MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Marxism makes monumental Manchester mark
JOHN GREEN recommends a unique documentary on the timely return of Friedrich Engels to the city
BEFORE AND AFTER: Engels statue in Ukraine (inset) and its arrival in Manchester
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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
IN 2017, Turner Prize-shortlisted artist Phil Collins displayed a statue of Friedrich Engels he’d brought from Ukraine to Manchester in a ceremony at the close of the city’s international festival.
Manchester is the city where Engels spent 20 years of his life and wrote his classic work The Condition of the Working Class in England, but which had no monument in the city centre to commemorate that fact.
Collins shot the whole project and his hour-long film Ceremony: the Return of Friedrich Engels not only documents the transportation of the statue but intercuts it with scenes from working-class life in present-day Manchester.
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