feminism
aleks.sierz
In 2017, playwright Nina Raine's Consent, an excellent National Theatre play about lawyers and rape victims, was hugely successful, winning a West End transfer, as well as generating a lot of discussion about gender politics. Her follow up, Stories, may be less controversial, but it boldly tackles a similarly sensitive issue: fertility. More specifically, as the publicity states, the drama asks the question: how do you have a baby when you're 39 and single? Starring Claudie Blakley, the play explores this idea with enormous intelligence and warmhearted sympathy.Anna (Blakley) is a white Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What an ambitious project! Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde looks at over 40 couples or, in some cases, trios whose love galvanised them into creative activity either individually or in collaboration.The best thing about the exhibition is that it blows out of the water the traditional notion of the artist as a lone (male) genius who draws inspiration from a supportive but essentially non-creative muse, usually his lover. At last, the role of women as essential partners in many creative relationships is being acknowledged and explored. A typical example is that of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Write about what you know, every nascent novelist is told. So you can't fault writer/director/actor Desiree Akhavan, Iranian-American creator of Appropriate Behaviour (2015) and The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018), which explore divergent sexuality and who has now written (with Cecilia Frugiuele), directs and stars in The Bisexual – about a lesbian woman who decides she wants to try out men for the first time.Akhavan is Leila, a lesbian in a 10-year relationship with Sadie (Maxine Peake), who is also her business partner in a fashion company. Their romance hits a snag when Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There are not that many plays about sport, but, whether you gamble on results or not, you can bet that most of them are about boxing. And often set in the past. Joy Wilkinson's superb new drama, The Sweet Science of Bruising, comes to the Southwark Playhouse, a venue which regularly punches above its weight (sorry!), armed with a beautifully evocative title and plenty of theatrical energy. It is also tells a story that is both original and affecting, about the Victorian subculture of female boxing. So hold tight, leave your squeamish side at home, and roll up to the ring to watch the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Let’s get a clip, Long Island.” One New York skateboarder encourages another, who’s from the ‘burbs, to show off ollies, pop shuvits and kick-flips for a YouTube video. But hang on: “There are too many penises in the way.” This is a posse of young women, a rare sighting in the male world of the skate park.Crystal Moselle’s first feature film (her extraordinary 2015 documentary The Wolfpack, about some Lower East Side siblings whose father closeted them in the family apartment for years, is a hard act to follow) homes in on eight teenage girls who bond through skateboarding. Very different Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It may be a sign of the times that the two lead performances in Killing Eve are female, with Jodie Comer fizzing hyperactively as shape-shifting assassin Villanelle and Sandra Oh (from Grey’s Anatomy) as British intelligence officer Eve Polastri (pictured below). Yet simultaneously, the show has a comic campness and air of fantasy that feels Sixties-like, reminiscent of such timewarp delights as The Avengers or Modesty Blaise. Amazingly, they had female leads back then too.My crystal ball (alias BBC Previews) tells me that the cracks start to show as Killing Eve works its way through its Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This should have been the perfect match. Saudi-born director Haifaa al-Mansour earned real acclaim for her 2012 debut film Wadjda, whose 12-year-old central character had to break the conventions of a restrictive society to realise her dream – owning her own bicycle. The challenges facing the eponymous heroine of al-Mansour’s new film may have been of a somewhat different order – to live as an independent woman in her early 19th century literary world, along with the right to publish her masterpiece, Frankenstein, written when she was just 18, under her own name. But the two stories share a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
As we enter the venue, Rose Matafeo is playing a game of mini table tennis with a member of the audience. Nothing that follows seems to relate to this “just a bit of fun to start the show” – but, trust me, it's one of the cleverest bits of misdirection you will ever see. The penny drops only at the end of Horndog, for which the New Zealander deservedly won the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Award for best show at the Fringe at the weekend.It's a high-energy hour, as Matafeo gallops through heaps of gag-laden material in a show that she says more than once is just about having fun, but which Read more ...
Hannah Greenstreet
Dear RashDash,I know you don’t like critics because Abbi read out a lot of reviews of famous Chekhov productions very fast, wearing a ruff and sequined hot pants. But I promise I won’t rate you out of five or patronise you with a gold star or give you a quotable soundbite to put on your posters. Even though I know you got four stars from The Times and the Guardian and the Stage because it says so on the back of the play text, which I bought because I had to take a piece of the show away with me.I’m not going to write what happens because nothing happens in Chekhov and by getting rid of the Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It feels like Michelle Terry’s first summer season at the Globe has been building up to Emilia for a while now. The theme is Shakespeare and race, so Othello was something of a given. It's joined by The Winter’s Tale, as if the Emilias of these two plays have been waiting for their chance to step into the spotlight. This new work, written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and directed by Nicole Charles, has a lot of potential that it never quite realises.Eponymous heroine Emilia Bassano, who appears at three stages in her long life (Leah Harvey, Vinette Robinson and Clare Perkins), was the first woman Read more ...
David Kettle
Launched just last year to celebrate the country’s 150th anniversary, CanadaHub has quickly become one of the Edinburgh Fringe’s most exciting and intriguing venues, presenting a small but richly provocative programme of work from across that vast country. Here are just three of its offerings this year.Daughter ★★★★ The post-show discussion in CanadaHub’s leafy garden bar following Daughter feels more like group therapy. Well, you might need some reassurance and depressurisation after experiencing the pitch-black whirlwind of Adam Lazarus’s seething solo show.He’s the writer Read more ...
Katherine Waters
“When you were our age, how did you imagine your life? What did you hope for?” It is a video of a classroom south-east of the Périphérique separating Paris from the working-class suburbs. The students are mostly girls between fifteen and sixteen and they wear make-up, jewellery, low-cut tops – we understand they’re sexy, confident, cool. Several are African, North African, Caribbean. When the teacher laughs, which is often, it bears vestiges of the provincial attitude of “a young girl who acknowledges her lack of importance,” though it’s unclear whether the students notice for she Read more ...