Joseph and Magda Goebbels arrive in Hitler’s bunker with their children aware that the end of war is nigh. We already know their fates: Hitler’s propaganda minister and his wife commited suicide after killing their six children, although accounts differ as to who feeds them the cyanide capsules. Ziervogel suggests Magda murders the children alone and focuses on what leads her to this final brutal act.

Combining fact and fiction and knitting together the perspectives of Magda’s embittered mother and her eldest daughter, Helga, Ziervogel creates a multi-layered portrait. Magda’s mother, a former maidservant, reveals how her estranged husband insisted that his daughter receive a convent education. Its harsh environment hardens Magda from a tender age. She is rescued by her mother’s second husband, a kindly Jewish shopkeeper, who brings up Magda like his own and encourages her to pursue an education rather than follow her mother into domestic service.

After meeting Goebbels, Magda realises that her destiny is to serve the Party and dedicates herself to Hitler as though “He” was God, confiding in him her fears and desires. At one point she bemoans her husband’s frequent infidelities and Hitler flatters her into believing that she is an “icon” for the German people and counsels her to “forgive Joseph his trespasses and live like a saint.”

In her afterword, Ziervogel suggests that her intention was “to capture the psychology…of a destructive mother-daughter relationship over three generations.”  Rather than presenting Magda as a monster, Ziervogel gives her a human face. She comes to represent all the ordinary German women who were swept up by Hitler’s abominable vision, refusing to recognise its horrors and absolving themselves with state propaganda.

Helga’s diary entries suggest that her mother is already distancing herself from her children, perhaps preparing herself for the inevitable. Ziervogel dedicates one chapter to Magda’s vision of what might happen should she and her children live under “enemy” occupation. Helga would have to prostitute herself while Magda would have to watch helplessly, terminally afflicted by her migraines. It is too hard for Magda to contemplate this possibility and so she chooses the only alternative left open to her. Even in that, she is deluded; seeing her act of prolicide as heroic rather than cold-blooded murder.

A shorter version was published in Tablet

An elderly woman, Moll (Ann Calder-Marshall), is alone in her high-rise flat observing people down on the street and waiting for her cat, Winston, to return. When Manz (Hugh Skinner) and then Hardy (Richard Riddell) arrive on her doorstep, Moll thinks she’s being taken on holiday. But strange things are happening outside. Paperchase is infested with voles and there’s a rabbit warren at the bottom of Aldi. Weeds are growing everywhere, trees are bursting through cracks in the pavement and the sighting of a deer strikes fear into Manz’s heart. Then the army moves in, quarantines the block and suddenly it is too late to leave. Moll offers shelter to a couple and their young son Arthur (played by actress Polly Frame).

Eccleshare subverts our expectations by finding humour in this dystopian world and satirising the urbanites’ fear of nature. When Hardy goes hunting for food, he proudly returns with a hedgehog, to everyone dismay. Ocado’s delivery man (Bill Fellows) heroically fights his way through the mayhem to Moll’s flat, minus the shopping, only to come to a sticky end. There are also moments of poignancy such as when Moll and young Arthur share a last cigarette as they are left to fend for themselves. But the play’s ending, involving the arrival of a bedraggled bride (Carrie Rock) dressed in a pink T-shirt and mini-skirt, is disappointing.

Steve Marmion ensures the pace never slackens and Michael Vale’s stunning design features an oak tree that comes crashing into Moll’s flat, and flowers on darts that drop from above. Gradually the walls and floors begin to cave in.

PASTORAL is superbly acted and this is entertaining, engaging and provocative theatre. Eccleshare proves himself a talent to watch and a worthy award-winner.

At Soho Theatre until 8 June

A young mother of twins, Catherine (Charity Wakefield) is delighted to be offered work with the Radium Dial Company, painting watch faces. Her hard-working husband Tom (Alec Newman) tells her it is only until he starts earning a better wage. But Catherine revels in her new found liberation and financial freedom.

