
Before the Führer
✮✮✮✮ Mark Hayhurst's Taken At Midnight Theatre Royal Haymarket | London directed by Jonathan Church “There’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it,” remarks Irwin from Alan Bennett’s The History Boys. Transferring from Chichester to the Haymarket on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Taken At Midnight is a capable refutation of the idea. This is a quiet and dignified commemoration of an ineffable event made more and more startling by

How to Solve a Problem Like The Magic Flute
✮✮✮ 1/2 Mozart's Die Zauberflöte Opera Siam | Bangkok Somtow Sucharitkul | Trisdee na Patalung How to present The Magic Flute? The problem is that it combines some of Mozart’s most sublimely beautiful and profound music with an absurd plot of nexplicable contradictions. In Opera Siam’s wonderful new production in December at the Thailand Cultural Centre, director Somtow Sucharitkul imaginatively reconciles the discrepancies of the plot by seeing the potential for both good an