that no genocide occurred. It’s only through the efforts of... Read more... |
The private life of Stefan Zweig in EnglandThursday, 09 February 2017
On 23 February 1942 at half past four in the afternoon in a secluded Brazilian hilltown called Petrópolis about an hour from Rio, a maid and her husband pushed at the bedroom door of a modest rented house. Despite the late hour, the tenants had not... Read more... |
DenialThursday, 26 January 2017
As alternative facts go, few are as grievous as the assertion that the Holocaust didn't happen. That's the claim on which the British historian (I use that word advisedly) David Irving has staked an entire career. Its day in court provides... Read more... |
DVD: The Shop on the High StreetFriday, 12 August 2016
There will surely be no end to the debate as to how any work of art can approach treating the Holocaust, and its depiction in cinema, with the great immediacy of that form, has always been especially problematic. Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’s 1965 film... Read more... |
Haïm: In the Light of a Violin, The Print RoomWednesday, 15 June 2016
On the face of it, there is nothing in this tightly focused little piece that says anything new about the Holocaust. The plight of a poor Jewish boy unfortunate enough to be growing up in 1930s Poland is dismally familiar. The story of life-... Read more... |
