CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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The heart of the Matti
DENISE MINA tells Angus Reid why she's updated Brecht's anti-capitalist satire to the era of zero-hours contracts and food banks
FORENSICALLY FUNNY: Denise Mina in rehearsal
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
MR PUNTILA and his Man Matti was Bertholt Brecht’s idea of a popular comedy — a sure-fire socialist crowd-pleaser. He believed in the play so much that in 1948 he used it to launch the Berliner Ensemble, the legendary theatre company whose practice still resonates globally.
He wrote it in Finland in 1940 while he hopped from country to country, staying one step ahead of the nazi occupations of European countries. Among his work of that period it is the odd one out, being entirely to do with economic relations and nothing to do with the war.
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