sexism
Kathryn Reilly
Queen of the earworm Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson has had quite the summer, capturing imaginations and sparking indignation. The brazen hussy has the audacity to wear what the hell she likes while belting out her stream of catchy country-pop, life-affirming hits. She’s in your face, unapologetic and going absolutely nowhere.Little surprise, then, that in doing so she has incurred the wrath of a multitude keyboard warriors. The BBC has had to turn off live commenting during some of her festival performances. The woman has had the temerity to not follow the narrative, and not to shape herself to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Rosamund Pike is back. For her first stage appearance since 2010, when she played Hedda Gabler in Adrian Noble’s production for Bath Theatre Royal, the Hollywood superstar has chosen Inter-Alia, Suzie Miller’s follow up to her smash hit Prima Facie, which starred Jodie Cromer and whose London staging was at the Harold Pinter Theatre in 2022.With the same production team, but now at the National Theatre, Miller returns to her chosen milieu – English legal professionals – but now zooms in on the family scene of top judge Jessica Parks (Pike). As before, this is mainly a monologue, running at Read more ...
Sarah Kent
On walking into Mikalene Thomas’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery my first reaction was “get me out of here”. To someone brought up on the paired down, less-is-more aesthetic of minimalism her giant, rhinestone-encrusted portraits are like a kick in the solar plexus – much too big and bright to stomach. Could I be expected to even consider accepting these gaudy monstrosities as art?A brash assault on the senses, they seemed to be daring me to turn away. Then came two installations – recreations of the living room in the terraced house in Camden, New Jersey where the artist grew up in the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a dingy room with dilapidated furniture on a dismal Sunday evening, two detectives prepare for an interview. The old hand walks out, with just a little too much flattery hanging in the air, leaving the interrogation in the hands of the up-and-coming thruster, a young woman investigating the disappearance of a young woman. Alone, with just a camera for company (we get the video feed also from hidden cameras too) she awaits the suspect for the showdown.A hit at Edinburgh and now expanded to a tense 70 minutes three-hander, Jamie Armitage’s first play as writer as well as director is a wordy Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie. Having explored similar territory for 50 some years, you’d have thought the American artist would have run out of ideas. Not a bit of it. Dominating the central space was a huge screen showing Untitled (No Comment) (main picture) which explores the Orwellian soup of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The latest true-crime adaptation about a murderous man and his female victims turns its star into a bloody mess on a hospital table, her vital signs flatlining. And that’s just halfway through, with two episodes to go. At least the second half of Until I Kill You offers less gruesome generic territory (spoilers ahead): the bungled police investigation of the assault; the sympathetic WPC assigned to the surviving woman, Delia Balmer (Anna Maxwell Martin, pictured below, left); the dangerously clumsy twists and turns of the justice system; the eventual resolution of this sorry saga. But Read more ...
India Lewis
Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland's Girl Bands is one of those films that, perhaps embarrassingly, feels very necessary. An examination of the history of solely all female bands in Scotland since the 1960s, it is a great demonstration of how little seems to have changed, particularly when it comes to the industry’s perceived "risk" when backing these groups.The film is a chronological journey through genres in musical history, starting in 1964 with the McKinley sisters, who seemed on track for success but were passed over in favour of male pop groups. Their music is eminently Read more ...
aleks.sierz
British theatre has a proud heritage of science plays. From 1990s classics such as Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998) to more recent examples such as Lucy Kirkwood’s Mosquitoes (2017) and Marek Horn’s Octopolis (2023), the trick lies in balancing intellectual material about often complex scientific subjects with dramatic flair.As the Hampstead Theatre stages Stella Feehily’s new play, The Lightest Element, which was originally commissioned by the Manhattan Theatre Club, the question of how to entertain as well as inform gets a contemporary twist as the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are many women whose outstanding science was attributed to men or simply devalued to the point of obscurity, but recent interest in the likes of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin and NASA’s Katherine Johnson has given credit where credit is due. Marie Curie was never diminished, the woman with two Nobel prizes and the discoveries of radium and polonium on her CV needs no such championing, a figure known by schoolchildren the world over. And yet there’s something that stirs in the back of the mind, something that complicates a story of stunning success often against the odds. When the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Cricket has always been a lens through which to examine the legacy of the British Empire. In the 1930s, the infamous Bodyline series saw the new nation, Australia, stand up to its big brother’s bullying tactics. In the 1970s, the all-conquering West Indies team gave pride to the Windrush generation when they vanquished an England whose captain had promised to make them grovel. In the 2010s, the brash and bold Indian Premier League saw the world’s largest democracy flex its financial muscle as global power shifted eastwards. Kate Attwell’s 2019 play, Testmatch (receiving its UK Read more ...
James Saynor
After a few years of cinema, the wow factor of seeing actual things moving about on a screen wore off a bit and showmen saw that jump cuts and stop-motion – the dawn of animation – could lift audiences some more. The liberation from gravity, in fact, is a singular pleasure of animation: being half-sellotaped to the floor is one of life’s great bores, it seems to delight in pointing out.If Disney led the tradition of smooth-as-you-like animated artwork, Europeans often fancied the jerkier joys of stop-motion mannequins leaping around. The Polish-language The Peasants adopts a new form Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A middle-aged man, expensively dressed and possessed of that very specific confidence that only comes from a certain kind of education, a certain kind of professional success, a certain kind of entitlement, talks to a younger woman. Despite the fact that she isn’t really trying, she’s attractive, bright and just assertive enough to weave a spell of fascination over men like him, with a tinge of non-dangerous exoticism evidenced by her East European accent to round things out. They are catnip to each other. And so it had been until almost two years ago. A torrid affair had been conducted, Read more ...