CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Bruising consequences of the blitz
SIMON PARSONS recommends a new play on the stand-off in Southampton between locals and government during WWII
Lady Cooper Anita Dobson and Hilton MCRae
[Manuel Harlan]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
The Shadow Factory
NST City
Southampton
IT WOULD be difficult to conceive of a more resonant production to open Southampton’s new 450-seat theatre than The Shadow Factory.
The Battle of Britain may be the context for this premiere of Howard Brenton’s play but the subject matter is the battle between locals in the city and the wartime government’s authoritarian approach to its people and their property.
After the 1940 bombing of the nearby Spitfire factory, homes and businesses were requisitioned under the Emergency Powers Act, to enable production to continue in a “shadow factory.”
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