She shares a table with three other women, outspoken Charlotte (Honeysuckle Weeks), practical Frances (Melanie Bond) and joker Pearl (Nathalie Carrington). Over the years, they become close friends. But unknown to them all, they are working with an invisible but lethal killer. Radium is used to make the watches glow in the dark. The women are encouraged to lick the tips of their miniature paint brushes to keep them in shape not realising that they are imbibing a highly dangerous chemical element.

The first sign something is wrong is when Catherine’s hands and clothes begin to glow in the dark. Then she starts to suffer from excruciating pain in the ankle. Her friends also struggle with various ailments, an aching jaw, bleeding, a numb arm, but the company doctor tells them not to worry and proscribes aspirin. As Catherine observes: “The definition of a company doctor is someone who takes care of the company”. When her health deteriorates and she has to take time off work, Catherine is sacked. Finally an independent doctor tells the women the truth. The radium has poisoned them. Supported by her friends, weaker by the day, Catherine begins legal proceedings against her former employer.

It’s a terrific drama, brilliantly staged. I defy anyone not to be in tears by the end. Tim Shortall’s design is gloriously simple, Rob Casey’s subtle lighting indicates a shift in setting with minimal fuss, Vic Craven’s video projection adds atmosphere and Loveday Ingram pulls it all together, directing with real panache. It’s beautifully acted and costume supervisor, Brigid Guy, deserve a special mention for her superb attention to period detail.

In Park200, Park Theatre until 9 June

Review originally published by Theatreworld

Loach combines archive footage with contemporary interviews. Miners, nurses, doctors, railway men trade unionists and ordinary working class men and women describe the poverty that they were rescued from and the sense of hope they all felt with the nationalisation of Britain’s heavy industries and public utilities and the building of new public housing. The high point of Clement Atlee’s government was the birth of the NHS in 1948 – championed by minister of health, Aneurin Bevan.

The post-war Labour administration oversaw a period of dramatic change in Britain, from 1945 to 1951, and this is perhaps why Loach, after covering the period jumps abruptly to 1979, the year Thatcher came to power. During her eleven-year reign she was responsible for dismantling all that the Labour party held dear, returning everything to the private sector. However, by omitting these two decades, the strikes, three day week and rampant inflation of the 1970s inherited by Thatcher is not even touched upon.

Inevitably, given his politics, Loach’s perspective is going to be one-sided. He includes fascinating footage of Winston Churchill and Thatcher being booed (apparently cinema audiences also jeered when Thatcher first appeared on screen). Loach clearly blames Thatcher’s policies for Britain’s current disunity. Mass privatisation and the crushing of the trade unions led to public disillusionment and social unrest which, he implies, we are still reeling from today. Through clever editing, Loach links today’s protests – such as Occupy in St Paul’s – with earlier demonstrations against poverty and injustice.

The Spirit of ’45 is shot in monochrome until its final moments when we return to the footage celebrating the end of the war, which has been coloured by Gareth Spensley, underlining the explosive and exhilarating sense of optimism and hope. In documenting this period so carefully, Loach seems to be suggesting that the time is now ripe for British communities to pull together once more. By recapturing the spirit of 45, finding a national solidarity that challenges the austerity measures, Britain may yet return to the unity needed to achieve a fairer society.

DVD release 94 mins

Dogwoof 15th April 2013

features an additional disc (420 mins)

Originally published by Cine-Vue

In The Hired Man, an English woman, Laura, and her two children arrive in the small Croatian town of Gost. They’ve come to renovate a beautiful blue house that has remained derelict for the past sixteen years. Their neighbour, Duro, offers to help the family with repairs, and together with Laura’s daughter, Grace, he uncovers a mosaic concealed beneath the plaster. As they restore it, hidden resentments among the townfolk begin to surface. What the family doesn’t know is that Duro has a long association with the blue house, and is reconstructing a past that has powerful repercussions for the future. The conflict may be over, but memories of the bloodshed linger. Forna is eloquent on the far-reaching consequences of ethnic hatred. Two local men, Fabjan, the owner of the local bar, and Kresimir, Duro’s childhood friend, appear to have sinister connections to the past. The three, we later learn, have blood on their hands – whether by shooting enemy soldiers, betraying a family to the death squads, or bearing responsibility for the murder of their neighbours.

