Festival Announcement - Lewes Live Lit listings

Lewes Live Literature have announced the details of this year’s programme, which is centred around the theme of ‘cabaret’, and will take place between October 27th-29th. What a great theme. The Polish-born writer Lisa Appignanesi will start things off with an illustrated talk related to The Cabaret, her defining work about the performing-art form which found its heyday in the Berlin dancehalls in the twenties and thirties, until it was silenced by the Nazis, who didn’t like being the butt of the burlesque jokes. The weekend will be full of talks, performances events and workshops by writers, artists and performers. One highlight will be a performance of Mortal Women Possessed, a dramatised one-woman play based on the women in Tennessee Williams’ short stories starring Linda Marlowe, which was a big hit on the Edinburgh Fringe in 2005.

Novelists Hilary Mantel (Beyond Black, An Experiment in Love) and Booker-shortlisted Jim Crace (Quarantine, Being Dead) will give readings, as will poets Pascale Petit and Imtiaz Dharker. Julian Bell will exhibit his paintings, Sue Roe will read from her work The Private Lives of the Impressionists, the Southern Winds Orchestra will perform original cabaret hits from the 20’s and there will be a screening of the Marlene Dietrich classic Blue Angel, of Falling in Love Again fame. Buy up all the Christopher Isherwood novels in the bookshops, rent the classic Liza Minnelli musical: prepare yourself for Lewes to transform itself into 1930’s Berlin. As HL Mencken put it at the time ‘one horselaugh is worth a thousand syllogisms.” Or whatever. DL