Matthew Xia’s adaptation of movie classic ‘crackles with visceral energy’

In 1972, “The Harder They Come” brought reggae to the world and catapulted Jimmy Cliff – who starred in the film and wrote and performed several of the songs on its soundtrack – to international fame, said Sonny Waheed on WhatsOnStage. This glorious adaptation, by Suzan-Lori Parks, honours that cinematic landmark while standing in its own right as a “vibrant, moving and ultimately triumphant piece of musical theatre”.

Set in Jamaica, it tells the story of singer-songwriter Ivan, a “country boy” who arrives in Kingston with the dream of making it as a recording artist, only to encounter corruption and slide into a life of crime. But where the film was a gritty drama, featuring scenes of intense violence, Parks has created for the stage something “altogether more uplifting”. Matthew Xia’s staging “crackles with visceral energy”, while the choreography, by Shelley Maxwell, “gives everything a natural rhythm that permeates” the evening “like a collective heartbeat”.

It’s hard to go far wrong when you are drawing on such uplifting reggae classics as “You Can Get it if You Really Want”, “Israelites”, and “I Can See Clearly Now”, said Anya Ryan in Time Out. But credit to the cast for making sure that the score “roars, cracks and prickles”. As Ivan, Natey Jones is superb, and matching him in both singing and acting chops is Madeline Charlemagne as the devout Elsa, said Gary Naylor on The Arts Desk. The singing across the board is astonishing, though, and never more so than in a bravura “Many Rivers to Cross”. Led by Josie Benson as Ivan’s mother, it “expands to an ensemble work that is operatic in its scale and power”. It is “spine-tingling” – and that is not a “metaphorical flourish, but a literal description”.  

“There are only aces in this deck,” said Chris Wiegand in The Guardian. The cast are “uniformly excellent”, set and costume design are impressive – with a “sharp eye for unadorned spiritual and natty secular stylings” – and the eight-piece band is as precise as the stunning choreography. It makes for an irresistible and spectacular show.

Until 1 November, Theatre Royal Stratford East, London E15

by Andrew Hussey

In 2018, the Paris-based British historian Andrew Hussey was caught up in a riot while cycling in Paris, said Kim Willsher in The Observer. As he dodged chunks of paving stone and other missiles, and felt tear gas scorching his eyes, Hussey – “in his early 60s with a heart condition” – became fearful for his life.

Yet he was struck by something else: the protesters were mostly “respectable looking” and middle-aged. How could it be that such “outwardly ordinary” people had such visceral hatred of the police? And what did it say about France? To find out, Hussey set out on a journey across the country, from the “working-class post-industrial” towns of the north to the Mediterranean port of Marseille, where around a third of the population are of Muslim origin.

The result, “Fractured France”, is a “readable” and timely blend of “memoir, travelogue and personal confession”, punctuated by interviews with writers and intellectuals. If it ends up being “less about the French and France and more about Hussey and France”, then it’s “all the better for it” – since the author’s “meanderings” are what “brings it alive”.

Hussey takes the “terms” of his enquiry from the “innovative geographer Christophe Guilluy, his first interviewee”, said David Sexton in The Times. Guilluy claims France is bitterly riven between a périphérique who live in the countryside, suburbs and small towns, and an elite who inhabit 15 or so vibrant “citadels”. This concept has “largely replaced” the notion that it’s only the banlieues, or immigrant-heavy suburbs, which are “seriously disaffected”.

Given how “compelling” Guilluy’s theory is, it’s a shame Hussey didn’t spend more time talking to the “struggling and increasingly estranged men and women” who are the subjects of his analysis, said Robert Zaretsky in The New Statesman. He spends too much of the book conversing with fellow intellectuals – or on “picturesque” detours into food and culture, which are of only dubious relevance.

The idea that France is “fractured” is of course nothing new, said Graham Robb in The Spectator. The discontents Hussey highlights – whether gilets jaunes protests by disgruntled motorists or the rise of far-right extremists – don’t seem “particularly unusual” to any “veteran historian of the fractious Fifth Republic”. Still, as an “on-the-ground” journey through the often “crazed landscape” of contemporary France, his book is “poignant, shocking, informative and funny”. It could even be used as a kind of anti-guidebook: “Where Not to Go in France”. 

Italian screen ‘goddess’ who became a Unesco ambassador

When Claudia Cardinale was 18, she attended an event to find “the most beautiful Italian girl in Tunisia”. She had only gone to watch, said The Daily Telegraph, but she was plucked out of the crowd – and declared the winner. The vote had been organised by the Italian film industry, and before long Cardinale was a star – one of only a handful in Italy to achieve global fame. She won numerous awards, and critics and directors vied to encapsulate her appeal – feline, elusive, fierce, passionate, sensuous. Bob Dylan featured her on the original gatefold for his 1966 album “Blonde on Blonde”; and several of her co-stars fell in love with her (she said she’d resisted them all). David Niven – the “perfect English gentleman”, she said, on the set of “The Pink Panther” in 1963 – described her as “Italy’s happiest invention after spaghetti”. 

Claudia Cardinale was born in Tunisia in 1938, to second-generation immigrants from Sicily, and grew up speaking French and Arabic. Later, she spoke Italian with such a raspy French accent that her voice was dubbed for her first few films. At school in Carthage, she did well academically, but she was a tomboy, prone to getting into scraps, and described in her teens as “silent, weird and wild”. In 1957, she had appeared in a locally shot film, but she had no interest in acting. The prize for the beauty contest, however, was a trip to the Venice Film Festival. Posing in a bikini, she caused a sensation, and was given a place at film school in Rome. She didn’t like it, and was planning to give up on her film career when she found that she was pregnant by her violent, much older boyfriend. She decided to keep the baby, but he wouldn’t support her, so she accepted the offer of a seven-year contract from the producer Franco Cristaldi. He arranged for her to have the baby in secret, and told her to pass her son off as her brother. This left her feeling tormented by guilt; she also said that Cristaldi had ended up controlling every aspect of her life. In the mid-1960s, he persuaded her to marry him, but it did not last. She later had a second child with the left-wing film director Pasquale Squitieri. 

By 1958, she was appearing opposite the likes of Marcello Mastroianni; in 1960, Luchino Visconti cast her in “Rocco and His Brothers”, with Alain Delon. Her role in “Cartouche”, with Jean-Paul Belmondo, made her a star in France. Then in 1963, she starred in three major films – Visconti’s “The Leopard”, Fellini’s “8 ½” (in which her voice was heard for the first time) and “The Pink Panther”, her first film in English. Invited to Hollywood, she starred in several films there; but she hated the US industry and went home to focus on European cinema, which led to her role in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968). By the 2020s, she had made over 130 films. A heavy smoker who described herself as “average looking”, she lived latterly in France, and worked as a Unesco ambassador for women’s rights.