How successfully does Denzel Washington translate August Wilson’s claustrophobic domestic drama to the big screen? Continue Reading Fences: How Do You Adapt A Play By August Wilson?
...
A foetus feels like a new narrative perspective – but, in the space of a year, three foetus-narrated novels have arrived at once. Continue Reading A Womb With ...
Austin Wright’s tricksy novel Tony & Susan didn’t make much of a splash in 1993 – but now Tom Ford has given it the Hollywood treatment. Continue ...
We all like a good story. The reliable arch of a narrative is what impels us to read, to go to the theatre, to write. For this reason I will ...
Florian Zeller’s latest is a play for our post-fact, Brexity age. Continue Reading The Post-Fact World: The Truth at Wyndham’s Theatre
...
Agualusa’s novel is an episodic, poetic and raw treatment of Angolan independence. Continue Reading Filtered Truth: A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa
...
One can’t help but leave Pamuk’s novel feeling a little disconcerted. Continue Reading Life Is Like This: A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk
...
I want to press this book aggressively into people’s hands. But its language, its length and the inclinations of its central character all call for restraint. Continue ...
Xenobe Purvis on Chinese novel about totalitarian madness: the third of her Man Booker International Prize reviews. Continue Reading The Ministry of Truth: The Four Books by Yian ...
Xenobe Purvis reviews Elena Ferrante’s contender for the Man International Booker Prize. Continue Reading Story of an Erasure: The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
...
In the run-up to the Man International Booker Prize announcement on May 16, Xenobe Purvis will be reviewing each of the sixth shortlisted books. First, The Vegetarian by South Korea’s ...
Sitting in Notting Hill’s Print Room, watching Deathwatch on the thirtieth anniversary of Genet’s death, Xenobe Purvis couldn’t help but wonder: what would Genet have made of this production? ...
Xenobe Purvis reviews Julian Barnes’s impressionistic biography of Dmitri Shostakovich, his first novel since 2011’s Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending. Continue Reading Power and Irony: The Noise ...
While Owen Sheers’ verse drama about soldiers in Afghanistan has a troubling tendency to tell rather than show, it has moments of real poignancy. Continue Reading Poetic ...
Xenobe Purvis looks at how Florian Zeller’s The Mother, currently at the Tricycle Theatre, and Lenny Abrahamson’s film Room portray both the joy and claustrophobia of motherhood. Continue ...
Ibsen is considered a father figure for today’s realist theatre. But this canonisation loses sight of the originality of his voice, argues Xenobe Purvis. Continue Reading The Quintessence ...
How does Joe Hill-Gibbins’ bold new production of Measure For Measure deal with Shakespeare’s “problem play”? Unproblematically, says Xenobe Purvis. Continue Reading A Problem Play No Longer: Measure ...
When Alec Guinness starred in the original 1949 production of T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, he said: “I don’t know what it means. In fact, I don’t know what meaning ...
Should opera be translated at all? Opera Up Close’s English-language version of La Traviata is currently at the Tricycle – but what it gains in clarity it loses in ...
This year, the great Japanese theatre director Yukio Ninagawa turns eighty. Xenobe Purvis reviews two of his productions at the Barbican Continue Reading The Fierce Imagination of Yukio ...
