Second world war

It can be difficult to remember that Tennessee Williams, the great songster of the Deep South during the 1950s, was still churning out plays when he died in 1983. In the 1960s he was past his peak and he began to experiment with form, perhaps hoping to compete with fashionable youngsters like Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter. Hampstead Theatre staged the world première of his absurdist melodrama The Two Character Play in 1967. And now, a mere 54 years later (an interlude that hints at its merits as a crowd-pleaser), the show has returned to its cradle. Sam Yates directs. This is an obscure and sometimes baffling script that features

On 31 March 1923, Alma Cummings put her feet into a bowl of cold water. Then, tired-eyed but smiling obligingly for the photographer, she held up her dancing shoes. There were holes in both soles. Cummings had just finished a 27-hour stint of waltzing at a Manhattan ballroom, wearing out not just her shoes, but six male partners in the process. The dance instructor was one of the Americans responsible for a strange cultural phenomenon that swept the United States over the next two decades — dance marathons. Cummings’s record was soon beaten and within a few years promoters were organising public competitions across the States in which couples danced

How to sum up the legend of Marlene Dietrich? She was an actor, a singer, a style icon, even a war hero. A retrospective is under way at the BFI, where more than a dozen of her films are being shown throughout this month. Many admirers saw only the shimmering legs and forgot the sharp intellect, the wartime gallantry. But it would be wrong to deny that body image was central to her success. It was with this in mind that the critic Robin Wood christened Dietrich ‘the Venus de Marlene’. Like the statue alluded to, Dietrich is a monument of Western culture, her image cast not in stone, but

The Painted Bird opens with a young boy (Jewish) running through a forest and clutching his pet ferret. He is being chased by some other boys (not Jewish) who beat him to the ground, douse his ferret in petrol and set it on fire. The boy watches as his pet burns alive and I don’t know if you’ve ever witnessed a ferret being burned alive, but my God, I’m not going to get those high-pitched cries out of my head any day soon, just as I’m not going to get this film out of my head any day soon. You’d think, after those opening few minutes, things could only get

Among the spoils of a lockdown clear-out was a box of my grandmother’s books: Woolf, Austen, Mitford and The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear with a jacket by Barnett Freedman. You only need to see a corner of the cover — a stippled trompe-l’oeil scroll — to recognise the artist. Freedman, a Stepney Cockney born to Jewish-Russian parents in 1901, delighted in paper games. Maps unfurl, book leaves fly, cut-outs and cartouches abound. His designs are a miscellany of silhouettes, decoupage, concertinas, peek-a-boos, lift-the-flaps and grubby thumbprints. Edges are ragged, endpapers torn. On the dust jacket to Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1931), a military map has been

It might seem a bit of a stretch to see deep similarities between Michaela Coel (young, female, black and currently very fashionable indeed) and the late Philip Roth (increasingly discredited as an embodiment of all those phallocentric white guys who once ruled American fiction merely because they were great writers). Nonetheless, this week’s television made it hard not to. On Tuesday night, as an adaptation of Roth’s The Plot Against America began on Sky Atlantic, Coel’s I May Destroy You was serving up a dazzling final episode that confirmed how Rothian the series has been. For one thing, the main character Arabella, played by Coel herself, was — like many