LGBT+
Ismene Brown
Apocrypha is a word that has acquired a dubious meaning, for books of questioned value and authenticity, texts in various religions that may not necessarily be held divine. The Belgian-Moroccan dancemaker Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's dance work Apocrifu applies the word and its queries to the holiest of texts themselves, the Koran, Bible, Kojiki, in a secular era where religion is more about politics than faith. This might sound dubious material for a remarkable evening when you were choosing dance shows to see at the Brighton Festival - the transvestite cabaret probably sounded a better bet. Wrong Read more ...
ronald.bergan
When Sergei Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin was first shown in Moscow in December 1925, just in time to commemorate the 1905 Revolution, the film played to half-empty theatres, because audiences, then as now, preferred the products from Hollywood. Box-office figures were exaggerated by the authorities to demonstrate to the rest of the world that there was a large Soviet audience for Soviet films.The Battleship Potemkin's depiction of a (partially) successful rebellion against political authority disturbed the world's censors. The French, banning it for general showing, burned every Read more ...
fisun.guner
It’s been 17 years since apartheid came to an end in South Africa, and the transition to democracy has not been an easy one, for while political systems may change, social attitudes may prove yet more difficult to shift. The Victoria and Albert Museum brings together 17 South African photographers whose work responds to the cultural and social changes their country has undergone. This major survey looks at photography from the last decade: exploring issues of identity across race, gender, class and politics, it provides a vivid snapshot of what it means to be a South African today.For her Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Does the perfect murder make for the perfect musical? One doesn't have to make undue claims for the work's chamber-size appeal to warm to Thrill Me, the American two-hander that has arrived at the Tristan Bates Theatre as this season's entry in retelling the story of the Chicago killers, Leopold and Loeb. (Last season's was the superb Almeida Theatre revival of Rope, from director Roger Michell.) While getting up close and personal with a show can sometimes magnify its flaws, the intimacy on this occasion allows a real appreciation of the performers, especially newcomer George Maguire, of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The secrets and lies, delusions and foibles of a group of thirty-, forty- and fiftysomething friends are laid bare in French director Guillaume Canet’s third feature, following his breakthrough international hit Tell No One (2006). This alternately genial and scathing comic drama explores the dynamics of friendship and the fragility of romantic relations. It’s a story fuelled by the friction and frissons between companions, who come together in the aftermath of a tragic accident, and take off on a misguided getaway which becomes a fortnight of reverie and recriminations.Little White Lies is a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Les Grands Ballets Classiques de Stoke Poges are a company waiting to happen for most of us, but for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo a bitter rivalry must be endured - one of their ballerinas didn’t show up last night in High Wycombe, due to winging on a last-minute errand of mercy to the Stoke Poges mob. Fortunately Ida Nevaseyneva was available to totter in with her eternally moulting Dying Swan - and all suddenly became right with the world. The Trocks are an errand of mercy, to anyone who loves old ballet, anyone who loves smart comedy.This all-male US ballet company started Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Scotland certainly loves its comedy. In addition to the month-long bliss that is the Edinburgh Fringe, just along the M8 Glasgow has been providing its own few weeks of fun since 2003. Their comedy festival has a very different feel to it - less of a comics’ gathering (they do one-nighters rather than residencies) and more of a busy schedule - but it’s all very enjoyable even so. Last night I saw local boy Scott Agnew, a 6ft 5in gay Glaswegian - not a phrase I have the opportunity to write very often.Agnew was Scottish Comedian of the Year in 2008 and has been in the business for a few years Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hailed by swarms of critics for its wit, warmth, compassion and daring challenge to conventional notions of gender and matrimony, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right strikes your correspondent as an exhaustingly solipsistic exercise in Californian smugness. The supposedly bold notion of casting two senior Hollywood dames - Annette Bening and Julianne Moore - as lesbian couple Nic and Jules does raise an eyebrow when Moore supposedly pleasures Bening under the bedclothes with a vibrator, while male gay porn plays on the TV.Yet otherwise, Nic'n'Jules's relationships with each other and Read more ...
josh.spero
Is there a televisual instruction manual for Nazi-era dramas? Cabaret singers with heavily kohled eyes, champagne from unmatched glasses in a shabby-chic apartment, smoke-filled gay bars in cellars with muscled trade, Stormtroopers marching in lockstep and Nazi banners unfurling from windows would all be on it. If there is, Christopher and His Kind last night was following it - but then it also wrote it.Christopher Isherwood is responsible as much as anyone for our perceptions of the period, but after decades of cinematic and theatrical adornments and encounters in this mode, a production of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who needs America for the American theatre? Barely six weeks into this year, and already we've had the bracing and bilious Becky Shaw, the West End transfer of Bruce Norris's perpetually award-scooping Clybourne Park and Woody Guthrie taking up residence at the Arts Theatre courtesy of Woody Sez. What's been lacking has been the sort of defining revival on the order of last season's All My Sons that shakes down an extant text, inducing in sometimes unruly West End audiences a wondrous hush. Well, the wait is over: The Children's Hour has reached town anew in a production so powerful that Read more ...
David Nice
Have you ever found onstage nudity sexy? Unlike a friend of mine, for whom the epiphany of the National Theatre's Bent was the giant member in the first five minutes, I honestly haven't. Sensuous, once, in the Maly Theatre's skinny-dipping Platonov, and even sweet, in ATS Theatre's strong adaptation of Forster's Maurice. Since the theatre's Artistic Director Peter Bull, evidently a good guy, was staging this, Jack Heifner's all-male updating of Schnitzler's La Ronde, I'd hoped that some good things would come of it. Unfortunately, for me at any rate, Seduction was neither erotic, very funny Read more ...
josh.spero
The first thing to make clear is that Robert Mapplethorpe, notorious for his photograph of himself with a bullwhip up his arse, is not really a photographer: he is a sculptor who works in the medium of photography. What else can explain the marble and ebony of his chiselled subjects, or the fact that most of the works selected for this show as responses to Mapplethorpe are sculptures?The Derrick Cross series is a perfect example. A nude, athletic black model looks like he has been hacked out of marble and then smoothed to a sheen by a loving creator, and the simple, still setting Read more ...