#MeToo
Daniel Lewis
Ian Williams’s writing is always in motion. For his 2012 poetry collection Personals, and since, he has composed little circular poems, similar (in style though not sentiment) to the posies you sometimes find inscribed on the inside of rings. He incorporates a couple into Reproduction, his debut and Griffin Prize-winning novel. “I’m sorry I made you hate me”, “no I don’t hate you baby don’t hurt me”, they read. Supposedly thought up by a teenager in the throes of childbirth, they speak to the seeming endlessness of labour pains as well as the forging of new bonds that are as hard to split as Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The Girls, Emma Cline’s acclaimed debut novel of 2016, was billed as a story based on the Manson murders. But in fact, like some of the stories in Daddy, her new short-story collection (written over a decade, several have already been published in magazines), it was an investigation into female friendship and what it means to be a teenage girl, when that state in itself makes feelings unreliable, “handicaps your ability to believe yourself”, and when so much time is spent trying “to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love”.Daddy’s style is tighter Read more ...
On the Record review - #MeToo turns its lens to the music industry, gives the mic to women of colour
Jill Chuah Masters
On the Record, the latest documentary from Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (acclaimed directors of The Hunting Ground), dives into the sexual misconduct allegations against music mogul Russell Simmons, the so-called ‘Godfather of Hip Hop.’ It centres on interviews with Drew Dixon (pictured below), who — as a twentysomething music executive — launched Whitney Houston hits and scouted a young Kanye West. She left the industry after Simmons allegedly raped her.This is an elegant, stinging addition to the #MeToo dialogue, which gives due emphasis to black women and the music industry — a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Harvey Weinstein is never mentioned in The Assistant, but the former movie mogul and convicted rapist looms large over this savagely relevant drama, which offers a vivid picture of what life might have been like for every one of the employees – male as well as female, victim or no – trapped in Weinstein’s evil little world. Kitty Green’s film could be viewed as the indie counterpart to the recent Bombshell, which was first out of the blocks in the aftermath of #MeToo. Where Bombshell was a glossily-packaged, all-star satire, The Assistant is low-budget, low- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Fiona Apple simmered in the LA sun for eight years to make this record, mostly holed up at home since her beloved dog died and she stopped drinking. Rather than polish the result to a sleek gleam, this is an album of trailing threads and percussive clatter, layered like unwiped tape. The brightly shining teenage angst queen of the Nineties continues to rub herself raw, rejecting major label norms, and left alone as Neil Young and Kate Bush are. The title is Gillian Anderson’s sex-crime cop’s demand in The Fall, when a room where a girl has been tortured needs breaking open. Cutters fetched, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
She’s an ordinary young woman, and she really doesn’t know what to think. After all, things are way out of control. She knows that the natural world is pretty fucked, and that nothing grows in the earth any more — well, at least not on her patch. She knows that the gators, the semi-aquatic reptiles that used to live in swamps, have now taken to strolling through cities. And that they fall in love with humans, and serenade them, and feel bad when they are rejected. She also knows that there are codes of behaviour — ways of doing things in everyday life that are right, and those that are wrong Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Artemisia Gentileschi has definitely had a hard time. Although she was an outstanding Renaissance painter in the style of Caravaggio, and the first woman to become a member of Florence’s Accademia di Arte del Disegno, her work was attributed to her father Orazio for centuries. Since she was rediscovered by feminist art critics in the 1970s, interest in her life and work has increased, but sadly the first major exhibition of her paintings in the UK, at the National Gallery, has had to be postponed because of the coronavirus. For the same reason, Breach Theatre’s drama about her was cancelled, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Assassinate the President! Obliterate history by torching libraries and murdering historians! Crazy leaders and fake news are just a few of the subjects tackled by political journalist and thriller writer, Jonathan Freedland (aka Sam Bourne), in this, his fifth novel featuring the inventive, imaginative, intelligent trouble-shooter Maggie Costelloe. Maggie – see her name – is Irish turned American. Aside from an off-again on-again Israeli partner, her only relative is her sister, a school teacher computer nerd, who lives a fairly normal life in the American South with (gasp) a husband Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Perhaps the most surprising thing is how good natured they all sound. There’s no anger. At least, not much – one can’t help wondering what they say off air. Through a kaleidoscope of vocation, hopes, dreams, inspirations, and worries about stuff that their male counterparts do not have to consider, nine conductors who happen to be female share their stories in this engaging and long-overdue film, with humour, intelligence and an occasional dose of major frustration.Women are increasingly stepping to the fore in the world of orchestral conducting, but my goodness, it has taken a long time. In Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This raunchy, gleefully cynical production takes one of Thomas Middleton’s most famous tragedies and turns it into a Netflix-worthy dark comedy. Where the themes of incest, betrayal, cougar-action and multiple murder would be spun out over several episodes these days, Amy Hodge’s production compresses them into a tart, wittily toxic two and a half hours. Hodge, by her own admission, has sheared off one third of the text to produce a sharply outlined drama of devices and desires. At the same time she has introduced music and songs that tip between jazz and blues, so that Middleton’s Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Recent politics surround the EU and nationhood, fantasies of Irish Sea bridges and trading borders more porous than limestone have revived the granular rub between Eire and Britain, and the Celtic Tiger cool of the Nineties is a history module these days. Nevertheless the creative exchange between the two nations has a long and fruitful history – our folk traditions are conjoined twins, after all, and our contemporary musical cultures part of a continual flow back and forth.Imagining Ireland, first mounted to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising back in 2016, the year of the Brexit Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Netflix’s Sex Education has returned to our screens and streams. The show made waves last year for its refreshing take on the teen comedy-drama. It took on abortion, consent and female pleasure — subjects strikingly absent from our actual high school educations. The result was a show that was always bingeable, sometimes educative, and oozing with sex-positive delights. Not everyone liked it. But those of us who did — teenagers all over again — could not stop talking about it. These are high expectations for a show going into its sophomore season. But thank God and thank Laurie Nunn: this is a Read more ...