STEPHANIE BROWN draws attention to the hidden labour of the female embroiderers, and how a 19th century replica made no such error
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Europe ahead of its time
Written 25 years ago, there's an unnerving prescience to this brilliant play in the era of Brexit, says JAN WOOLF
Trainspotters: Characters in David Greig’s Europe
[Marc Brenner]
MIK SABIERS revels in a band that ploughs an idiosyncratic furrow of expletive laden, guitar-driven alt rock
ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Synthetic Sincerity, Our Hero, Balthazar, Heartstopper Forever, and A Year In London
The bard invites readers to a gig, raps for Clacton, and lays out the Burnham-Hurzeler conundrum
RON JACOBS recommends an important book that enhances the oppositional theories put forth by Fanon and, in doing so, remakes psychology itself
JAN WOOLF relishes an extensive history of our long relationship to trees in Britain that underlines the current emergency
DIANE WATT argues that while evidence of sex is not there, a 16th‑century lesbian poet could be Scotland’s answer to Gentleman Jack
Europe
Donmar, London
THIS fine production of David Greig’s play by the Donmar’s new artistic director Michael Longhurst is set in a shabby train station on the point of closure in an anonymous Mitteleuropa border town.
All its charm and cultural identity are gone and its inhabitants — whose accents, interestingly, are northern British — yearn for work or escape.
They are becoming nowhere people from a nowhere place trying to grasp a sense of their future, as are two refugees from war-torn former Yugoslavia. The father sleeps on the station seats, with his head resting on his adult daughter’s lap, while she stares desolately into space.
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