CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Beyond Brecht
ANGUS REID watches two productions at the EIF that deal in different ways with the consequences of war
Adrien Barazzone, Beatriz Brás, Baptiste Coustenoble and Natacha Koutchoumov in As far As Impossible; Kim Kum-mi in The Trojan Women
[Andrew Perry/Jess Shurte]
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
HARD on the heels of the NT show Grenfell: In The Words Of The Survivors comes another astonishing epic of verbatim theatre, As Far As Impossible (★★★★★), Tiago Rodrigues’s rendition of interviews with humanitarian aid workers from the Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontiers.
Like in Grenfell, actors play multiple interviewees and the result is so urgent and compelling that it is tempting to see this very contemporary convention as heralding a new genre in political theatre and a next step after Brecht.
This theatre has learned from the East German master. The “distance” of actor from role is immediately established, allowing a man to play a woman or, controversially, a white woman to play a black woman. The performance is simply enactment; the words themselves are evidence.
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