education
Katherine Waters
It's the 2nd May 1997, the morning after the night that swept New Labour into power. We’re in the staffroom of a school somewhere in Britain and the teachers are jubilant. They've been glued to their TV sets for the results and have shagged and drunk through the night to crawl in with hangovers and pouchy eyes to face the day with a particular brand of frazzled optimism. But they're also anxious, because — according to the relentless logic of musical theatre which permits only extremes — today is the worst day to be a teacher. Today, of course, is muck up day.Between the ordinary mayhem Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Joshua Harmon knows how to stir and excite an audience and does that and more with Admissions, newly arrived in the West End as part of the ongoing tsunami of American theatre across the capital just now. Opening the same day as news reports of financial bribery and malfeasance deployed to gain admissions to America's top universities, Harmon's portrait of a family poleaxed by their teenage son's fraught route to college comes with an unexpectedly topical urgency. But neither this writer nor his exceedingly smart director, Daniel Aukin, needs to coast on headlines to make their point. As Read more ...
graham.rickson
Robert Alan Evans’ adaptation of Kes is a dark, expressionist reworking of Barry Hines’ novella. It pays lip service to Ken Loach’s iconic film version, and most of the memorable bits are present and correct here: the wince-inducing rant from head teacher Mr Gryce is a highlight, as is the PE teacher’s sadistic insistence that poor Billy has to take a shower. Evans distils the book into just 70 minutes without diluting its anger, the original’s dense narrative reshaped into a series of tiny scenes. Hines’ Barnsley-set story focuses on 15-year-old Billy Caspar, a misfit destined to Read more ...
James Graham
Thank you. It’s an honour to have been asked to speak here today. Although looking at the h100 List this year, I’ve no idea why I’m presumptuously standing here; given the talent, creativity and achievements far surpassing my own within this room. But I’m also excited, and genuinely inspired, to be part of such a group.I don’t know about you, but I find working in the arts often seriously discombobulating in either being a far-too-lonely and private endeavour one minute; an overwhelming public and intensely populated one the next.Those days where the only human contact you have is with the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Holy shit! After being closed for two long years, the old and battered Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn has been refurbished and relaunched, with a name change and £5.5 million-worth of improvements. It’s now a much more welcoming place, full of light at the front and with an on-street café, as well as easy access to the new plush seats and excellent sightlines. Although some patrons have grumbled that the name change is a betrayal of past achievements, Indhu Rubasingham, the artistic director, has created a much more hipster-friendly, much more middle-class venue than the previous community hive. Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Lycra, jealousy and pubescent ambition are put under the spotlight in Clare Barron’s provocative probe into the American competitive dancing scene. Dance Nation is a tarantella through the convulsions of the teen psyche as its characters respond to the psychological and physical pressures of ambitious parents circling like piranhas, and a dance teacher (Pat) with a dictator complex."This is the future! I am making the future!! We’re gonna make those judges feel something in their cold, dead, pernicious hearts!" Pat bellows early on. Like brainwashed cult devotees his 13-year-old pupils jerk Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Theatre for children can often be dismissed – a box to tick for parents who want to keep up with cultural practices; a job for actors who haven't quite made it in the mainstream; theatre that mums and dads want to see that works for their little ones, too.It's actually quite rare to find theatre that works purely for children – something that excites, inspires and invigorates on their level without worrying too much about the olds. But at bOing! International Family Festival, contemporary dance, conceptual theatre, live art installations, classical and modern music, film and storytelling Read more ...
Owen Richards
On the surface, Pin Cushion is a whimsical British indie, packed with imagination and charm. But debuting director Deborah Haywood builds this on a foundation of bullying and prejudice, creating a surprisingly bleak yet effective film.Teenager Iona and her mother Lyn (Lily Newmark and Joanna Scanlan, main picture) are a pair of social outcasts, recently moved to Swadlincote in Derbyshire. They’re constantly festooned in bright woolly layers and surrounded by ornamental tat and misplaced furniture (including a toilet at the head of their shared double bed). Iona boasts about her new school Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Shall we dodge? (One, two, three) No, the brilliance of Bartlett Sher’s Tony-winning Lincoln Center revival – first on Broadway in 2015, now gracing the West End, with its original leads – is that it faces the problematic elements of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1951 musical head on. But, in a canny reading, it finds such nuance in the piece that it feels freshly minted – if gorgeously attired in Golden Age trappings.Based on the memoirs of army widow Anna Leonowens (Kelli O’Hara), the show follows her journey to Siam in 1862, where she’s employed to teach the many children (by many wives) Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Genuine emotion does battle with gerrymandered feeling in Wonder, which at least proves that the young star of Room, Jacob Tremblay, is no one-film wonder himself. Playing a pre-teen Brooklynite who yearns to be seen as more than the facial disfigurement that announces him to the world, Tremblay is astonishing once more in a movie that feels as if it wants to break free of the formulaic but can't quite bring itself to do so. When the director Stephen Chbosky keeps the focus on 10-year-old Auggie's domestic life – that's to say the scenes involving his interactions with his mum and dad Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Cast your minds back, if you will, to 2011. Remember Jamie Oliver’s Celebrity Fight School? I think that was the title… in any case, it was an astonishing vanity project which seemed to suggest that the reason so many kids were being failed by education was down to a vital lack of abrasive celebrities in the classroom. Falling standards, we were asked to believe, were not the result of an astonishing lack of investment, or a wider societal ill. No, it was the absence of David Starkey’s generous and engaging influence that was to blame. Oliver may as well have gone door-to-door to every Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Whether it’s the £400,000 that separates Mishal Husain from John Humphrys, or the 74 million miles between the metaphorical markers of Venus and Mars, there is a gulf between the genders. Despite legislation to enforce equality, the reality is that, right from the start, boys and girls are treated differently. Boys like trains, right? Girls like dolls… Before you know it, female students are massively under-represented in the sciences, and worrying numbers of young men think it’s OK to shout sexual threats to women on the street in the name of banter. Boys will be boys after all… but Read more ...