Professor Martin Paul Eve on The Ferryman Jez Butterworth’s previous play, Jerusalem, starring the irrepressible Mark Rylance, was a stage hit. After its gestation at the Royal Court, Jerusalem transferred to the West End and then to Broadway in the US, despite its main theme being
Martin Eve on Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present On my birthday, at the end of May this year, a package arrived from my esteemed colleague in Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics & Archaeology, Joanna Bourke. The timing of the package
Martin Eve catches up with Contemporary Slo-Mo Electro A certain colleague in the Department of English & Humanities frequently teases me about my love of “banging techno” – as he mischievously terms any bass-heavy contemporary electronic music to which I listen. Nevertheless, and as with
Martin Eve on The White Devil by John Webster at the Wanamaker Playhouse The White Devil is, by many standards of judgement, a pretty terrible play. It features a large cast of characters who appear and disappear extremely quickly, making it very difficult to follow.
Martin Eve on The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? This Saturday I saw the revival of Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. Although I was familiar with the problem play’s central conceit, this work still retains the power
Professor Martin Paul Eve on talking disability activism with Naomi Lawson Jacobs and Judith Butler I have spent much of this week thinking about disability activism. I was spurred to this by Naomi Lawson Jacobs who was excluded this week from attending a lecture by Judith
Martin Eve on Nice Fish at the Harold Pinter Theatre The reviews were mixed and I wasn’t sure what to expect. Two men sitting on a sheet of ice, fishing and talking. For that is the plot of Nice Fish almost in its entirety, which
Professor Martin Eve on The Man Who Knew Infinity On a flight to Kansas this week, where I was participating in a scholarly communications symposium, I watched The Man Who Knew Infinity (2016); a dramatisation of the life of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan as
Martin Eve & Peter Fifield on “No’s Knife” at the Old Vic Martin Eve: When I booked to see No’s Knife at the Old Vic – an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing devised and performed by Lisa Dwan – I did kind of know what I
Martin Eve on William Gaddis’s JR I am currently re-reading William Gaddis‘s monstrous 1975 novel, JR. While this is a book that defies easy plot summary, one of the central strands of the text concerns the eponymous eleven-year-old schoolboy, J. R. Vansant, and his adept manipulation