feminism
carole.woddis
It’s like waiting for a number 19 bus. You hang around for half an hour then two come along at once. So it is just now with plays either written by women or featuring women’s lives. While Amelia Bullimore’s sparky three-hander Di and Viv and Rose is storming audiences in Hampstead, Mehmet Ergen, the dynamic Turkish-born founder of both Southwark Playhouse and the Arcola, is continuing to make waves in unfashionable Hackney and Dalston.Directed by Ergen and written by Leyla Nazli, Mare Rider offers up a hallucinatory and disturbingly revisionist feminist fable for our time. The title character Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
To the first-time listener of Martha Tilston’s work, the “folk” tag seems like a tremendous over-simplification. Right from its opening track, “Stags Bellow”, the songwriter experiments with novel percussion and call-and-response choruses to create complex compositions that demand to be gotten lost in.These compositions do, however, blend the more traditional percussive and string sounds associated with the genre with some of its central concerns; both personal and political. And Tilston certainly has the pedigree: her father, Steve Tilston, ran a folk club with Bert Jansch and has released a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
While it’s not unusual for an imported television show to have been downloaded, discussed and dissected at length long in advance of of its UK transmission date, HBO’s Girls is even harder than most to approach with an open mind. Depending on which publications you read, you may already be aware that the show is many things: racist, classist, realistic, unrealistic, hilarious, overrated, written by one of the best and brightest young female writers, written by an overprivileged egomaniac. The show won an Emmy this year for outstanding casting for a comedy series (and was nominated for several Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Even now, as revelation after revelation about what really went on backstage at Television Centre in the 1970s play out in the tabloids, there seems something almost wholesome about the heyday of the televised beauty pageant. Compared to the daily barrage of heavily sexualised images we are bombarded with from the moment we wake as consumers of contemporary culture - bare arses before the watershed, fake orgasms selling shampoo, Kate Middleton’s tits on the evening news - the swimsuits the contenders paraded up and down in looked positively demure.Beneath the surface, however, there’s Read more ...
Laura Silverman
When Hindle Wakes opened in 1912 in London, the script was burned in the street. Stanley Houghton, a member of the Manchester School of playwrights, had exposed one of society's double standards: that it was fine for a man to have a guiltless fling before marriage, but it was not acceptable for a woman. The problem with Bethan Dear's earnest revival is that the play no longer holds the same moral force. Today, the idea that Fanny Hawthorn, a mill girl, goes away for the weekend with Alan Jeffcote, the mill owner's son, and then refuses to marry him is hardly shocking.Solidly constructed, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” It is a truth less universally acknowledged that a married woman in possession of a rich Victorian husband must be in want of a vibrator.Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Richard Curtis walk into Ann Summers… It’s not the setup for a joke but it is essentially the starting point for Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria – a film the director herself has dubbed “the vibrator movie you can take your mum to”. Wexler gamely takes on the true story of this Victorian medical innovation, folding Read more ...
Susannah Clapp
Eighteen months before her death from lung cancer at the age of 51, Angela Carter talked to Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour. She had just edited The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990), a rich stew of stories – Eskimo, Swahili, Armenian – which she had grouped in provocative sections: "Brave, Bold and Wilful"; "Good Girls and Where it Gets Them". She talked about the difference between the work undertaken by "chaps" – the novel and the epic – and the kind of stories often referred to as "old wives’ tales". She suggested it was time for the power of female heroines to be not just reclaimed but Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the collaboration between Jane Arden and Jack Bond was truly two-way, their films were wholly driven by a female perspective. They also evolved from Arden’s explorations into the nature of self and how external forces affect that. Yet instead of being a form of therapy, the Arden-Bond films are magical journeys blurring the boundary between the real and unreal.Separation (1967) has some mod-ish trappings: music by Procul Harum, visuals from light-show artist Mark Boyle and clothing from Ossie Clark. The character Jane (Arden herself) drifts through a world where she interacts with a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
GAGGLE (n.): According to the Oxford Dictionary the collective noun for a flock of geese - or, less formally, a disorderly group of people - actually finds its root in the noise that a goose makes. It’s a fact that raises a smile as one attempts to create a back story for Deborah Coughlin’s 21-member all-female choir, as they stare out from the mysterious, brightly-coloured promotional shots with black eyes and tightly-set, blue-painted lips.The bird references carry over to From the Mouth of the Cave; whether in the form of titles, sound effects or a perfectly-choreographed cacophony Read more ...
howard.male
It’s hard to think of any other records as exuberantly hedonistic as the handful of singles this London band rattled off at the beginning of the 1980s. Yes, they were accompanied by the then necessary punk sneer which said, This is all strictly ironic. But the music couldn’t lie. The music really did want you to go wild in the country, even if naughty Annabella Lwin just wanted to sneak off for a fag. Or was naughty Annabella just an illusion too? The 40something Lwin who skipped and twirled onto the Islington Academy stage last night certainly had as much energy as the 14- to 18-year-old Read more ...
emma.simmonds
If you’re game for a galling statistic, here’s one that’s guaranteed to stun: at present, only 14 per cent of British films released in the UK are directed by women. If that seems oddly as well as infuriatingly low, it’s probably because so many of the brightest and boldest British film-makers of recent years, from Lynne Ramsay to Lucy Walker, are women – women who it seems are exceptions as well as being exceptional. These towering talents, it could be said, give the impression that opportunities for women behind the camera are at a high, rather than being persistently paltry. And so it’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Those of a certain age have certain memories (very certain) of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, wife of the Bionic Man and not exactly unbionic herself, especially in that poster of her in the red one-piece with Seventies enormohair and fluorescent American Dream gnashers. There were a couple of others in Charlie’s Angels. One forgets their names, and indeed faces. (Feel free, scholars of the era, to write in on this.) It was revolutionary at the time: girls had been high-heeling men in the schnoz since The Avengers, but only one lady at a time. Now three bra-burners, Aaron Spelling’s fantasy answer to Read more ...