black culture
Aleks Sierz
Black women often find themselves subject to a double dose of prejudice. Pressure. They face everyday racism as well as sexism. It’s called misogynoir, and Queens of Sheba is a short show dedicated to calling it out. In as joyous and energetic way as possible. First staged in 2018, and subsequently revived several times nationwide, Jessica L Hagen’s debut play has been adapted by Ryan Calais Cameron and now visits the Soho Theatre in London.The show was loosely inspired by a particularly grotesque incident which happened in September 2015, when two women from a group of four were turned away Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Conundrum is a tricky play. Written and directed by Paul Anthony Morris, founder of Crying in the Wilderness Productions, it’s an extended meditation on Blackness and what it means to live in a racist society. Anthony Ofoegbu is the star of the show, but his mesmerising performance isn’t enough to make sense out of Morris’s inscrutable script.Fidel (Ofoegbu, pictured below) is decluttering, shredding documents he doesn’t need anymore. He stumbles across a page of biology notes, and starts testing himself on parts of the body: hypothalamus, oesophagus, carotid canal. He scrawls the words in Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
The National Theatre has a good record in staging classic American drama by black playwrights. James Baldwin's The Amen Corner, August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs have all had terrific new stagings. Now it’s the turn of activist writer Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind, which was first successfully produced off-Broadway in 1955. By a grim irony, this play — which attacks the attitudes of white producers and directors towards black creatives — was itself a victim of racism: the proposed transfer to Broadway fell through because Childress wouldn’t tone Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Adams has long been Robert Plant’s guitarist in bands including the Sensational Space Shifters, as well as working with fellow Space Shifter Juldeh Camara in the band JuJu. He is steeped in American Blues as well as its West African and Desert Blues roots, having worked as a producer for Rachid Taha and on some of Tinariwen’s finest albums. More recently, he has produced and performed with the outrageously energetic southern Italian Taranta band, Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, and it’s from that collaboration that this new set with CGS’s violinist and percussionist, Mauro Durante, stems.They 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 ...
Graham Fuller
The independent filmmaker Alexandre Rockwell has flown under the radar since he made his name with the Cassavetes-vibed 1992 New York comedy In the Soup. He recently explained that his career was sabotaged by Harvey Weinstein, who was jealous, Rockwell suspects, of his close friendship with Quentin Tarantino. The intervening years haven’t been fallow, but Rockwell’s 10th feature, the lyrical childhood mini-odyssey Sweet Thing (2020), represents a major comeback.Rockwell's revival began with 2013’s hour-long Little Feet, made for $11,000 and starring his kids Lana (b. 2003) and Nico Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
I’ve lived in Brixton, south London, for about 40 years now, so any play that looks at the gentrification of the area is, for me, definitely a must. Like many other places in the metropolis, the nature of the urban landscape has changed both due to gradual factors — such as migration — and spectacular events — like the Brixton riots of 1981 and 1985. Archie Maddocks’s new play, A Place for We, which is produced by Talawa Theatre Company and the Park Theatre, comes to the stage after being shortlisted for, although not winning, the Bruntwood Prize and the Alfred Fagon Award. Its cast is led by Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Bill Duke’s 1992 thriller Deep Cover receives the Criterion restoration treatment, and certainly the neon noir lighting looks luscious and fresh. It’s a shame the screenplay, the directing, and most of the acting hasn’t stood the test of time. The narrative is more than a little moralistic and obvious right from the start, opening with a flashback to a young boy witnessing his addict father die attempting a liquor store robbery as Christmas looms. The boy grows up to be a troubled Cleveland cop, Russell Stevens (played very well by Laurence Fishburne), who gets recruited by an ambitious Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Anaphylactic shock, anyone? Candyman, both the 1992 original, directed by British director Bernard Rose and based on a story by Clive Barker, and its stylish, sharp sequel by Nia DaCosta, co-written and produced by Jordan Peele, features an awful lot of bees.Swarms of stripy insects, however, are far from the most severe problems besetting the new hipster residents of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green luxury lofts. These were formerly a crime-ridden high-rise public housing project, as pictured in the 1992 film, now partly torn down and in the midst of gentrification.“White people built the ghetto, Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
The Edinburgh International Festival has returned this year, with a programme of socially distanced events held almost completely outdoors. Yup, that’s right. Outdoors. In Scotland. (Top tip: if you’re going to one of the 8pm concerts, wear a winter coat. It gets somewhat chilly when the sun goes down.) The purpose-built structures which house EIF’s classical music programme are actually pretty robust, and the venue for the larger-scale classical concerts – the grounds of Edinburgh Academy Junior School – is just within walking distance of the city centre, but far enough from busy roads that Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s hard to imagine a movie more of its time than Zola, as it takes on sex, race, the glamorisation of porn and the allure of the ever-online world. For 90 minutes we are embedded in the lives of two young American sex workers and it’s a wild ride that leaves its audience breathless as they try to keep up with the hand-brake turns and sudden changes of pace and tone. Is it another feminist comedy reminding us that it’s every woman’s right to deploy her body any way they want? Or is it a nightmarish true portrait of the sex trade? Or is it a film about the covert racism that comes into play Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
What’s in a name? In Benedict Lombe’s incendiary debut play at the Bush Theatre, the answer to this question encompasses a whole continent, an entire existential experience - the Black experience, to be exact - though not in the way that "roots" stories often proceed. The lost first name that the lead character of Lava needs for her British passport application is indeed her African one, long banned by her original home country, but not for the reason you’d expect. And home for this character, billed simply as Her (Ronke Adekoluejo), isn’t a straightforward proposition either. To Read more ...