black culture
Aleks Sierz
The Black Lives Matter movement is such an important international protest that it is odd how few contemporary plays even mention it. Since the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has been around since 2013, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman who shot African-American teenager Trayvon Martin in February 2012, there is little excuse. Now, however, New York playwright Antoinette Nwandu's allegorical play about race in America, first staged in 2018at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre (and filmed there by Spike Lee, no less), has come to this Off-West End venue, opening the day after rapper Dave Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Just Mercy, the latest film from Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12), is based on a New York Times bestseller. It has a star-studded cast. It’s emotionally moving as well as intellectually accessible. But it’s no easy film to watch. “They can call it what they want – it’s just another way to lynch a black man.” Just Mercy is about death row in the American South, and it is a bruising and beautiful film. It lights a fire under you.Just Mercy is based on a memoir by Bryan Stevenson, an American civil rights attorney who has spent his life working with adults and children condemned to die in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview comes to the Young Vic with the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama under its belt, and a reputation for putting audiences on their mettle through a build-up of theatrical surprises that culminate in a denouement about which the playwright has urged all who have seen the play to keep silent. It certainly delivers a final act that places viewers in a theatrical position that they have probably never experienced before, one that will prompt reflection long after the impassioned note on which the play's frenetic 90 minutes conclude.The result is ingenious in every way Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This week, one of the finest gems in the entire Hendrix catalogue finally sees the light of day in its full unedited glory – Songs for Groovy Children comprises all four sets from the Band of Gypsys New Year’s Eve 1969-70 residency at the Fillmore East in New York City.Originally recorded to free up Hendrix from a contract he’d signed earlier in his career, while transitioning from the R&B circuit towards his first psychedelic flowering, Band of Gypsys, released in April 1970 was the only full live album he ever sanctioned under his own name. It is one of rock’s great live albums. An Read more ...
Nick Hasted
San Francisco has rarely looked more unattainably golden than in Joe Talbot’s Sundance prize-winning gentrification parable. Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) once belonged inside the city’s Californian Dream, symbolised for him by the grand Victorian-style house built by his granddad for their black family, only to be repossessed as the city soared out of their reach in the Nineties, a legend that has become his identity’s beating heart. This is Jimmie Fails’ own family story, fictionalised with childhood friend and director Talbot into a film of awkward, homemade, sometimes overweening beauty.It’s a Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Shuck 'n' Jive is an hour-long two-hander about writing a play about being black in a white industry. The industry? Theatre. Performance. The stage.Simone (played by Olivia Onyehara), an opera singer, is from Lincolnshire. Cassi (played by Tanisha Spring), an actress, is from south London (so south, in fact, it's the part of Croydon where you can see countryside). But hold on. Is the play really about what it says it is? On the one hand, yes: the anecdotes come thick and fast. Meta-pastiche minstrel shows take over the auditions which Cassi and Simone attend. Hamilton and Porgy and Bess are Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Putting a radical spin on a fish-out-of-water story, The Last Tree explores troubling aspects of the African diaspora experience in an England riddled with xenophobia and black-on-black racism. Shola Amoo’s semi-autobiographical second feature is distanced from Brexit by its early 2000s time frame, but its young protagonist’s identity issues speak to the current moment.The film begins with a sunlit idyll in the Lincolnshire countryside. An 11-year-old British Nigerian, Femi (Tai Golding) runs around outdoors and gets “all over mud” with his three schoolmates – but for the colour of his skin Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One question springs immediately to mind on hearing that Romesh Ranganathan’s new stand-up show, The Cynic’s Mixtape, is touring: how does he find the time? Ranganathan has overtaken Jack Whitehall as Britain’s most media ubiquitous comic, with a deluge of TV shows and appearances, a column in the Guardian newspaper and even a recent autobiography. However, his TV CV is hit’n’miss, which leads to a second question: can he still cut it in the live arena?In short, yes, he can. With able support from Jake Lambert - who is heckled by that rarest of creatures, a Brighton Brexiteer – Ranganathan is Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Ailey company is that rare thing – a dance legend that’s even better than you remember. While no one forgets their first encounter with America’s No.1 touring troupe and its unique mix of ballet, modern, jazz, street, and all-round athletic fabulousness, repeat viewings only increase one’s respect. The opening night of Programme C at Sadler’s Wells notched up my own 13th exposure to Revelations, the company’s barn-storming calling card inspired by Ailey’s early experience of segregated rural Texas. And it’s still fresh. Try as I might to spot a pasted-on smile in “Rocka My Soul”, there Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Identity politics has been around for decades. One of the great things about the Bush Theatre in West London is the fact that it not only stages new plays by a diverse range of playwrights, but also successful recent revivals of modern classics such as Winsome Pinnock's Leave Taking and Caryl Phillips's Strange Fruit. Now it is the turn of Scottish poet, novelist and playwright Jackie Kay, with this revival of her 1986 play, Chiaroscuro, presented this time in the exciting form of gig theatre.It's a story about female friendship: although one of its central aims is to question simple Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There is no equivalent of the Ailey phenomenon. This is a modern dance company with a New York square named after it. It’s a dance company that has performed at the inauguration of two presidents. Its calling card, Revelations, a suite of dances first performed in 1960, is the most-watched modern dance work anywhere, ever.And how could it not be, when the Ailey bills it as a closer at every show? No matter which of three programmes you book to see at Sadler’s Wells, you will get the signature sign-off. It’s half an hour and a bit of kinetic joy drawing on Ailey’s memories of the Baptist Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Of all grime's original generation, Kano has a strong claim to being the greatest rhyme-constructor in the old school hip hop sense of dense rhymes packed with multiple meanings. Add movie star looks and a penchant for fur coats in photoshoots and he was most young grime fans' tip for following Dizzee Rascal into the big league. But though he got the major label deal, MOBO awards, Mercury nominations and Damon Albarn collaborations, and though his 2016 Made in the Manor album hit the top ten, he's never quite parlayed that into becoming a breakout superstar, a household name in that Read more ...