feminism
stephen.walsh
How many dead female composers can you name? Tom Green, the composer of this stunning one-woman show, could initially only think of five (I managed thirteen while waiting for the show to start, but then I’ve been around somewhat longer than he has, and knew one or two of them). In any case he soon dug up a few more, and based his score entirely on more or less unrecognisable quotations from their work – or so he claims. His libretto, on the other hand, he took from a living female writer, the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s eponymous collection, which examines assorted famous males Read more ...
Richard Bratby
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you have to be pretty silly to take Gilbert and Sullivan seriously. But even sillier not to. And positively heroic to revive the pair’s 1884 three-acter Princess Ida: the show which – updated to a futuristic sushi bar – was responsible in 1992 for one of English National Opera’s all-time great fiascos (well, if you will hire Ken Russell as director...). Vivian Coates’s colourful new production for the National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company keeps the action firmly in the cod-medieval Neverland, lifted straight from Tennyson, that G Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In Jean Grémillon's final fiction film The Love of a Woman, Marie Prieur (Micheline Presle) arrives on the Breton island of Ushant to replace the tiny settlement's aging Dr Morel (Robert Naly). While showing Marie her new digs and surgery, Mme Morel (Madeleine Geoffroy) compliments the lady doctor on her youth. Marie sighingly replies that she is 28. Quel horreur!Ninety-five now, Presle was 31 when the film was released in France in 1953. It is no discourtesy to say she looked closer to 35 – Marie is an attractive, dignified woman who performs her work with a quietness and authority that Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Whether it’s the £400,000 that separates Mishal Husain from John Humphrys, or the 74 million miles between the metaphorical markers of Venus and Mars, there is a gulf between the genders. Despite legislation to enforce equality, the reality is that, right from the start, boys and girls are treated differently. Boys like trains, right? Girls like dolls… Before you know it, female students are massively under-represented in the sciences, and worrying numbers of young men think it’s OK to shout sexual threats to women on the street in the name of banter. Boys will be boys after all… but Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The 1960s were “hilarious”, says one young character in this revival, starring Broadway icon Stockard Channing, of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s 2009 family drama at the Trafalgar Studios. How so? “Oh you know, the clothes, the hair, the raging idealism.” The thought of hippies marching for political causes, smoking Gauloises on the Left Bank or storming the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, and all the time wearing sandals and beads. Yes, to anyone under the age of 60 that must seem funny. But not, of course, for anyone who was actually there – especially if they were a radical and a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Five thousand miles away from her native Lake District, I first understood the eerie magnetism of Sarah Hall’s fiction. As a regional judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, I’d travelled to join the jury’s deliberations in Sri Lanka. I was keen for Hall’s debut novel, Haweswater, to prevail but unsure what my fellow-judges – both from the Subcontinent – would make of this local drama set in a bleak English backwater. Hall’s hardscrabble uplands scarcely resemble Wordsworth’s. Yet under a gnarled bodhi tree on a hotel lawn in Kandy, with the highland rainforest behind us and the sacred lake Read more ...
mark.kidel
As Wonder Woman hits screens worldwide, the publication of a book that explores the myth and reality of the Amazon seems timely. The latest of John Man’s works of popular history is opportunistic enough to end with a fascinating account of the origins of the female world-saviour originally launched by DC Comics in 1941. He relies extensively on – and acknowledges – Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman, which explains the proto-feminist origins of the female answer to Superman.The invention of Wonder Woman is one of the most recent manifestations of a mythologising thread Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Dorothy Parker’s take on suicide is called “Resumé”: it goes, “Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.” Although this seems to cover the terrain, Alice Birch’s powerful new play adds a couple more methods of doing away with yourself, as well as an argument for avoiding the necessity of suicide. And although this drama takes up some 237 pages of published text, director Katie Mitchell proves you can stage it in 120 minutes without a break.And what an excruciating, yet devastatingly Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Inversion may not be the catchiest of titles, but in the case of Iranian director Behnam Behzadi’s film its associations are multifarious. On the immediate level it refers to the “thermal inversion” that generates the smogs that engulf his location, Tehran, and also direct his story. Meteorologically, the phenomenon happens when a layer of warm air sits over one of cold, preventing it from rising, and trapping pollutants in the atmosphere.But there’s surely a deeper relevance in this story of family conflict – in particular sibling antagonism – that relates to the position of women in Iranian Read more ...
mark.kidel
Greek tragedy provides an unending source of material for the stage: in no other theatrical form have the labyrinths of human nature been so deeply explored: the rich tapestry of archetypal family conflicts, driven by instincts that force helpless characters into inescapable constellations of behavior that have resonated through several millennia.The Greeks understood, perhaps better than anyone, the perpetual ambiguity of human character. The divinities they imagined were never one thing or another, good or evil. Christianity and other religions of the book brought us a more rigid set of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Scottish play’s traces are faint in this bloody, steamy tale of feminist psychosis. Based on Nikolai Leskov’s Dostoevsky-commissioned novel Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, its 1865 setting is transferred from Tsarist Russia to Northumberland. Little of the isolated, feudal oppression is lost in translation, as teenage Katherine (Florence Pugh) finds herself chattel to the sullen, impotent, older Alexander (Paul Hilton), till lust for a servant sparks her to life, and consumes everything around.Though Katherine is lady of the manor, this is a tale of gilt-edged slave days from a female Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The 1980s were a great decade for British women playwrights. During those Thatcher-dominated years, Caryl Churchill produced two world-class masterpieces – Top Girls and Serious Money – while a host of other playwrights, such as Timberlake Wertenbaker, April De Angelis, Charlotte Keatley, Sarah Daniels, Winsome Pinnock and Andrea Dunbar lit up our stages. Many of them experimented boldly with the structure of their plays, using time shifts and different storytelling techniques to give a forceful picture of women’s life experiences.The central event of the play happens offstageThe late Clare Read more ...