Occupation
BBC 1
Psychoville
BBC 2
Much as it galls me ever to agree with anyone, there’s no way to avoid adding my voice to the chorus of critical approval for Occupation. This three-part BBC drama shown on consecutive nights was everything claimed for it – meaty, intelligent, emotionally engaging, credible and courageous.
A Child In Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-Ali
Verso, £9.99
The Guardian called Naji al-Ali: “The nearest thing there is to an Arab public opinion.” For 30 years his cartoons provided an incisive commentary on Arab politics until his career was cut short when he was shot outside the offices of the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Qabas in 1987. “No one knows who killed him. Everyone had a reason.”
Richard Long: Heaven and Earth
Tate Britain, London
“Taking a line for a walk” was how, memorably, Paul Klee described his drawing, adopting an approach that allowed his imagination free reign. By contrast, Richard Long makes art by taking himself for carefully planned solitary walks, usually in remote and sometimes distant lands, whether in Britain, Canada, Mongolia or Bolivia. Long’s work can be seen as “land art”, a movement concerned with how artists respond to the way landscape influences and affects our lives, part of the romantic tradition in which humankind and nature are perceived to be in some complex symbiotic relationship.
Been So Long
Young Vic, London
Orwell: A Celebration
Trafalgar Studios, London
New writing for British theatre experienced a boom in the mid-1990s and we are still living with the aftershocks. But these reverberations come in many different guises, as is obvious in this revival of Che Walker’s 1998 play, Been So Long. Although Walker has kept the basic outline of his play, as well as much of its exuberant language, he has turned a slight story into a bouncy, occasionally hilarious, musical.
The Revengers
Pomegranate Theatre, Chesterfield
Take a frustrated actress and her equally frustrated wheelchair-bound husband, both hounded by a sleazy loan shark looking for a £5,000 debt in cash or kind, and you have the recipe for a depressing night at the theatre. It reads like one of those creaky black and white kitchen sink dramas on the old BBC Play for Today, dark, grim and menacing. But The Revengers, thankfully, is nothing of the kind. Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood have written a snappy comedy using serious ingredients and achieving one of the best humorous plays I have ever seen.
Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy by Shane Hamilton
Princeton University Press, £20.95
It is easy to see the beauty in the beast when you look at those huge American trucks with their distinctive driver’s cabs and aura of majesty on the freeway. They have featured in red neck movies and bring together the outlaw swagger and romantic tenderness of modern Western heroes. Country music lauds truckers as gritty yet sentimental. They are as much a part of American life as burgers and fries, endless highways and Wal-Mart superstores. But they are much, much more than machines.
I still find it hard to believe that it is 45 years since the masthead of the Daily Herald disappeared from our newsagents’ shelves. A lot of people, and a lot of publications, have sought ever since to fill that gap but, apart from Tribune, the gap remains. There is no longer a national daily newspaper of the left-wing character of the Herald.
The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables by Robert Henryson translated by Seamus Heaney
Faber & Faber, £12.99
As Seamus Heaney admits in his introduction to this splendid new translation, little is known about Robert Henryson other than that he was probably born sometime in the 1420s, he was “a schoolmaster of Dunfermline” and he was dead by 1505 when William Dunbar mourned his passing in Lament for the Makars. He was the author of three major narrative poems – The Testament of Cresseid, The Moral Fables and Orpheus and Eurydice – as well as a number of shorter lyric poems.