Access and trust are the key issues facing any documentary director, especially when the film concerned touches on questions that arouse controversy in society. It’s a long time since I've seen a work that achieved so much on those two fronts as Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer. The HBO-Storyville documentary by double directors-producers Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin tells the brave story of the Russian conceptual art, feminist punk collective. Two of the group's members are still imprisoned in Russian penal colonies for their participation in the "punk prayer" they staged at Moscow’s Read more ...

Now here’s a funny thing, possums. Back in 1990 when one great Australian Dame, Joan Sutherland, gave her farewell performance, another, a certain housewife superstar from the Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds, seemed closer to  retirement age.Now La Stupenda is no more, Dame Edna is a gigastar and it’s her turn to shrill a gladdie-waving goodbye to her adoring public. She doesn’t look a day older, nary a hair out of place in that immaculate lilac coiffure. Daring to upstage her in a final speech is manager Barry Humphries, still with his hand in the till while Edna gives all for her art Read more ...

Internet porn, the sexualisation of childhood and the objectification of women are so commonplace in Western society that they go mostly unmentioned and unchallenged, even in the arts. So thank goodness for performance artist and comic Bryony Kimmings, who not only mentions and challenges these pernicious forces in so-called civilised society, but in Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, an award-winning show first seen at Edinburgh Fringe, fashions an entertaining show around them.It was created from a very personal perspective. Kimmings recently started taking an active care role in the Read more ...

In this refreshingly rowdy, distinctly feminist film from debut writer-director Maggie Carey an inexperienced, tirelessly sensible teenage girl prepares herself for college life by taking charge of her own sexual awakening. She does so in a way that's hilariously overly administrative, with her plans taking the form of the title's tawdry, quite literal "to do list".Parks and Recreation's Aubrey Plaza is gifted the role of Brandy Klark, school valedictorian and virgin. As the film opens, the year is 1993 and Brandy's sights are set on college and little else. That changes when she's conned Read more ...

Marin Alsop may be one of America’s leading conductors, with stints as music director of the Colorado, Eugene and Richmond symphony orchestras, not to mention positions at the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, and of course her current roles at the head of the Baltimore and São Paulo State Symphony orchestras, but apparently none of that is as important as the fact that she’s a woman.Taking up the baton as the first female conductor of the Last Night of the Proms, Alsop is once again in the spotlight for the gender-discussions that Read more ...

Could you choose between love and knowledge? Between a life of acceptance and affection, and one of self-improvement and learning? These are the questions that Jessica Swale's new play Blue Stockings poses again and again.For the women who provided the inspiration for this play – the students of Girton College, living on the cusp of the twentieth century – this is not a hypothetical question. To choose to study at Cambridge is, for them, to choose the life of an outcast over the possibility of marriage and a family. In 1896, when the action takes place, a campaign is underway to attempt to Read more ...

If the past week or so has proven anything, it’s that feminism in 2013 has lost none of its power to inspire, anger and enthrall. Given the nature of the abuse meted out to those who raise their voices above the chorus, for Alan Bissett to turn his own feminist awakening into an hour-long show is brave, foolish or some combination of the two. But it’s not as if the author and playwright wasn’t prepared: long before Ban This Filth! was ready for an audience its central thread faced the toughest audience of all - Twitter.Part autobiography, part women’s studies class, Ban This Filth! is an Read more ...

In the independent cinema world, the question of where exactly a director hopes to find his or her audience never goes away. On home ground? Around the international festival circuit? Or in a lucky combination of the two, when a film resounds both locally and beyond its native land? It was always going to be a tricky issue for Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadjda, the first full-length feature to come out of Saudi Arabia, where cinemas simply do not exist – they are banned. And the fact that it's a woman director who has set the Saudi film industry in motion challenges further our expectations of Read more ...

Jane Campion's much-anticipated series is set amid hauntingly beautiful scenery on New Zealand's South Island, which in its remoteness seems to shake its head gently at the antics of the sparse human population. The people themselves are like a tribe that time forgot, living in a wilderness-bubble governed by the kind of attitudes you'd expect to find in some dust-devilled outpost of the Old West in about 1800.If they weren't born there, they've come to escape. Thus, in an early sequence, a cluster of containers was delivered to a lakeside piece of land called (either ironically or not) Read more ...

Some plays have such historic significance that it is surprising that they are not revived more often. I blame the obsession with novelty that characterises our culture. So it’s great to see this venue, under its ever-enterprising supremo Neil McPherson, stepping up to the plate and offering us the late Pam Gems’s 1976 feminist classic, Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, a play that is more often found hidden in the history books than out in the open on stage.This is a flatshare drama, and it’s very much a character piece. We are in the London apartment of Fish, an upper-crust femintern activist who is Read more ...

It is unfortunate that those who hate Deap Vally find it way easier to articulate why than those who love them. There’s little new in the bluesy, garage-rock riffs that pose and swagger their way through debut album Sistronix, and it’s not as if - on the evidence of the hidden a cappella track that closes off the album - they have the greatest voices. Even the two-piece, guitar and drums setup has been done before, with the White Stripes so obvious a reference point it would be negligent not to mention it.But it is its very simplicity that makes the Californian duo’s music so direct and so Read more ...

Staged in 1931, The Man Who Pays the Piper appealed to women who had gone to work (and become the master of the house) while men were fighting in the First World War, but were subjugated once they returned. The protagonist, Daryll, starts work during this time and gets hooked on the money, the independence and the buzz of her job at a fashion house. She enjoys being able to keep her siblings and kindly but inept mother in luxury. But when her father is killed, she realises she could be funding her family indefinitely. This is not what she wants.The strength of GB Stern's rarely seen play lies Read more ...