'Must-see' theatrical adaptation of John Galsworthy's novels

Here's a confession, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. I've never read "The Forsyte Saga", John Galsworthy's early 20th century novels chronicling the trials and misadventures of a wealthy English family between 1886 and 1920. Nor have I seen either of the two long, luxurious TV adaptations.

Those better acquainted may find cherished bits of the saga are missing from this superb condensed version, which is adapted by Shaun McKenna and Lin Coghlan, and presented in two parts (five-hours long in total) by the Troupe Theatre Company at the Park Theatre in north London. But as theatre it's "faultless": a "must-see" production that's "sumptuous, panoramic, intense, amusing; vividly of its time yet arrestingly modern in its understanding of the games we play".

I went in anticipating a stately production, full of "fabric and furrowed brows", said Susannah Clapp in The Observer. But this terrific new version is quite "disruptive". Here, a story "so stuffed with stuff is set on an almost bare stage". Lighting, music and sound all conjure up leaps of place and era. Anna Yates's costumes "wire the action into character and epoch". And, somehow, nothing feels rushed. "The atmosphere is charged but nothing is skimped", and "the two-part play unrolls, ample and spacious".

The adaptation foregrounds two female characters, Irene and Fleur, whose fortunes are linked by one terrible incident, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times. The whole thing is directed "with immense skill and fluidity" by Josh Roche, and becomes a "joyous exercise in shared dramatic storytelling". 

The tireless cast of nine are "pitch-perfect", said Sarah Crompton on What's On Stage. As Irene, unhappily married to paterfamilias Soames, Fiona Hampton is "still and dignified, yet suggesting constant ferment beneath the surface". Flora Spencer-Longhurst is "sophisticated, sharp and selfish" as Fleur, the evening's unreliable narrator.

As Soames, who balances "loathsome acts with tenderness and fragility", Joseph Millson is "riveting", said Dave Fargnoli in The Stage. It's a great performance at the heart of a "gripping" evening.

Park Theatre, London N4. Until 7 December

by Tessa Hadley    

Tessa Hadley is an "old hand at short stories", but "The Party" is her first novella, said Fiona Sturges on the i news site. Set in Bristol soon after the Second World War, it begins with two sisters – Evelyn and Moira – attending a gathering in an old dockers' pub. There, they get talking to "two strange men" – both much posher than they are – by whom they are "simultaneously fascinated and repelled". Displaying her customary "emotional acuity", Hadley dissects the sisters' rivalrous relationship, with its "see-sawing camaraderie and resentment", and vividly evokes the atmosphere of late 1940s Bristol. A study in "artfully compressed, quietly subversive drama", "The Party" is "captivating".

After the pub scene, the action moves to the sisters' home life, and finally to another party they've been invited to, held in a "crumbling country house", said Philip Womack in the Financial Times. It's a gathering that "begins in stiffness and ends in bohemian excess". Written in prose so beautiful that "you linger over each lucent phrase", "The Party" is a "glimmering, sensuous" addition to Hadley's "supremely elegant oeuvre".

Auschwitz survivor who spread her message on TikTok

Lily Ebert was 20 when she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau along with most of her family. On arrival, her mother and two of her siblings were sent left; Lily and her other two sisters were sent right. Subsequently, she saw smoke belching from a chimney. She assumed it was a factory, but another inmate told her that this was a crematorium. "They're burning your families there. Your parents, your sisters, your brothers. They're burning them." At Yom Kippur, saying her prayers while crammed into a barracks, she vowed that she'd live to bear witness to this atrocity. And she did, said The Guardian: one of the last survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, she toured schools; she spoke in Parliament; she wrote a bestselling memoir; and in her 90s, she gained more than two million followers on TikTok.

One of six children, Lily Ebert was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Bonyhád, Hungary, in 1923. Although her father died when she was 18, she said her early life was idyllic – until March 1944, when German troops invaded Hungary. Two months later, the family was forced into a ghetto; and soon after that, they were sent to Auschwitz. The only token Lily had of her previous life was a tiny gold pendant that her mother had given her, and which one of her siblings had hidden when their other valuables were confiscated. Many of the people in the cattle truck with them died en route; many more were selected for immediate extermination on arrival. Lily and her sisters were deemed fit for work, and ended up in a munitions factory at Buchenwald. As the Allies approached in April 1945, the women were sent on a forced march, with no food or warm clothes. "People came out of their houses and looked at us," Lily recalled. "We looked at them. Nobody did anything to help. We just stared at each other, as though we were from two different planets."

After a few days, their guards disappeared: the Americans had arrived. She and her sisters found sanctuary in Switzerland, where no one, she said, wanted to know about the camps. Later, they emigrated to Israel, where she worked in a factory and married a fellow Hungarian, before moving to London in 1967. In the 1990s, she joined a Holocaust support group and began work on what would become her memoir, "Lily's Promise". Shortly after her liberation, she'd met an American soldier who – with no paper to hand – had written on a German banknote a message wishing her luck in her new life. She'd kept it, and in 2020 her teenage great-grandson, Dov Forman, tweeted a photo of the note. It went viral (and the soldier's daughter got in touch), and Dov then helped her use social media to spread her message. In 2018, she told The New York Times that she still wore her mother's pendant every day. "Not only I survived, but my jewellery, that you didn't want me to keep, survived with me."