Features
Adam Sweeting
Anybody who has read Rupert Everett's book Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins will be well aware of his fascination with sex and prostitution, so it's no surprise to find him very much in his element as writer and presenter of the two-part Channel 4 series Love for Sale. In part one, showing on Monday 28 April, he goes on a European tour of "sex workers" (though Everett prefers the old-fashioned "prostitutes"), investigating the wildly varying ways and circumstances in which sex is sold. In part two, he steps through the looking glass to meet the clients who pay for the services in question. Read more ...
Steven Berkoff
I hardly knew anything about Shakespeare as a schoolboy and it was only when attending my first acting classes, when we sallow and uncouth students were required to do a speech each week to be tested on, that I had my first awakenings. At the very first I found the dense text too complex and remote for my taste, but persevered, swallowed the language in great chunks and then heaved it out. But from the outset I felt that something had bit. The text, so sinuous, so entwined in metaphors, slowly but surely affected me. I was breathing a stronger air and a profoundly disturbing air. I was being Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Yinka Shonibare MBE makes work from a less entrenched position than his many decorations suggest. This Member of the British Empire (he adopted the initials as part of his name after receiving the honour in 2005) is naturally also a Royal Academician, an Honorary Fellow of Goldsmiths, and has an honorary doctorate from the RCA. Shonibare is one of the most celebrated artists around, a fixture as well received as the ship in a bottle which occupied the Fourth Plinth in 2010 and which now has a permanent home outside the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.Yet his ambitious new work for year’ Read more ...
David Nice
In a near-perfect, outward-looking Swiss city sharing borders with France and Germany, on a series of cloudless April days that felt more like balmy June than capricious April, anything seemed possible. The doors of perception which had slammed, I thought, irrevocably shut for me 45 minutes and four chords into the first act of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha could well open again in two concerts – London is to get three on a UK tour this week - around the musical Minimalist theme from Dennis Russell Davies and the excellent Basel Symphony Orchestra. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if the Read more ...
Anya Reiss
About a week after my modern adaptation of The Seagull closed in 2012 at Southwark Playhouse the director Russell Bolam texted me, "Same again?" So it’s now in 2014 that at (the new) Southwark Playhouse we’ve got our modern take on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which has just opened.I made it modern because I can’t see any other reason for me to do it. There are loads of eloquent, clever versions of the original knocking around and I don’t feel any need to throw another one in unless I’m doing something different. The reason to make it modern though is more than that, and I have more than a Read more ...
Jeremy Eccles
"Everyone is beautiful when they dance,” oozes the ballroom MC in the midst of a competition that reveals just how un-beautiful terpsichorean people can be when seriously challenged by other dancers, or by anyone radical enough to try to dance to a different tune. Yes, Strictly Ballroom the 1992 film has become Strictly Ballroom the Musical – premiered in Sydney last weekend with Kylie Minogue in attendance – as it was always destined to be.It is less well known that the work actually began as a 20-minute student exercise at Australian's National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) way back Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This April is proving the kindest month for cinephiles. Hot on the heels of Mark Cousins’ engrossing A Story of Children and Film comes another documentary about cinema of captivating, encyclopaedic interest, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Celluloid Man. The director’s immediate subject is PK Nair, the man who created India’s National Film Archive (NFA). It’s thanks to Nair that many early classics of that nation’s film heritage – India is as cinema-centred a country as any in the world, with many of its national languages giving rise to distinct branches of the industry – have been preserved at Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I don’t do the costumes,” says an intense bloke called Adrian. “That’s for people without a life. I’ve no interest in that.” Further down the corridor, or the Upper Deck as they’re calling it for one weekend only, there’s Kevin, who presumably has no life. Kevin is wearing a maroon zip-up blouson with black shoulders, retailing at £35. “Last year I wore normal clothes and I felt out of place,” he says. “I’ve been a fan for years but I’ve never had the courage to actually come to one. We’re stigmatised. We’re geeks, aren’t we?”You’ve heard the stories. You’ve laughed at the jokes. You may Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The contradictions and iniquities of Panama City were very much in evidence last week. The city opened Central America’s first subway system, which many claim is a $2billion folie de grandeur for outgoing president Ricardo Martinelli, rather than a necessity; meanwhile, a fire destroyed one of the city's dilapidated old city buildings, killing a number of squatters who had refused to remove themselves from the path of gentrification, and whose lives would have benefited from an infinitesimal fraction of the money spent on the subway.Here was hubris and suffering, side by side in a city still Read more ...
Jenny Sealey
As an 11-year-old, I used to love writing my address as My Bedroom, 50 Ridsdale Rd, Sherwood Rise, Nottingham, England, Great Britain, The World, The Universe. We belong to ourselves, but our sense of belonging is also about people and places and our sense of who we are in the world. It became our starting point for the collaboration with Circo Crescer e Viver. Graeae's Reasons to be Cheerful was part of Unlimited Festival in Rio and I was also there to share the experience of co-directing the London 2012 Paralympic Games Opening Ceremony. I had the opportunity to meet Junior Perim and Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If you are seeking to keep small children entertained this Easter, there's no need to sit around gorging on chocolate with so many egg-citing cultural experiences on offer throughout the UK. This week's edition of Listed suggests a range of choices, some in London, some touring, in theatres and beyond. Choose from sing-a-long characters and historical adventures, kooky eco-warriors and Shakespearean puppetry shows.The Unicorn TheatreThe primary London venue for children's theatre is home to two shows this Easter. At the End of Everything Else combines music, puppetry and animation in the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Andrew Comben, CEO of the Brighton Festival, has agreed to reveal to theartsdesk his favourite moments from previous Festivals. “Looking backwards,” he ventures, sat in his office around the corner from the Pavilion, “is not a luxury I tend to indulge in as my head is so focused on this year, next year and 2016. Then again, it’s an enjoyable wrench, a fun exercise."Comben, 40, took the position in 2008, having previously worked with Wigmore Hall and the Aldeburgh Festival. “I was a horn player and singer.” he says, “I left that side of my life behind me but I like to feel it gives me some Read more ...