Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater edited by Susan Tumarkin Goodman
Yale University Press, £35

ART and theatre – often seemingly occupying different worlds – were brilliantly brought together in the early years of the Russian revolution, creating work that was dramatically and visually inventive. It also attracted a popular rather than a specialist audience. While today it is not possible to see the actual performances and the degree to which design and acting worked together, this beautifully illustrated book, of little known material, gives a powerful sense of the sheer visual and theatrical spectacle as artists investigated new ways of telling tales.

History on our Side: Wales and the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike by Hywel Francis
Iconau, £9.99

OF ALL the numerous books on the miners’ historic strike of 1984-1985 this one, written by an expert on the history of the labour movement in Wales, carries a special and quite different approach, as well as fresh quality. It is also quite brief – a mere 97 pages – yet in fact it gains from this brevity since it focuses largely on the uniqueness of the South Wales mining community from which the entire British labour movement has drawn so much of its strength and inspiration.

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam
Macmillan, £25

OF ALL America’s major wars since 1945, the conflict in Korea is the least celebrated in book and on film. It wasn’t popular with US citizens, who were never quite convinced of its purpose. Nor did returning GIs talk about their terrifying experiences in bleak mountains among a people they neither liked nor respected, fighting battles against an enemy they hardly ever saw in daylight. Korea is the war the US would prefer to forget about, except in the lecture rooms of West Point.

The Boat That Rocked
UK 2009
Knowing
US 2009

AT HEART, Richard Curtis, in financial terms the most successful British screenwriter currently working (even if he was born in New Zealand), is a sit-com writer. His second film as writer-director, The Boat That Rocked, is a floating situation comedy about a group of “pirate” DJs broadcasting from the North Sea while a repressed politician (Kenneth Branagh) plots to put an end to their so-called vulgar music. This music enjoyed by a listening public – nurses, school kids, students – frequently shown in cutaways includes songs by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and The Seekers – yes, The Seekers. One DJ from the fictitious Radio Rock even congratulates himself for playing two Seekers records back to back and you think: “How subversive”.

Tusk Tusk
Royal Court, London

ONE of the best things about theatre is its ability to conjure up an imaginary world. Although the situation created by Polly Stenham in her new play, Tusk Tusk, is based firmly on reality, it is also coloured by fantasy – in this case the vividly imaginary world that children create when left alone by the adults.