Richard Eyre’s show promises ‘masques, magic and monsters’

At the grand old age of 83, and after some 60 years in the theatre, Richard Eyre has finally made his Stratford debut. And with this spectacular production of “The Tempest” – which also marks the return of Kenneth Branagh to Stratford for the first time in 30 years – the venerable director has opened his account in considerable style, said Michael Davies on WhatsOnStage.

He brings clear storytelling and a brisk one-hour-each-way running time to Shakespeare’s famously dense text, while leaning into its visual grandeur, with its undiscovered island full of “masques, magic and monsters”. Eyre also fills the play with music: Branagh’s Prospero doesn’t so much conjure the storm as conduct it.

This is an “enchanting” and visually thrilling staging, agreed Arifa Akbar in The Guardian, “with something of the children’s magic show to it”. Initially, Branagh “follows in the vein of his fast and furious” Lear, performed in the West End in 2023. He “seems to be speeding through the part, rather than inhabiting it”; he’s “too puckish, almost larky”.

But as the evening wears on, “there’s growing depth and poignancy to his performance”, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times. “We feel the struggle in him as he watches the sexual attraction between his daughter Miranda and Ferdinand (played with lovely, clumsy humanity by Ruby Stokes and Fred Woodley Evans), and wrestles with his desire for vengeance over those who have wronged him.”

If you’re still smarting at the memory of Sigourney Weaver’s appalling verse-speaking in the West End, said Clive Davis in The Times, you’ll certainly enjoy Branagh’s command of the Shakespearean text. What you don’t glimpse, from this lithe 65-year-old, is “the vulnerability” that some have found in the character.

The evening’s other star is set designer Bob Crowley, whose backdrops draw on the tropical fantasies of the painter Henri Rousseau. With much of the action taking place on a circular platform, he also “conjures up shimmering washes of gold that evoke the most perfect sunsets”.

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Until 20 June

by Mark Oppenheimer 

When Judy Blume started writing, in the late 1960s, the young-adult category was dominated by what were known as “problem novels”, said Katy Waldman in The New Yorker: books that “took up social issues, such as drugs and teen pregnancy”. In her work, Blume embraced contentious topics – masturbation, teen sex, “friendship drama” – but framed these not as “problems”, but as ordinary parts of adolescent experience. In the process, notes Mark Oppenheimer in this biography, she pioneered a new genre: “realism for young people”. Oppenheimer, a religious-studies scholar in his 50s, may seem a somewhat incongruous chronicler of the life of the “patron saint of getting your period”. But his book is well researched and often “compelling”, even if it contains few genuinely explosive revelations (the best may be that the original draft of Blume’s adult novel, “Wifey”, included a scene “in which a dog performs oral sex on the main character”).

Blume’s early life, in the “distinctive milieu” of a secular Jewish family in postwar New Jersey, “reads like a Philip Roth novel”, said Meghan C. Kruger in The Wall Street Journal. The daughter of a dentist and a homemaker, she “grew up around adults who devoured books and could speak frankly about the human body”. Aged 21, she married a law graduate, John Blume, and soon found herself with two young children, domestic help, and a “poolside perch at the country club”. But she was emotionally and creatively unfulfilled – and so signed up for a class in writing for children. After “nearly two years collecting rejections”, she had her breakthrough in 1970 with “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret”, the story of a “sixth-grade girl who navigates puberty through daily conversations with the divine”.

I vividly remember, aged 12 or 13, reading Blume’s “taboo-busting” 1975 novel “Forever”, said Lucy Bannerman in The Times. “Periods! Orgasms! A penis named Ralph! You didn’t get that kind of adventure in ‘Jill’s Gymkhana’.” The “audacious glimpse into adulthood” afforded by her books helps explains why they’ve sold over 90 million copies (timing helped: she began writing as cheap paperbacks were becoming widely available). Blume, now 88, initially co-operated for this biography, but relations soured after the first draft. It’s not clear why. Though Oppenheimer delves into her personal life, including her ill-fated second marriage, he treats his subject “with the seriousness he clearly believes she deserves”, in a book that is thoughtful, but ultimately not that revealing.

The “saxophone colossus” of the bebop generation

Sonny Rollins, who has died aged 95, was regarded as among the greatest jazz saxophonists of all time, said The Guardian. One of the last of the bebop generation, who “took jazz from a predominantly dance or ballad form into startlingly expressive new territory”, he was a living link to the world of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis.

He described himself as “a primitive… I’m going with my feelings more than my brain.” This intuitive approach facilitated a level of improvisation that was hugely influential. Yet he played as much for himself as for an audience, said The Times. For him, jazz became a spiritual pursuit. He described improvisation as a form of meditation, in which the mind goes blank and the performer becomes a vessel for the music.

In 1959, three years after he recorded “Saxophone Colossus”, the landmark album that gave him his nickname, he walked away from the music business. For the next two years, he practised alone, for hours each day, on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York, where his already “muscular tenor” had to compete with the screeching roar of the subway, the honking of the tugboats and the wind.

Over his long career, Rollins “flirted” with a range of styles, said The New York Times, including jazz-rock fusion, but “with his ferocious energy, his penchant for playing the unexpected note at the unexpected moment, and his unusual sound”, sometimes bleak, sometimes lush, his playing could not be classified. “The music I play is too big to be put into any one style,” he said. “Every time I pick up the horn, I want to hear something fresh.”

Walter Theodore Rollins (nicknamed Sonny by his grandmother) was born in Harlem, New York, the youngest of three children of Valborg and Walter Rollins, who had emigrated from the Virgin Islands. (One of his most famous compositions, “St. Thomas”, draws heavily on Caribbean musical traditions.) His father was a chief petty officer in the US navy, the highest rank attainable for an African-American at that time. The family was musical, and Sonny took up the sax when he was seven. He could, he reflected, hardly avoid jazz in their Sugar Hill district: Duke Ellington lived on their block; Coleman Hawkins on the corner. To his parents’ dismay, he started playing jazz in clubs when he was still in his teens, and was soon working with Parker, Monk, Davis and others. Drugs were rife in that milieu, said The Daily Telegraph, and he became addicted to heroin. Aged 19, he took part in an armed robbery to fund the habit, and spent time in jail. He was in rehab when he learnt that Parker had died aged 34. After that, he determined to clean up his act; later, he’d refer to his character back then as “despicable”.

By 1959, he was being hailed as one of jazz’s hottest talents. But he found the pressure overwhelming, and felt he needed to be better. So he walked away. He marked his come-back with an album called “The Bridge” (1962). After that, he toured widely. While in London for a residency at Ronnie Scott’s, he composed and performed the score for the film “Alfie” (1966). In 1969, he took another long career break to pursue a spiritual quest that took him to India and Japan. Some of his later albums were less well-received; but his live performances dazzled. The intense concentration, and sheer length of his improvisations, left audiences “exhausted and exhilarated”.

When not performing, he lived quietly on a smallholding in Upstate New York with Lucille, his second wife and manager, whom he had married in 1965. She died in 2004. They also had an apartment in lower Manhattan. In the chaotic aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the nearby World Trade Centre, he was seen in news footage being led out of the building by rescue workers, his saxophone case in his hand.