feminism
Katherine Waters
“Pussy is pussy” and “bitches are bitches” but Jen Silverman’s Collective Rage at Southwark Playhouse smashes tautologies with roguish comedy in a tight five-hander smartly directed by Charlie Parham.The play is set in New York and follows the ad hoc and long-standing relationships that develop between five women (two of whom are queer) called Betty over the course of a series of rehearsals for a skew-whiff rendition of the play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Betty 3 (Beatriz Romilly) decides to put on after going on a date to “The Thea-tah” with a posh Read more ...
theartsdesk
It was both astonishing and depressingly unsurprising that Suffragette, Sarah Gavron’s feature about the insurgent foot soldiers of the campaign for women’s suffrage, was the first fictionalised film specifically about the movement. There are more films about the miners’ strike – which clearly tells us something.It’s no surprise that literature has fared far better, since, in the words of Virginia Woolf, all one needs is a “room of one’s own” in order to think and to write. Often we see the movement featured as a side story of a male-focused storyline, such as the television adaptation of Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In Between didn’t get nearly enough attention on its cinema release in the UK last autumn, hampered perhaps by its nothingy title and a synopsis that can make it sound like it will be a worthy evening out when in fact it’s anything but. One of the liveliest debut features of 2017, it follows three twenty-something Palestinian women who share a flat in Tel Aviv. It’s sharp, funny and eye-opening.Director Maysaloun Hamoud draws on her experience as an Arab film-maker living in Israel to create a wholly fresh take on sexual and cultural politics. Imagine Girls and Sex in the City but without the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s hard to be sure if Rakal, Bella and Alice from Dream Wife are a rock’n’roll band or a girl gang with guitars. Either way, their debut album has got some cracking Riot Grrrl-flavoured tunes and a stridently feminist, in-your-face attitude. There is nothing demure about this trio and they really don’t care what your thoughts on that might be.Like Blondie on rocket fuel or Bikini Kill with better songs, Dream Wife is a set of thrilling tunes of raw guitar from Alice Go and the harpy-like vocals Rakel Mjöll. “Hey Heartbreaker” comes on like turbo-powered glam rock and a kick in the nuts, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
One of the much-hyped jewels in the crown of the family-friendly BBC holiday season is this new three-episode adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's much loved novel by Heidi Thomas, the writer of Call the Midwife. We started in the New England winter – a simulacrum of Concord, Massachusetts, where Alcott lived with her three sisters, in circumstances of genteel poverty that she lightly fictionalised in her best-selling novel.An American classic since its publication, and never out of print, Little Women has already made it into half a dozen films, several television adaptations, a piece of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This is a heartbreaking week for women’s tennis. The death from cancer of Jana Novotna at only 49 evokes memories of one of Wimbledon’s more charming fairytales. Novotna was a lissome athlete who flunked what looked like her best shot at greatness, tossing away a third-set lead in the 1993 women’s final and then crumpling on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent. Five years later she eventually became the oldest first-time champion. It would make a lovely Hollywood movie.Instead this year’s second tennis film is Battle of the Sexes. Like Borg/McEnroe, it spirits us back to the 1970s, that Read more ...
stephen.walsh
How many dead female composers can you name? Tom Green, the composer of this stunning one-woman show, could initially only think of five (I managed thirteen while waiting for the show to start, but then I’ve been around somewhat longer than he has, and knew one or two of them). In any case he soon dug up a few more, and based his score entirely on more or less unrecognisable quotations from their work – or so he claims. His libretto, on the other hand, he took from a living female writer, the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s eponymous collection, which examines assorted famous males Read more ...
Richard Bratby
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you have to be pretty silly to take Gilbert and Sullivan seriously. But even sillier not to. And positively heroic to revive the pair’s 1884 three-acter Princess Ida: the show which – updated to a futuristic sushi bar – was responsible in 1992 for one of English National Opera’s all-time great fiascos (well, if you will hire Ken Russell as director...). Vivian Coates’s colourful new production for the National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company keeps the action firmly in the cod-medieval Neverland, lifted straight from Tennyson, that G Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In Jean Grémillon's final fiction film The Love of a Woman, Marie Prieur (Micheline Presle) arrives on the Breton island of Ushant to replace the tiny settlement's aging Dr Morel (Robert Naly). While showing Marie her new digs and surgery, Mme Morel (Madeleine Geoffroy) compliments the lady doctor on her youth. Marie sighingly replies that she is 28. Quel horreur!Ninety-five now, Presle was 31 when the film was released in France in 1953. It is no discourtesy to say she looked closer to 35 – Marie is an attractive, dignified woman who performs her work with a quietness and authority that 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 ...
aleks.sierz
The 1960s were “hilarious”, says one young character in this revival, starring Broadway icon Stockard Channing, of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s 2009 family drama at the Trafalgar Studios. How so? “Oh you know, the clothes, the hair, the raging idealism.” The thought of hippies marching for political causes, smoking Gauloises on the Left Bank or storming the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, and all the time wearing sandals and beads. Yes, to anyone under the age of 60 that must seem funny. But not, of course, for anyone who was actually there – especially if they were a radical and a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Five thousand miles away from her native Lake District, I first understood the eerie magnetism of Sarah Hall’s fiction. As a regional judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, I’d travelled to join the jury’s deliberations in Sri Lanka. I was keen for Hall’s debut novel, Haweswater, to prevail but unsure what my fellow-judges – both from the Subcontinent – would make of this local drama set in a bleak English backwater. Hall’s hardscrabble uplands scarcely resemble Wordsworth’s. Yet under a gnarled bodhi tree on a hotel lawn in Kandy, with the highland rainforest behind us and the sacred lake Read more ...