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| | | Wayfinder review – Larry Achiampong's poetic lockdown odyssey | | by Wendy Ide Jul 3, 2022 | | A young wanderer encounters social injustice in the artist’s melancholy, sometimes magical feature set in a near-future England Created during lockdown, the latest work from British-Ghanaian artist and film-maker Larry Achiampong is a poetic odyssey, a top-down journey through a near-future England, divided into chapters. It follows a young woman (Perside Rodrigues), known only as the Wanderer, as she travels the country, bearing witness to its iniquities and injustices. Through a fabric of narrating voices, the film touches on race, economic imbalance, the housing crisis and gentrification, among other themes. The approach is superficially similar to the work of Andrew Kötting, although the playfulness and humour that characterises his travelogues is absent here. There are moments of magic: the loamy folk vocals of artist Mataio Austin Dean, who sings twice in the film, gave me goosebumps. And the film conveys a pervasive sense of melancholy: a kind of real-time bereavement for lives that are increasingly marginalised in the name of progress. But there are moments in which the picture’s wafting lyricism works against it – points that need, or deserve, to be more emphatically made. Continue reading... | | | | | The Card review – cheeky chappy comes up trumps in a twisty tale of social mobility | | by Arifa Akbar Jul 3, 2022 | | Fenton Town Hall, Stoke-on-Trent
Wily upstart Denry Machin is played with picaresque charm in a witty adaptation of Arnold Bennett’s novel, empowered by the big, vivid sound of a brass band Downstairs, in Fenton Town Hall’s cute cafe, local theatregoers spot me as an out-of-towner and begin speaking of their region’s once glorious past, from its potteries to its literary godfather in Arnold Bennett, before getting on to Brexit and this corner of Stoke-on-Trent, which, they say, has been so badly “left behind”. Upstairs, Bennett’s long-gone world of wealth, upward-mobility and opportunity, brought to life on the hall’s handsome ballroom, gives their words poignancy. The drama features the fictional town of Bursley in 19th-century Stoke and its protagonist is the incorrigible Denry Machin, a left-behind of the Victorian era at the start and humble son of a washerwoman. The Card is at Fenton Town Hall, Stoke-on-Trent, until 9 July. Continue reading... | | | | | Peter Brook: the great seeker of British theatre | | by Mark Lawson Jul 3, 2022 | | The esteemed British director inspired each new generation of theatre creatives to be more daring and experimental The two key British theatre directors of the middle decades of the 20th century were near-contemporaries and close friends called Peter. But while Peter Hall was instrumental in setting up and running the biggest theatres – first the Royal Shakespeare Company and then the National Theatre – Peter Brook set himself up to run away from them. He spent the last five decades of his career at a theatre of his own in Paris, where he worked on long and idiosyncratic projects that would come to the UK only as a date on a world tour. But, despite this long absence, which he disliked being described as an exile, Brook’s impact on the theatre of his home country was huge. Directors, especially of the classics, are often at their best with either the visual or the verbal aspects of theatre, but Brook was brilliant at both. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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