This extraordinary production at Stratford East lands with the quiet, cumulative force of a dossier being opened in front of you. What emerges is not a conventional piece of Holocaust drama but an inquiry into how very ordinary people become functionaries of atrocity, and how institutions charged with memorialising victims must navigate the unsettling images […]
Arts reviews
Review: Celebrating Billie Holiday, jazz great and civil rights activist
A great night at the Jazz Café, Camden, on 7 April when we were transported back to the Jim Crow era and Billie Holiday’s concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1956, with Riketté Genesis really embodying Holiday and Alex Webb on piano with a fantastic band supporting. Holiday was born on 7 April 1915. Webb read […]
‘Lili Marlene’: the song that haunted the Nazis
One song and two singers came to represent opposition and resistance to Hitler in the Second World War. The most beautiful and certainly most popular song of the Second World War was Lili Marlene. A poem written in 1915, it was first recorded by German singer Lale Andersen in 1939 and was titled Das Mädchen unter […]
Theatre Review: The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, by Dario Fo and Franca Rame
The Accidental Death of an Anarchist is a play that arose from events in December 1969, when Italian fascists bombed the Piazza Fontana in Milan, killing 17 people and injuring 88. It was the deadliest of several bombs planted that day by the group Ordine Nuovo (New Order) as part of the far right’s ‘Strategy […]