Horrors of war

in a cloud of vape.

The court is heavily (wo)manned by black actors. Overall, I am at peace about changes to trad casting as long as the result coheres. Women have, after all, been cast as Hamlet since the eighteenth century when Sarah Siddons played the part nine times. Neither would we insist on the world’s most famous fictional Dane being played by Mads Mikkelsen or Nikolaj Coster-Waldau for verisimilitude.

Norah Lopez Holden is captivating as a tiny waif of an Ophelia, dreamily listening to salsa and smooching sensually in her headphones. Rightly for the youth-focused Young Vic, there is a concatenation of older actors mixing with newcomers to major theatres.

Alas Hersov’s erratic sense of concept verges on the giddy and becomes an insistent flaw. Big moments fall alarmingly flat — the murder of Polonius and Hamlet’s descent into callousness were so “meh” as to seem like a minor hiccup rather than a chilling foreshadowing of the torrent of suicides and murders ahead.

The play within a play, “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature”, starts promisingly as the travelling players set up their DJ mixing decks. Yet we don’t feel the moment of horror and recognition that prompts Claudius to interrupt the action in panic and turn his relationship with his step-son from suspicion to outright enmity.

I hate to say a bad word about Anna Fleischle who provided us some stunning set designs but an odd gilt-mirrored abstract contraption standing in for the palace interiors cramps the stage. Gertrude and Claudius sit uneasily on chairs that look like the sale section of made.com.

It all goes a bit Abigail’s Party, which echoes a broader insecurity and the tempo and energy lag, even in a hard-cut second half. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s ill-fated journey to Britain (“He shall recover his wits there or if he does not, it’s no great matter. There the men are as mad as he”) is already compacted in the play and even more rushed here.

Leo Wringer’s pithy gravedigger

hums Bob Marley as he exhumes bones and shows off Yorick’s skull. It is held up by Jumbo, mirroring the shape of her statuesque shorn head in the meditation on mortality, a moment of spine-chilling momento mori as the reckoning of the final joust with Oprphelia’s vengeful brother Laertes beckons.

Oh woe: the final scene takes such a brutal cut that it ends in a sprawl of bodies (after a swift choreographed MMA-style knife fight in Lonsdale gloves). The

OShowing at this year’s London Film Festival were two extraordinary films from Eastern Europe. The first of these, Babi Yar. Context, is a documentary by the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa about before and after the September 1941 massacre by machine gun fire of 31,771 Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kiev.

Thankfully, there is no footage of the massacre itself to harrow us and the director chooses instead to insert a long, scrolling title extracted from a 1943 Vasily Grossman essay, “Ukraine without Jews”. But otherwise Loznitsa has assembled striking and poignant footage not only from official German, Ukrainian, and Soviet newsreel archives, but also from German amateur movies.

Indeed, there is one scene where dozens of German soldiers are photographing the Nazi general, Hans Frank — so many tourists in uniform. What must have seemed celebratory to them seems condemnatory to us.

The documentary begins with the Nazi invasion. Most startling is the relative poisonings, which come so thick and fast that they demand nimble direction to skirt bathos, simply feel like one damn intoxication after another. Gertrude even manages to die of poison while sitting bolt upright. It feels rushed in a “Play that Goes Wrong” way.

Kudos however to Jumbo who has a star’s ability to rise above the inadequacies and shine bright in her youthful desperation and moral recklessness in an amoral world. For her, at least, this patchwork c

Hamlet is a very palpable hit. Anne McElvoy is Senior Editor at The Economist absence of fighting, implying collapse, and the vast number of Soviet prisoners who are herded by relatively few guards.

There is some context that the documentary does not provide. The city of Lvov (known as Lemberg when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and now known as Lviv, Ukraine) belonged to Poland between the wars. The Soviet Union annexed and occupied it in 1939, and made Ukrainian the language of instruction.

Hence the newsreel footage of Hans Frank being garlanded by the city’s formerly Polish population in 1941, when he became General Governor for the Occupied Polish Region — to them he was indeed, briefly, a liberator. Later in the documentary we see the Soviets return in July 1944 and a Soviet general and “liberator” being similarly garlanded with flowers.

We see a calm Kiev on the eve of invasion, but once Kiev is invaded, citizens eagerly claim their posters of “Hitler the Liberator” and children are thrilled to receive little Nazi flags. Following a series of bombings by Soviet Secret Police, the Nazi military governor orders “all Yids” to report to Babi Yar and to bring with them all valuables and warm clothing. That last detail hinted at resettlement rather than death and the Nazis, who had only expected around 6,000 to turn up were amazed when more than

KUDOS TO JUMBO WHO HAS A STAR’S ABILITY TO RISE ABOVE THE INADEQUACIES AND SHINE BRIGHTLY

Christopher Silvester on Cinema