'Thrilling' revival of hit Broadway show returns to London

The original 1975 production of "A Chorus Line" – about jobbing dancers auditioning for parts in a musical – was the longest-running hit in Broadway history until "Cats" stole its crown in 1997, said Fiona Mountford in The i Paper.

This "thrilling" revival, which originated at Leicester's Curve and which will be touring the UK following its London run, proves that the show still has the power to entrance and mesmerise. Based on its original creator Michael Bennett's interviews with real-life dancers, "A Chorus Line" is structured around the tales of "difficult home lives, sexual confusion and body insecurity" that are drawn out of the auditioning dancers by a brutally old-fashioned director. But all this is really just a frame for a glorious feast of singing and dancing – performed here with consummate energy, commitment and skill by a crack cast. 

Fifty years on, "A Chorus Line" feels of its time, said David Benedict in The Stage, but its "knockout determination and drive remain intact and exciting". Ellen Kane's demanding choreography is executed superbly, and "everyone seizes their opportunities with both hands and, indeed, their entire hardworking bodies". 

And there's no doubting the "enduring power" of Marvin Hamlisch's score, said Theo Bosanquet on What's On Stage. Standouts include "At the Ballet" and "What I Did for Love", while the first-rate ensemble and "electric" choreography shine in group numbers such as the "stunning opener" "I Hope I Get It".
 
"There are neon-coloured hotpants galore and high kicks worthy of Olympic gymnasts" in this blockbuster, said Susannah Butter in The Times. And there's tension, too: the 17 auditionees smile, but they know that "one false move could lose them a job they're desperate for". After a few numbers, I did start to feel the lack of a plot, and wish for a bit more pace. 

But ultimately, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph, you forgive the wispiness of the story, owing to the "jazz-hands joy" delivered by this "mesmerising" evening. When the ensemble comes together for the rousing closing number, "One", you can hardly imagine the show "dazzling more incandescently".

Sadler’s Wells, London EC1 (until 25 Aug)

by Patrick Bishop 

As Britain wasn't invaded by the Nazis, we never had to decide whether to collaborate or resist – "and so, foolishly, we sometimes imagine ourselves to be better than the French", said Nicholas Farrell in The Telegraph. The "harsh choices" forced on the inhabitants of Paris lie at the heart of this "fascinating" account, by the journalist and historian Patrick Bishop, of the city's occupation, and its liberation in 1944. His prose is "admirably unflowery", and his choice of testimony "inspired"; we meet a "rich cast" of characters, from dashing resistance fighters to the chief collaborator himself, Marshal Pétain.

The "most gripping" part of the book is the account of the progress of Free French units into Paris; Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied commander, let General De Gaulle's units enter first. Paris on the eve of liberation is described as "dark, near-starving and throbbing with hostility and burgeoning violence". But liberation itself, on Friday 25 August, was an eruption of pure joy. Bishop calls it "an immortal spectacle that rekindled humanity's love affair with the city".

The story of Paris under occupation has been told many times, but Bishop is such a fine raconteur that even the most knowledgeable readers "will enjoy his book enormously", said Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. For the Germans, he writes, Paris was "a dreamscape, a playground", and in the brothels, business had never been so good. But for most Parisians, food was so scarce that children's growth was dramatically stunted. And for the Jewish population, those were "nightmarish years" – in a single period of two days in 1942, the French police rounded up 13,000 people. "As Bishop's narrative reaches 1944, his pace quickens." His account includes a frank depiction of the "ugly face of victory": thousands of women were publicly shorn, beaten and humiliated for collaborating with the Germans.

Bishop's book covers logistics and military manoeuvres, but it "does not read like military history", said Andrew Martin in The Guardian. It reads like "an epic thriller", full of vivid, well-drawn characters. Among his witnesses are Ernest Hemingway, accompanying the troops "as a sort of war-tourist-cum-journalist" (and "liberating much booze on the way"), and J.D. Salinger, then a young sergeant in counterintelligence (who was forever marked by his experience of saving a collaborator from a baying mob). All in all, "Paris '44 is a wonderful book: droll, moving, with a cinematic eye and not a boring line in it".

Acclaimed Irish novelist who wrote 'The Country Girls' 

Edna O'Brien, who has died aged 93, created a sensation with her debut novel, in 1960. Written from self-exile in London and based in part on her own experiences, "The Country Girls" was about two convent girls growing up in rural Ireland and their sexual awakening when they embark on their adult lives in Dublin. In the US and elsewhere, readers found O'Brien's writing "compelling, touching and truthful", said The New York Times. Young women's passions, and the intensity of their lives, had never been described with such honesty. But in Ireland the book caused an uproar. Denounced as a "smear on Irish womanhood", it was banned, and so were its two follow-up novels. Even O'Brien's family were appalled: she recalled that her mother, who adored her, "was too ashamed to be proud", and hid her copy of the book away.

A strikingly elegant woman, with auburn hair and green eyes, O'Brien came to be seen as a "glamorous" international literary star with a faint hint of scandal about her, said The Telegraph."Her views on sex were much quoted." But in her books, which became increasingly experimental, she explored, fearlessly, the full spectrum of female experience – "joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter". Having been criticised in Ireland for focusing on the Ireland of her youth, from the 1990s she set about examining the social and political changes sweeping her homeland, said The Guardian. "House of Splendid Isolation" dealt with the Troubles; "In the Forest" was based on a notorious triple murder in County Clare; "Down by the River", also based on real events, was about a young victim of rape-incest seeking an abortion. "I am seen as a genteel, romantic writer," she said. "But the reality of what I'm doing is this: I am a savage writer with a savage eye. I write about the things we are not supposed to speak about." 

Josephine Edna O'Brien was born in County Clare in 1930. Her mother was deeply pious. Her father was an alcoholic, prone to violent rages. To escape these, she'd wander into the fields to write stories. At home the only books were bloodstock reports and prayer books, said The Times, but in that small community, she was aware, she said, of "everyone's little history, the stuff from which stories and novels are made". Then, while training to become a pharmacist in Dublin, she acquired a copy of T.S. Eliot's introduction to the work of James Joyce. She became a committed Joycean, and later wrote a biography of the writer. 

It was also in Dublin that she met her future husband, Ernest Gébler, a writer some 15 years her senior. He was married and their affair caused such a furore that, in 1959, they fled to London. She never lived permanently in Ireland again, but remained Irish, she said. "It is a state of mind as well as an actual country." In exile, she felt liberated to write, but Gébler became jealous of her talent – and controlling; she left him in 1964.

Fiercely dedicated to her work, she wrote books, plays and screenplays for films including "X, Y and Zee" (1972). She mixed in starry circles. Paul McCartney came to a party at her house and tucked her sons into bed. She had an affair with Robert Mitchum; visited the White House; and went on an acid trip with R.D. Laing. Philip Roth described her as the best living female writer in English. She was still writing in her late 80s: her final book, 2019's "Girl", was about the abduction of schoolgirls in Nigeria. By then, she had finally been accepted in Ireland, too. Her many garlands included the Irish Pen Lifetime Achievement Award. Her mother, however, had died unreconciled to her career and still fretting about her soul, said The Times. In a story based on their relationship, O'Brien wrote of wishing for a chance "to begin our journey all over again, to live our lives as they should have been lived, happy, trusting, and free of shame".