race issues
Ishion Hutchinson: School of Instructions review - learning against estrangementMonday, 20 November 2023School of Instructions, a book-length poem composed of six sections, is a virtuosic dance between memory and forgetting, distant tragedy and personal grief. At times, Hutchinson’s language perhaps forgets itself in its own excess. His lines are... Read more... |
Othello, Riverside Studios review - three Iagos pitch Shakespeare's villain into the 21st centuryMonday, 09 October 2023Shakespeare gives Iago over 1000 lines to implant the jealous rage in Othello, so there’s plenty to of raw material to work with. The director Sinéad Rushe has had the idea to split these weaselly words between three actors, a device that seems so... Read more... |
The Old Oak review - a searing ode to solidarityFriday, 29 September 2023Ken Loach has occasionally invested his realist TV dramas and movies with moments of magical realism – football inspiring them in The Golden Vision (1968) and Looking for Eric (2009) – but magical spaces in them are rare. In The Old Oak,... Read more... |
R.M.N. review - ethnic cleansing in rural RomaniaThursday, 21 September 2023If you think we’ve got culture wars, then welcome to Transylvania. This rugged Romanian region is home to a bewildering overlap of ethnicities and tongues – Hungarian, a bit of German and Romanian itself – such that Cristian Mungiu’s new movie... Read more... |
Beneatha's Place, Young Vic review - strongly felt, but unevenFriday, 07 July 2023Trauma is the source of identity politics. In the case of African-Americans, the experience of brutal slavery, exploitative colonialism and violent racism are defining experiences in their history.Although many recent black dramas have contested... Read more... |
Chevalier review - a less than extraordinary film about an extraordinary manFriday, 09 June 2023This frothy bio-fantasy about the 18th century composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges and top tunesmith to Marie Antoinette at the French court, could have been a powerful and revealing shout-out to a woefully under-appreciated composer... Read more... |
Solmaz Sharif: Customs review - a poetics of exile and returnMonday, 01 May 2023The language of poetic technique is perhaps weighted towards rupture, rather than reparation: lines end and break, we count beats and stress, experience caesurae (literally ‘cuttings’), and mark punctuation (literally ‘to prick’). Juxtaposition sets... Read more... |
Infinity Pool review - it's like The White Lotus on bad acidFriday, 24 March 2023Director Brandon Cronenberg has inherited his father David’s eye for the twisted and the sinister. After the creepy mind-meld dystopia of 2020’s Possessor, Infinity Pool finds Cronenberg turning his attention to horror-tourism. It’s like The White... Read more... |
Two Billion Beats, Orange Tree Theatre review - lively, but overly idealisticWednesday, 01 February 2023Do the right thing! But doing the right thing isn’t easy – especially if you are a teen. And a female teen who is being pressurised by your mother and your school teacher. It takes courage to make the best decisions, it’s scary and it’s hard.In... Read more... |
Allegiance, Charing Cross Theatre review - George Takei's childhood story makes a heartfelt musicalFriday, 20 January 2023Like families, nations have secrets: dirty linen that they prefer not to expose to the light of day. Patriotic myths need to be protected, heroic narratives shaped, good guy reputations upheld. In 1942, the USA rounded up Japanese-Americans and... Read more... |
Watch on the Rhine, Donmar Warehouse review - Lillian Hellman's 1940 play is still asking awkward questionsWednesday, 11 January 2023We’re reminded, in a grainy black and white video framing device, that, as late as the summer of 1941, the USA saw World War II as just another European war. As brilliantly illustrated in Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America, not only was such... Read more... |
Othello, National Theatre review - ambitious but emotionally underpoweredSaturday, 10 December 2022Clint Dyer is the first black director of Othello at the National Theatre, a venue that once staged the piece with its actor founder Laurence Olivier playing the lead role in blackface. We are reminded of this now-reviled practice before... Read more... |