To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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Europe ahead of its time
Written 25 years ago, there's an unnerving prescience to this brilliant play in the era of Brexit, says JAN WOOLF
Trainspotters: Characters in David Greig’s Europe
[Marc Brenner]
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
Europe
Donmar, London
THIS fine production of David Greig’s play by the Donmar’s new artistic director Michael Longhurst is set in a shabby train station on the point of closure in an anonymous Mitteleuropa border town.
All its charm and cultural identity are gone and its inhabitants — whose accents, interestingly, are northern British — yearn for work or escape.
They are becoming nowhere people from a nowhere place trying to grasp a sense of their future, as are two refugees from war-torn former Yugoslavia. The father sleeps on the station seats, with his head resting on his adult daughter’s lap, while she stares desolately into space.
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