feminism
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“How to explain Theresa May?” Grace Petrie muses from the Summerhall stage as she introduces decade-old opener “Farewell To Welfare”. “Well, in 2010, she was as bad as we thought it was going to get.”That is, on the face of it, the problem with being a protest singer: in a just world, your songs should ultimately lose their potency. But the crowd at this twice-rescheduled Edinburgh show have been waiting a long time to hear Petrie’s powerful messages of solidarity across class, race, gender and ability lines and while the names may change, the sentiments are as relevant as ever.Lockdowns Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Zadie Smith might not be the only writer who can rhyme "tandem" with "galdem", but she’s the only one who can do it in an adaptation of Chaucer. In The Wife of Willesden, her debut play, a modern version of one of the Canterbury Tales, Smith’s talent for mixing high and low is at full power.Indhu Rubasingham’s staging at the Kiln Theatre rattles along with warmth, wit, and a whole lot of heart. The premise is a little flimsy, but forgivably so. Brent has been voted London’s Borough of Culture, and the landlady of the Sir Colin Campbell has organised an open mic night to celebrate. A Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Katie Mitchell’s desire to bust the boundaries of theatre has taken a brilliant turn. Over her long and distinguished career as a director she has been tirelessly inventive, injecting stylised movement into Greek tragedy, projecting film onto giant screens of the actors onstage, slicing a set into three time zones. To tackle a formally bold novel, Rebecca Watson’s recent little scratch, Mitchell and her adaptor, Miriam Battye, have fashioned something equally inventive that works perfectly in the small Downstairs space at the Hampstead.Watson’s novel offers a day in the head of a young Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Tuesday, 8 November 2016. Vera is in a New York hospital room giving birth to a son. On anxiously checked phones, the votes are piling up for Hillary, but the states are piling up for Trump. Vera’s world will never be the same again.Mathilde Dratwa’s new play, Milk and Gall (directed by Lisa Spirling, Theatre 503's Artistic Director), takes a searingly unsentimental look at 21st century parenting in the big city, mining plenty of laughs along the way. Speaking from experience, I can vouch that it’s all true – except, perhaps, that the reality is even worse!In her mid-thirties, Vera ( Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Iliza Shlesinger is an American writer, performer and presenter whose film work includes roles in Pieces of a Woman and Good on Paper, the latter which she also wrote and produced. She's also an established stand-up comic, with five Netflix specials to her name. For her latest stand-up show, Back in Action, she was on a fleeting visit to London as part of an international 70-date tour, delayed by COVID, before she performs some dates in the US.From the off her performance was full of energy, with lots of adroit physical comedy – two standouts being how a woman taking off her bra looks like Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“We haven’t started yet!” Hannah-Jarrett Scott, dressed in Doc Martens under a 19th-century shift, reassures us as she attempts to dislodge a yellow rubber glove from a chandelier in the middle of the set of Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of). So begins this rollicking all-female adaptation of the timeless Jane Austen romcom, in which the servants recreate their famous mistresses’ and masters’ turbulent love lives.Written by Isobel McArthur, the play originated in Scotland in 2018 and has gone through several versions before pitching up in the heart of the West End. Directed here by Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
In his 1985 essay “Not-Knowing”, the American writer Donald Barthelme describes a fictional situation in which an unknown “someone” is writing a story.“From the world of conventional signs,” Barthelme writes, laying out for the reader this story being written, “he takes an azalea bush, plants it in a pleasant park. He takes a gold pocket watch from the world of conventional signs and places it under the azalea bush. He takes from the same rich source a handsome thief and a chastity belt, places the thief in the chastity belt and lays him tenderly under the azalea, not neglecting to wind the Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“Careful, there’s a hole in the floor.” The warning’s an unusual one, passed along conscientiously by the stewards at the door of the tiny Orange Tree Theatre.The hole in question is long and angular and will soon be filled with water, stretching around one side of the pristine white set of Rice, a new play by Australian-Hmong writer Michele Lee. It’s an intimate two-hander about immigration and belonging, directed ably by Matthew Xia – but, like its characters, it’s suffering an identity crisis.Our heroines are two women of colour: Nisha (Zainab Hasan, pictured below), a young executive at Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Anyone familiar with psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s bestseller The Body Keeps the Score (2014) will recognise the ghost of his title in Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s My Body Keeps Your Secrets. His book is an essential text for understanding the physiological changes wrought by trauma and the techniques that work to recalibrate body, mind and brain in its aftermath. Through a blend of memoir and reportage, Osborne-Crowley explores the same subject while indicating her own emphasis: the experience, and grammar, of shame.Staying close to her own experiences, while drawing on her background Read more ...
joe.muggs
The endless circles and spirals that dance music moves in can take you to some strange places.It is, after all, a little peculiar that a producer from California, who was first turned on to DJing by the edgy, claustrophobic, ultra-modernist sound of Chicago’s footworking DJs, should on her debut album sound like a blissed-out, hazy sunrise at a hippie rave somewhere in the English countryside 30 years ago. But Tomu DJ has captured a very specific mood and moment that feels slightly outside of time so well that this doesn’t even feel like a nostalgia piece. Back between 1991 and 1994 Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
I’m one of the women in the pages of Elinor Cleghorn’s new history of the female body, Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World. I’ve dealt with strange chronic pain throughout my early twenties. Still, I’ve always felt like I could articulate fairly clearly what I felt was wrong with my body, at least in my own words, if not in a medical sense, and have been lucky enough to see a series of compassionate GPs, gynaecologists and physiotherapists (all themselves women). Cleghorn’s suggestion that “the answers reside in our bodies, and in the histories our bodies Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The latest album from Marina Diamandis, her fifth, is a startling explosion of vim and attitude. It mingles speeding, wordy, indie-tinted dance-pop bangers, tilting at all manner of contemporary ills, with sudden moments of broken-hearted piano-led contemplation. When she last appeared two years ago, it was with the lengthy Love + Fear album, Paloma Faith-ish songs whose tastefulness masked real character. Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land, on the other hand, is packed with plenty of juice and surprises.It opens with the title track, an electro-glam-pop stomper midway between Britney Spears’ “ Read more ...