America
Katherine Waters
Ros and Ray are old hippies made good. She’s a hard-bitten, hard-working teacher in an inner-city Pennsylvania school where her pupils rob 7-Elevens on Fridays and the staff have a betting pool on how many times she gets called "white bitch". He’s a member of the one percent, a corporate heavyweight who’s always trying to see “the bigger picture” but who drives a Merc and – by his own admission – pulled himself out of poverty to become a wealthy financier.Even on the cusp of retirement they’re still besotted with each other, their love conversely made stronger by the frank Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Hie thee to Oxford, for it is doubtful that we will see the like of this exhibition again this side of the Atlantic. American art of the 1920s and 1930s was once disregarded in its homeland in favour of Francophile superiority, and once it fell into critical and commercial favour it became too expensive to move around at the beckoning of would-be international hosts.But the Ashmolean is – bolstered, too, by its nearly breaking the million-visitor mark last year – a master at barter: as the repository of more Michelangelo drawings than anywhere else, its loans made the Michelangelo exhibition Read more ...
Liz Thomson
For as long as I can remember, and long before I set foot in America for the first time at age 24, I have been intrigued by America – the “idea” of it, conjured up through music, and, as it turned out, the reality – and the common language which (depending on your point of view) binds us, or separates us. I’ve spent time in 10 of its major cities and, over the last three years, a great deal of time in New York where my (crazy to many British friends) proposal for an arts festival was welcomed, as was I – and by officials whose London equivalents would probably not have granted me the time of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The mystery remains of why they keep tucking away The Good Fight on More4, as they did with its illustrious predecessor The Good Wife. No disrespect to 4’s ancillary channel – now seemingly the designated last resting place of Grand Designs – but it’s like hanging a sign on the door saying “niche viewing, please knock quietly before entering”.In fact The Good Fight, having hit the ground running in series one, has stormed into series two swinging like a champ. Its finely tuned blend of character and beautifully detailed milieu accompanies a feeling of seamless inevitability in the plotting, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's long been a theatrical given, especially in musicals, that characters need to be seen to change: a climactic duo in the eternally crowd-pulling Wicked makes that abundantly clear. ("Because I knew you," goes the lyric, "I have been changed for good.") But what happens when people can't or won't change, and are so ground down by circumstance and their own temperament that they retreat inwards until they implode?That's the situation at the provocative and ever-stirring heart of the Tony Kushner/Jeanine Tesori musical Caroline, or Change, whose revival at Hampstead Theatre boasts a central Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Oh dear. After a bumpy couple of years which included an all-too-public arrest for domestic violence to which he pleaded guilty, Don McLean is releasing his first new studio album in eight years. Metaphorically (and sometimes literally) it hits a lot of bum notes and often tips over into self-parody.For a singer-songwriter whose back catalogue includes such genuine classics as “Crying”, “And I Love You So”, “Winterwood” and of course “American Pie” (the manuscript for which recently went for $1.2 million at auction), and whose talent was (according to some) is hymned in the Charles Fox-Norman Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 2017 the documentary series The Vietnam War told the story, from soup to nuts, of America’s misadventure in south-east Asia. It now seems the comprehensive history may have missed some nuts out. Not that anyone would question the sanity of a deserter from the US Army in 1968. Seen on the ground and from the air, the hot front of the Cold War was no place to be.Thus a group of four daring pioneers shucked their uniforms while on leave in Japan, and made their way via a fishing vessel to the eastern shore of the Soviet landmass, across which they were ceremonially paraded as propaganda Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The gripping paradox of Lynne Ramsay’s terse, brutal thriller is suggested in its title. Adapted from Jonathan Ames's novella, it’s a film distinguished by the force of its images and the compression of its narrative, and while its impact leaves you dazed, you can’t quite believe that what you’ve just seen ever happened.Even its running time is designed to provoke. At a mere 85 minutes, it rejects the creeping bloat which has become endemic in Hollywood, and the shock of its abrupt ending leaves you feeling as if you’ve just staggered out of some terrible accident, and you’re trying to put Read more ...
Marianka Swain
That this 1948 Tennessee Williams play is rarely performed seems nothing short of a travesty, thanks to the awe-inspiring case made for it by Rebecca Frecknall’s exquisite Almeida production. Aided by the skyrocketing Patsy Ferran, it also makes a case for director Frecknall as a luminous rising talent in British theatre.During a long, hot summer in early 20th century, small-town Mississippi, minister’s daughter Alma (Patsy Ferran, pictured below) – whose name means “soul” in Spanish – yearns hopelessly for the boy next door: dissolute doctor’s son John (Matthew Needham), who believes Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is it possible to get too much of American politics? With Donald Trump’s daily tweets invading our digital space, a new Kevin-Spacey-free House of Cards on the, well, cards, and new films set in Watergate times, it might be that few will have any appetite for this revival of Gore Vidal’s 1960 play set during a Democratic Party convention, and now making its West End debut. But to dismiss it completely would be a pity because, for all the creaks of its plotting, this is quite a watchable account of political in-fighting. After all, any show that has Maureen Lipman and Martin Shaw in the cast Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Al Jourgensen is pissed off with Donald Trump. Really pissed off. So pissed off that he’s dragged the latest incarnation of mighty industrial metal originators Ministry back into the studio for the first time since 2012’s Relapse to produce an album made up solely of songs of resistance against the 45th President of the USA and his alt-right junta. Ministry’s signature monster guitar riffs, jackhammer beats, spoken-word samples and Uncle Al’s unmistakable roar are all given a fresh airing to unleash a tropical storm of revolutionary rock with one very definite target. Make no mistake though, Read more ...
howard.male
Believe it or not, it’s been 14 years since the one-time Talking Heads frontman’s last solo album proper. Perhaps it doesn’t feel like that because his interim collaboration projects always sound so very David Byrne. Even when he took equal billing with the formidably talented and highly individualist Annie Clark (St Vincent), it still sticks in the memory as a Byrne album with guest Clark. But anyway, here we have it, and it too sounds very much like a David Byrne album. Is this meant as a backhanded complement? Not at all.For one thing, it’s not as sonically dense as that St Vincent Read more ...