Latest news with #anti-Stalinist
Times
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Times
Maria Teresa Carbonell obituary: revolutionary socialist
Etched in Maria Teresa Carbonell's memory was her mother screaming from the window of their flat: 'Murderer!' They were watching a priest with a rifle on the bell tower of the local church in the Sants neighbourhood of Barcelona. It was July 19, 1936. In response to the military coup led by General Franco, a revolution had erupted in Barcelona. The priest was firing on the masses in the street. Maria Teresa was a lifelong revolutionary socialist in France and Spain. Her parents belonged to the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (Poum), a revolutionary, anti-Stalinist party allied with Britain's Independent Labour Party. It was relentlessly persecuted by the official Communist Party, backed by Stalin's Soviet Union. In the Barcelona May Days of 1937, a small
Washington Post
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A play about the 2017 Charlottesville rally, and a rock musical with the devil
Do you associate the Devil only with evil? Think again. In the savory new musical 'Professor Woland's Black Magic Rock Show' the archfiend leaves justice in his wake. The Spooky Action Theater production is one of several current shows that ponder polarized extremes: Peace and violence. Inclusive and exclusionary visions of America. Cosmic yins and yangs. 'Professor Woland' adapts 'The Master and Margarita,' Mikhail Bulgakov's Stalin-era novel about the Devil and his retinue wreaking havoc in Soviet Moscow. The musical's creators, including book writers Jesse Rasmussen and Elizabeth Dinkova (the latter directs), shrewdly reimagine the tale's demonic characters as louche but charismatic rock musicians performing in a dive bar. Strutting around a cabaret stage, the Satan-esque Woland (Fran Tapia, radiating shady bravado) introduces us to a mortal Moscow writer, the Master (Camilo Linares), whom authorities have forcibly disappeared after they perceived his Pontius Pilate-themed novel to be subversive. His lover, Margarita (Jordyn Taylor), is in agony until Woland's team recruits her to host a consequential diabolical ball. Dinkova and her colleagues made some savvy choices in condensing Bulgakov's epic masterpiece, preserving its wicked humor and elegiac sadness, while necessarily sacrificing much anti-Stalinist satire. The musical's plot twists and numerous characters may dizzy audiences new to the tale, and the Master-Margarita love affair, which is not the most interesting part of Bulgakov's novel, gets too much focus. But the prog rock score, an intoxicating weave of haunting hooks and propulsive verses, composed by Michael Pemberton, who wrote the lyrics with Andrea Pemberton, is an excellent match for Woland's anarchic energy. It helps that most actors double as musicians. Bassist Danny Santiago nails the rascally fallen angel Azazello, while ace guitarist Oliver Dyer, cellist Jeremy Allen Crawford and music director Marika Countouris vividly channel additional demons, and flutist Stephen Russell Murray sings beautifully as a crazed poet. Luis Garcia's projections are vital to capturing a phantasmagoric world. The musical's final song, 'Time to Go (Moscow Goodbye),' does reach too overtly for political relevance. By contrast, such relevance is essential to Priyanka Shetty's '#Charlottesville,' a methodical, sometimes stirring solo play recalling the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in the college town. Now in a world premiere run at the Keegan Theatre in partnership with Voices Festival Productions, the play draws on interviews with more than a hundred Charlottesville-area residents, plus court transcripts and news reports. Directed by Yury Urnov, Shetty does a reasonable job calibrating diction and mannerisms as she channels people who witnessed, or were affected by, the 2017 events: A sweetly callow student. A seething local musician. And, most movingly, the desolate mother of Heather D. Heyer, who died when an avowed neo-Nazi rammed his car through a crowd. Other moments chillingly summon alt-right voices, sometimes through Shetty's mimicry and sometimes with video of white supremacists and their memes. (Dylan Uremovitch designed the projections and lighting.) Interwoven with Shetty's own experiences as a University of Virginia graduate student, and unfurling on Matthew J. Keenan's cracked-marble-like set, which evokes national ideals, '#Charlottesville' asks whether Unite the Right was an aberration or a strand in long-term American bigotry. A more abstract confrontation between civilization and savagery drives German author Rebekka Kricheldorf's blunt-force satire 'Testosterone,' running in Neil Blackadder's English translation in an ExPats Theatre production. The 2012 fable tells of smug doctors Solveig and Ingo (Amberrain Andrews and Elgin Martin), who live in a walled, moated community, initially safe from a violent dystopia. But when their well-intentioned plan to help a sex worker change profession irks a crime boss (Bruce Alan Rauscher, all jovial menace), only Ingo's amoral and hyper-macho brother Raul (a swaggering Gary DuBreuil) can help. As Raul boasts about his kills, weight-lifts with furniture and flaunts his victims' mutilated body parts, the play explores how primal urges like aggression and sexual desire might make a mockery of society's rules of behavior. Director Karin Rosnizeck's production boasts effective touches, like baroquely grim news footage (Jonathan Dahm Robertson is scenic/projections designer), but scenes can be stiff, and the play's Grand Guignol swerves will not appeal to everyone. Still, the concepts here, as in the other two shows, are a reminder that theater can offer bracing ideas that help us navigate reality. Professor Woland's Black Magic Rock Show, through April 13 at the Universalist National Memorial Church in Washington. About 2 hours including intermission. #Charlottesville, through April 13 at the Keegan Theatre in Washington. About 70 minutes, no intermission. Testosterone, through April 6 at Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington. About 90 minutes, no intermission.
The Guardian
28-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
I was a cold war courier – the British leftists who smuggled books into the eastern bloc
Further to your account of Janusz Bogucki and other heroes who smuggled banned books into communist Poland in the 1950s and 1960s ('It allowed us to survive, to not go mad': the CIA book smuggling operation that helped bring down communism, 22 February), there was also a smuggling operation of books, literature and other banned material from the UK into communist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. It was organised by the Czech exile Jan Kavan, who went on to become a senior Social Democratic politician and foreign minister of the Czech Republic after the collapse of communism in 1989. I am proud to say that I was one of maybe dozens of British anti-Stalinist leftists posing as ordinary tourists who smuggled banned literature, documents and even illegal movie cameras across the heavily policed Czech border during that period. These nerve-racking trips were undertaken in an adapted camper van, fitted with cleverly designed secret compartments. Once in Prague we met various brave oppositionists, mainly at night, to hand over the banned materials. Jan Kavan was our liaison man in London who organised these trips, and as far as I know none of Kavan's couriers were ever detected. Sadly my companion on the trip I made in 1974, Peter Gowan, an academic in eastern European studies, died several years ago. I am now 76, and if asked to undertake a similar trip today to a repressive regime, I would do it again – although I have obviously now blown my cover. I would love to meet up with other couriers who undertook similar journeys, to share our GardnerLondon Your report of the CIA smuggling the Guardian Weekly along with books into eastern Europe during the cold war (Report, 22 February) brought to mind my father's efforts to the same end. In defiance of the censors, for three years after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia he engaged in an intense and sustained correspondence with a Czech doctor. In June 1970, the doctor thanked him for the Guardian Weekly and 'your hilarious letters sandwiched into its pages'. A few weeks later, acknowledging the arrival of a some saxophone reeds for his son, he noted 'how carefully and skilfully you are always wrapping the packet with the Guardian'. Fortunately the flow of letters, newspapers and a judicious selection of books, intended to offer some hope and relief from isolation, were never cut off, although sometimes opened by the censors. My father of course had nothing to do with the CIA, being a member of the British Communist ParkerHolmfirth, West Yorkshire Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
