Issue 636

Maelstrom

‘I started DJing,’ says Paul Gordon candidly, ‘by playing some pretty dubious music. Definitely nothing I’d admit to! You know, all the usual under-18s discos when I was about 13 or 14, then I started to get a few decent gigs as I got older. I played…

Festival Insider - Gavin Webster

Here we are from the Toon to Auld Reekie, 100 miles up the ‘road’ (I use the term road loosely, it being almost farm track between the Geordie metropolis and the Scottish capital, yet Portsmouth and Southampton have a three-lane motorway separating…

Susan Calman: The Last Woman on Earth

A warm show from a friendly talent

Susan Calman was once heckled by a guy who said he wouldn’t shag her if she was the last woman on earth. Taking his abuse as a launchpad, the premise of the pocket-sized Weegie’s show is that we’re all stuck in a bunker after a nuclear attack, and she…

Xiaolu Guo

Creating political parables out of flying saucers

After her reading at the Book Festival last year, Chinese author Xiaolu Guo spent a lot of her Q&A session chatting about the literary headaches, not to mention boredom, created by translating from her first language, Chinese, into English. She had gone…

Suhayl Saadi

Spanning the Scottish Highlands and the wilds of Pakistan, his new novel is a weighty affair

‘Epic’ and ‘ambitious’ are adjectives often bandied about in the description of novels that in fact display very little of either. That’s not an accusation you could level at Joseph’s Box, the sprawling, expansive, strange and moving new novel by…

Theatre Hitlist

As the EIF joins the Fringe, we choose our pick of Festival theatre.

Diaspora, Sea Wall, The Tartuffe, Trilogy, The Hotel, Party, White Tea, Optimism, Faust

Chika Unigwe

Learning how much shame there is in luxury

The depiction of prostitutes in fiction can be a one-dimensional affair, but not in Chika Unigwe’s poignant and moving novel On Black Sisters’ Street. Unigwe was raised in Nigeria, but has spent the last decade in Belgium, and it was a culture shock…

James Kelman

Striking deep into the Scottish soul

There can be few Scottish writers as lauded as James Kelman, and rightly so. The Glasgow-born author has spent a career carving out a place as the authentic voice of his generation, his use of stream-of-consciousness prose and vernacular Scots…

Sylvia Plath - Three Women, The First Revival

Rare production of the poet’s play, with fine performances

There’s more than a touch of the poet and playwright herself in each of the three titular characters in Robert Shaw’s production of what was originally a radio play from 1962. The triumvirate of voices are those of a wife (Louisa Clein), a secretary…

Birthing the Crone: The Crone Chronicles

One-woman show proclaiming the menopause as more than the beginning of old age

Lisa Wilson’s battle with the menopause and a number of unforeseen obstacles come together in this one-woman show that takes a refreshing look at ‘the change’. Intelligently written, and performed with honesty and humility, Wilson takes you on a highly…

The State We’re In

The power of protest

A fictionalised account of Brian Haw’s camp in London’s Parliament Square to protest the war in Iraq, foreign policy and threats to our civil liberties. Michael Byrne is compellingly impassioned as a man who has taken on the burden of protesting for the…

The Chronicles of Irania

The pleasantries of tea, sweets and traditional stories are juxtaposed with harrowing tales of violence towards women and homosexuals. The country may be fictional but its real-life inspiration is all too clear, and Maryam Hamidi’s beautiful turn as…

Opening Night of the Living Dead

Zombies - not huge fans of amateur dramatics

Shakespeare and Romero form an unholy alliance in this horror/comedy that depicts a zombie attack on an am-dram production of Romeo and Juliet. Fun, but ultimately predictable, with often repetitive chase sequences, this piece goes for giggles instead…

Top 20 Festival Shows

Emmanuel Jal There are few people who could even imagine the terrors of being a child made to fight in a war-torn homeland. This guy has lived it and come through the other side. Jen Hadfield In a year of poetry shocks, this Shetlands-based…

Profile: Aly Michalka

Bandslam

Name Aly Michalka Born 1989 Torrance, California Background Having already had top 20 singles in the UK and UK with her sister Amanda as AJ and Aly, and opened for Hannah Montana/Miles Cyrus, rising star Michalka has got the right qualifications…

Bargain DVDs

Inglorious Bastards, Pirates of the Caribbean, Rocky, Planet of the Apes, Die Hard, Dollars trilogy, Powell and Pressburger anthology, Watchmen, Let The Right One In, O Lucky Man!, Repo Man, Harold and Maude, Donnie Darko

Profile: Gianni Di Gregorio

Name Gianni Di Gregorio Born 1949, Rome Background Having grown up in the Trastevere district of Rome, di Gregorio studied acting and directing in the Italian capital, before becoming a screenwriter. From 1996 he began collaborating with the…

Mid-August Lunch

The subtle drama of an Italian village

Hitherto best known for co-writing Gomorrah, 60-year-old Gianni di Gregorio makes his directorial debut with this charming tale, which beautifully illustrates Tolstoy’s dictum that ‘To speak to the world, one should write about one’s village’. The…

Geoff Dyer

Merrily spinning a Thomas Mann-inflected yarn

The main man in Geoff Dyer’s smartly-penned fourth novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi has a pretty devilish sense of humour. And it would seem that the same can be said for the character’s creator. So what does he have in store for us with his…

French Film

Fresh from a spot of miracle working in Ken Loach’s feelgood melodrama Looking for Eric, Eric Cantona returns in this damp squib of a British romantic comedy, the debut feature of Jackie Oudney. He plays Thierry Grimandi, a chain-smoking French auteur…

Music: also released

The Xcerts: Live at King Tut’s. James Yorkston & the Big Eyes Family Players: Folk Songs, Squarepusher: Solo Electric Bass, The Crystal Method: Divided By Night. Richard Thompson: Walking on Wire.

Bandslam

Todd Graff's take on the teenage rock star dream

‘This is sick!’ says budding impresario Will Burton (Gaelan Connell) as he constructs a rock’n’roll band from his fellow high school students to take part in a battle-of-the-bands competition. The description ‘sick’, obviously meaning, that his band are…