Forna reveals a conspiracy of silence. Duro does not refer openly to the victims but alludes to them as “the people who use the word hleb for bread”. The terrible ethnic cleansing is never spoken about. All that remains is the graveyard, a metaphor for the town’s history. We are told: “There are different neighbourhoods for the rich and the poor and people who worship in one church and people who worship in another. Everything you need to know about Gost is here in the cemetery”.

Winters in the South also explores the region’s ethnic tensions, but from a different perspective. Gstrein recalls the end of the Second World War, when the Croatians who had allied with the Nazis tried to flee to Austria. Many were then returned to Tito’s Partisans. Gstrein’s central character, Marija, was six when she found refuge in Vienna with her mother. Her father never joined them and is presumed to have been killed.

Now aged fifty, Marija is adrift from her marriage and comfortable existence in Vienna. Though there are rumblings of war, she decides to return to Croatia in an attempt to find herself. She is unaware that her father managed to elude capture in 1945. Like many other fascists, he fled to Argentina where he has been waiting for the opportunity to resume the fight for Croatian independence. Focusing on the old man’s obsession with the past, and his determination to exact revenge, Gstrein illustrates how old differences left to fester can lead to new conflict.

As war erupts, Marija’s father begins preparations for his return. He hires Ludwig, a disgraced expat Austrian policeman, as his bodyguard, and installs a shooting range in his cellar. He gives the lifesized dummies names: a long list of candidates, among whom there always featured a former partisan general or a minister of the People’s Republic of Yugoslavia whom he hadn’t managed to dispatch himself yet, until Ludwig too knew the names of all these prominent figures by heart, consoling himself with the afterthought that many of these World War Two heroes and postwar fighters were already dead anyway.

Gstrein uses the various settings in his novel to draw parallels between the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia, the 1990s Balkans conflict and Argentina’s Dirty War. Each of his characters has a different perspective on war, and Gstrein cleverly juxtaposes the ideology of the two men in Marija’s life. Her husband is a renowned communist revolutionary and respected journalist whose anti-fascism sits uneasily with her father’s fervent nationalism. The author’s multi-layered approach and convoluted style may frustrate some readers, but Anthea Bell and Julian Evans have done a good job of rendering his complex sentence structure into accessible English prose.

Originally published in the TLS

We then track back in time to a few months earlier. Two elderly Parisians, Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignan) are retired music teachers who still enjoy a comfortable existence. But their lives are torn apart when Anne suffers a stroke and Georges has to care for her. After undergoing an operation she arrives home paralysed down her right side and makes Georges promise not to hospitalise her again. At first, Anne gets around in a wheelchair and the couple can still talk together, listen to music, read and, on occasion, even laugh. Then Anne deteriorates dramatically. She suffers another stroke, becomes bed-ridden and can no longer communicate properly. Gradually, she loses all consciousness of who she is and her surroundings. Georges is left with a terrible choice.

Haneke is unrelenting in what he chooses to film, whether it is Anne’s face and body contorted in pain, George’s quiet desperation as he tries to feed her or the nurse’s insensitive handling of her patient. Sound is also amplified – we hear every mouthful of food Anne swallows – and “it hurts” is a constant refrain. Their daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert), a successful musician who lives abroad, visits only rarely and when she does, finds it hard to cope. Conversely, her face is frequently obscured as she turns away to face a window or hides it in her hands. We realise that she is now irrelevant to them, her parents have no need for her, for it is their long past together that sustains them.

A profound meditation on old age and dying, Amour is rich in symbolism: A grand piano dominates the sitting room but is no longer played; an errant pigeon becomes trapped inside the apartment until it is caught and smothered by Georges; and a photo-album becomes the sole remnant of the couple’s love and life together.

Those who have experienced the loss of a loved one will connect with the film on many levels. Others will be moved by Haneke’s sensitive treatment of a difficult subject and the provocative and topical questions he raises. There’s a brilliant and terrible conceit at the heart of Amour; a violent act that is imbued with love.

