Culture

Today Bloomsday is a magnet for tourists and a boost to the Dublin economy. As one travel site advertises: “It’s a great time to visit Dublin whether you’ve managed to read Ulysses or not.” The Joyce scholar Michael Groden calls Bloomsday the biggest holiday in Ireland, even bigger than St Patrick’s Day. Other cities have caught on: in 2012, the county and borough councils of Sligo launched Yeats Day on the poet’s birthday, which also happens to be 13 June. In 2015, Literature Wales and the Welsh government announced the first International Dylan Thomas Day, held in Swansea, where the university holds Dylan Thomas manuscripts, on 14 May: the date of the first staged reading of Under Milk Wood in New York in 1953. Again, a pub crawl features. … [Read more...] about Bring out the cardies and cocktails – it’s time we celebrated Dallowday

As the production is at the Yard, an enterprising east London venue seeking to develop theatre attractive to the Netflix and podcast generation, form further complicates content. Wendy Kweh delivers a monologue, while a third of the stage is filled with projected images (a magnified fly recurs) and theatregoers hear through headphones an unnerving soundscape (by Max Pappenheim) of street and aerial voices and buzz. … [Read more...] about A Kettle of Fish review – unnerving tale for an age of anxiety

It’s a painfully obvious choice, but A Brief History of Time has to be here, because it’s where I began to think of time as a strange concept, not just a thing on a clock face. Time as described by an increase of entropy, say – entropy must increase in a closed system (like the universe) and so time must seem to go “forwards”. I glimpsed concepts in this book that I can never really understand, but which preoccupy my writing – what is time, how do we experience it, how does it have an impact on us? … [Read more...] about From Virginia Woolf to Stephen Hawking: the best books about time

The writer Hal Coase meets Woolf’s experimentalism with his own. In the first scene, actors appear in costume but out of character. “I live in London,” says one. “I’m terrified,” says another. They speak about Woolf’s 1924 essay on the primacy of character, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, and quibble about how the play should begin; stopping, starting, and narrating their lines from a lectern to stall our suspension of disbelief. The complications of staging an adaptation are exposed, but it all feels awkward and overplayed. … [Read more...] about Mrs Dalloway review – a cacophonous take on Virginia Woolf’s classic

His rugged features always looked as if they had been chiselled out of Yorkshire rock, and now real chiselling will etch out Ted Hughes's place in Poets' Corner. His commemoration alongside the likes of Wordsworth in Westminster Abbey may lift the long shadow cast over his reputation by the suicides of both his first wife, Sylvia Plath, and his subsequent partner. As the pall fades, the sheer power of Hughes's talent can be enjoyed afresh, and without distraction. While shunning the snooty ways of the modernists of his youth, Hughes nonetheless took on themes that were just as big, the difference being that he also made them accessible, often by putting them in animal form. Thus the thrushes with the "dark, deadly eye, those delicate legs", who are "nothing but a bounce and a stab and a ravening second" are an arresting starting point for asking why human beings are condemned to be something beyond what they do. The "natty get-up" of A March Calf is graphic enough to draw children in, … [Read more...] about In praise of … Ted Hughes