CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Hansard, National Theatre, London
Marital skirmishes point up personal and political schisms of the Thatcher era
Dysfunctional duo: Robin Hesketh (Alex Jennings) and Diana (Lindsay Duncan)
[Catherine Ashmore]
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
WHEN junior Tory minister Robin Hesketh (Alex Jennings) returns to his idyllic Cotswolds home after a busy summer week in Parliament, he finds foxes making a mess of his garden and his unhappy, drink-sodden wife Diana (Lindsay Duncan), ready to do some destructive emotional digging of her own.
Over the course of an hour-and-a-half without interval, the two sixty-somethings pick, poke and provoke as they range over familiar argumentative territory maritally.
Yet gradually, and at Diana’s insistence, the old, well-rehearsed topics give way to new ones that have lain unconsidered for many years, leading to a dramatic and heartbreaking revelation about a painful incident from the past.
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