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

Telling Tales: Fear and Fantasy in Contemporary Design
Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The all-pervading influence of surrealism continues to inspire artists and designers, sometimes in bizarre ways. Design has often been a way for artists to explore the odd and unnerving, whether in Salvador Dali’s iconic sofa in the shape of a pair of giant red lips or in his lobster telephone. By appropriating everyday familiar forms, idea and object take on different and often disturbing significance. The argument is that, by taking practical objects, the notion of use is subverted by the concept.

Poisoned Spring: The EU & Water Privatisation
by Kartika Liotard and Steven P McGiffen
Pluto Press, £17.99

I once interviewed an Iraqi scientist, now working at Surrey University, who specialises in designing new systems for making fresh water. He told me he was inspired to go into this area because when he was growing up his father’s farm was forced to close and they all moved to the city. The river which supplied the farm’s water was reduced to a trickle because of a dam built upstream in a neighbouring country. It’s a story that has been repeated endlessly throughout history and, with climate change, it is likely to become even more common.

Judgement Day
Almeida, London

In the year Ödön von Horváth was writing Judgement Day, English audiences were introduced to Noel Coward’s Still Life (later adapted to become Brief Encounter). Both plays begin in railway stations, feature strangers enduring a tedious wait for trains and involve a love match which the mean-spirited community would have frowned on, had it known about it. However, while Coward’s audience was largely blind to the impending global conflict, von Horváth was in Germany/Austria to observe at first hand the malign influence of the Third Reich.

Free: The Future of a Radical Price
by Chris Anderson
Random House, £18.99

Chris Anderson has two products to flog. Obviously, there’s the book, which takes an intriguingly counter-intuitive premise (businesses can make money by giving stuff away) and demonstrates it to be a scaled-up version of an already established tactic, made possible by the low overheads involved in the delivery of online products. In fact, Anderson begins the story of Free in the world of 19th century patent medicines – which is fitting, because with its impossible promises of entrepreneurs growing wealthy at no cost to consumers or themselves, Free is 80 per cent snake oil, too.

Away We Go
Director: Sam Mendes

Three Miles North of Molkom
Directors: Robert Cannan and Corinna McFarlane

The second film directed by Sam Mendes to be released in Britain this year, Away We Go, would make a fascinating double-bill with his first, the superb Revolutionary Road. Whereas the latter, based on the classic novel by Richard Yates, was a study of crushing stasis, wherein a youngish couple in 1950s suburbia dreamt of escaping to Paris – with catastrophic results – this new movie, co-scripted by acclaimed American writer Dave Eggers (responsible for memoirs including A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and novels such as You Shall Know Our Velocity) is all about the freedom of movement enjoyed by another educated, middle-class couple, 50 years later.

2nd May 1997
Bush Theatre, London

Some dates evoke instant feelings. The title of Jack Thorne’s new 90-minute play, 2nd May 1997, immediately calls to mind the euphoria of the day after Tony Blair’s historic landslide victory over the Tories. But this is not a play about politics – the general election is just the background to three stories about sex and love. As the media pumps out the election results, including the memorable Portillo moment, three very different couples in three very different bedrooms react very differently to the dawning of a new political age.

Like most thinking people, the authors of this book were fascinated, baffled and occasionally repulsed by the dark world of Conservatism in England. Unlike most people, they decided to hold their noses and plunge deeply into this bizarre society and, between 2005 and 2008, they infiltrated the Conservative Party to bring the rest of us the strange tales from a Tory nation that is the sub title of this book.

Attlee’s Great Contemporaries: The Politics of Character edited by Frank Field

Continuum, £16.99

Frank Field has done a commendable service in bringing together this fine collection of the essays Clement Attlee published, between 1951 and 1966, in The Observer, The Times and the National and English Review. They demonstrate, as Field reflects, the importance that Attlee attached to personal qualities in those who aspire to do public good: “Attlee held it as a great truth that the revolution he espoused would never change the character of the British nation unless politicians led by living that kind of life themselves.”