Originally published by Cine-Vue.com

DVD release 18 March 2013

Runing time: 125 Minutes

Harburg was renowned for his commitment to civil rights and swiftly realized that he could use satire to present his political ideas. In one interview he noted, “Words… make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought”. Born on April 8, 1896, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Harburg’s early deprivation informed his politics. His parents were poor Orthodox Jews who had emigrated from Russia. His father worked in sweatshops. At the age of twelve, Harburg became a lamplighter for the Edison Company to pay his way through high school.

According to Harburg, musical theatre provided the perfect vehicle for conveying a political message because “a song follows you wherever you are”. His comments about the hit musical, Finian’s Rainbow (1947), reveal, most clearly, his desire “to foster a spirit of human rights advocacy”. He cites George Bernard Shaw and Hans Christian Andersen as influences: the former “taught us that truth can have many disguises” and the latter demonstrated that “if you don’t want to be jailed for the truth, tell it as you would to a child”. In Bloomer Girl (1944), Harburg linked anti-slavery with the women’s rights movement. In Finian’s Rainbow, he mocked “the folly of racism” together with greed, consumerism and corruption, and, for Jamaica (1957), he wrote the anti-nuclear song “Leave the Atom alone”.

During the McCarthy era, he was attacked by the conservative writer Ayn Rand, labelled a communist and blacklisted in Hollywood. The accusations were groundless and stemmed from a song he had written for the “Tribute to Russia Day”, held at the Hollywood Bowl in 1943, which was designed to raise money and awareness for the Soviet war effort.

Harriet Hyman Alonso has pored over numerous interviews and other source material, some of it previously unpublished. Tying together the most illuminating of Harburg’s reflections, and adding cultural context, she offers a comprehensive portrait of a man driven as much by his passion for human rights as he was by music.

Originally published in the TLS

A group of people hire themselves out to the newly bereaved. They are led by Aris Servetalis’s paramedic who names the business after the mountain range because, he claims, it does not reveal exactly what they do and yet is symbolic. The Alps, he tells his three colleagues – a young gymnast, her male coach and a nurse – are so imposing that each of them could stand in for another mountain and yet they are irreplaceable. He names himself after the highest one, Mont Blanc. His rationale is as bizarre as his business plan. Mont Blanc’s office is in a gym where he interviews perspective clients and introduces them to the members of the group who will enter their homes and take on the roles of the recently departed. Their intervention is meant to help the grief-stricken deal with loss until such time that they feel able to move on.

What makes Lanthimos’s work so refreshing is his quirky, highly original storylines and audacious cinematography. Aggeliki Papoulia’s hardworking nurse becomes so obsessed with her role playing that it begins to take over her life. The line between fiction and reality becomes increasingly blurred and she starts crossing boundaries with her clients. Gradually, we realise, she is herself struggling with loss and grief.

All the principle characters are, to some degree, damaged, but it is the women who suffer the most. The nurse and the gymnast are effectively controlled by the two men in the group. Mont Blanc proves cold and brutal when crossed, while the coach constantly undermines his young protégée’s confidence and denies her the opportunity to make her own choices.

There is both humour and sadness in the way the characters rehearse their roles, delivering their lines in dead pan voices like bad actors or automatons, and their desire to fulfil their clients’ demands, however bizarre. But their ‘professional’ empathy is empty and potentially damaging. The paramedic thinks nothing of grilling a young girl (a promising tennis player, bleeding profusely in his ambulance) for the name of her favourite actor after telling her that she probably won’t make it. Later, when she does die, his two female colleagues vie for the opportunity to stand in for her.

Of course the whole premise is absurd. Members of Alps can never replace the real thing and everything they are involved in becomes devoid of meaning. This is driven home in the explicit sex scenes that are mechanical and unerotic. The headless shots and characters breaking in and out of frame give a vivid sense of fragmented lives.

It’s intentionally disconcerting, but part of Lanthimos’ skill as a filmmaker is that he constantly pushes boundaries both cinematically and in terms of narrative. He persuades us that the surreal could be real. The bereaved want to believe in the scenarios they create and we sympathise with their desperation.

Alps is released on DVD 11 March 2013

Review originally published by huffingtonpost.co.uk