Review of 'Paula Spencer', Roddy Doyle, Jonathan Cape £16.99
The film adaptation of Roddy Doyle's novel The Commitments brought his Barrytown trilogy - The Commitments, The Van and The Snapper - to a wide audience. In 1994 the four-part television series Family stirred much controversy with a very different view of modern Dublin.
Review of 'U-Carmen eKhayelitsha', director: Mark Dornford-May
When U-Carmen eKhayelitsha was premiered earlier this year in the South African township where it was filmed, it drew an audience of 1,500 every day for a month. This contemporary version of George Bizet's opera Carmen deserves as large an audience everywhere it is shown.
Recent disputes have shown a growing confidence and militancy among workers, argues Moira Nolan.
In a summer of iconic images, two much-pictured events may prove to have a lasting impact on class struggle in Britain in the coming months: the chaos at Heathrow Airport following the solidarity walkouts by BA workers and the hilltop protests by their fellow T&G members, the Gate Gourmet workers. These two events sum up both the injustice of working life in Blair's Britain and the power of workers to do something about it.
Review of 'The Merchant of Venice', director Michael Radford
For modern audiences, there are many advantages to seeing Shakespeare on film as opposed to the theatre. The use of close-ups for key speeches or visual symbols to represent emotions in the medium of film can take a viewer into the psychology of character or place in a way that helps overcome the very real barrier that the highly figurative language can often present.
Review of 'Buried Child' by Sam Shepherd, National Theatre, London
Many post-war American playwrights have delved into the reality of life inside of the nuclear family. Sam Shepherd's Buried Child, a 1978 play in revival at the National Theatre, does so with an incredible richness of imagery.
Mike Tomlinson's report on education provision for 14 to 19 year olds in England and Wales is timely.
The introduction of the new A-level examinations was a fiasco, and there is widespread disillusionment among both teachers and pupils with a school system dominated by tests and targets.
Moira Nolan surveys recent teenage fiction
'It's not like it was in our day' is a phrase you can thankfully apply to much of the exciting, controversial and gripping fiction produced for teenagers in Britain today. Gone are the pompous, moralistic tomes full of Victorian values and happy endings. No more do our teens have to read novels whose main aim is to provide them with a model of how they should live - conventional, obedient, saintlike and quite frankly dull existences.
Review of ’The Dreamers‘, director Bernardo Bertolucci
Bertolucci‘s The Dreamers captures the excitement and energy of the events in May 1968 Paris, when a students‘ revolt grew into the biggest general strike in history and threatened the entire fabric of the French political and economic order. Though focusing primarily on the cultural turmoil that accompanied the sudden outbreak of radicalism, this is a film in which there is an overwhelming sense that the world can and should be changed.
