The best playwrights create word magic – and when that happens, you can’t miss it. Other writers produce journalism, or teaching materials. Sadly, for me, Christine Bacon is one of the latter, and her latest 90-minute play, A Fine Idea at the Arcola studio, is a didactic account of 80 years of international aid. Inspired by Jason Hickel’s 2017 book about global inequality, The Divide, her play is a passionately felt critique of international development which questions whether us liberals really want to change the world – or are we just more comfortable with the idea, a fine one, of helping Read more ...

In his fascinating but overlong and sometimes unfocussed ‘political life’ of James Joyce – the biographer himself died in 2021 so was perhaps unable to make the necessary cuts to a 909-page text – Frank Callanan gives us a portrait of the artist as a young socialist who became disillusioned with socialism once he left Ireland in 1904 for exile.It’s an interesting revisionist view because scholarship has often tended to promote a depoliticised reading of Joyce’s work in order to burnish the novelist’s credentials as a god of 20th-century literary modernism, transcending politics in much the Read more ...

Can you remember what you were doing on 23 June 2016? You might well have been out to cast your vote in the EU referendum, which has thrown its interminable shadow over our benighted country ever since.Or maybe you just stayed in bed, which wouldn’t have been a bad choice because after all the shouting, campaigning, anger and bitterness, nobody got what they wanted. Remainers failed to remain, and Brexiteers didn’t get anything they considered worthy of the name “Brexit”. President Obama had theatrically flown in to warn us to remain or else, but he must have been disappointed when nobody Read more ...

As a catchline for a tour, “40 years of arsing about in comedy” is a grabber. That’s how Harry Enfield describes Harry Enfield and No Chums!, and it certainly shows that he is still, well, arsing about to great effect as he casts an eye over his life and careerThe show is a collection of anecdotes about his life and some of the characters he has voiced in television programmes such as Spitting Image, or created for shows such as Saturday Live and Harry Enfield & Chums.He comes on stage as King Charles, whom he has spoofed in The Windsors. The references to cancer are unexpected, but then Read more ...

In director Paolo Sorrentino’s new film La Grazia, Tony Servillo portrays a fictitious Italian president, the ageing Mariano De Santis, who – in the last six months of his successful seven-year term – must grapples with two moral dilemmas. De Santis must decide whether to sign into law a bill legalizing euthanasia, certain to end his friendship with the Pope, and whether to pardon two prisoners who killed their partners. He is meanwhile haunted by the knowledge that his late wife, for whom he grieves, was unfaithful.Grazia (the word means "grace" and "pardon" in Italian) is the seventh Read more ...

“Your term is about to end,” Italian president De Santis (Toni Servillo) is told, with implications which extend far past politics. Director Paolo Sorrentino is second only to old maestro Marco Bellocchio in his current fascination with Italian power, from The Young Pope (2016) to Berlusconi satire Loro (2018). His muse Servillo’s bunga-bunga act in the latter contrasted with his gnomic reserve as post-war Machiavelli Guilio Andreotti in Il Divo (2009) and now this fictional sphinx, lizard-still even as damped passions threaten to finally erupt. His last half-year as head of state may anyway Read more ...

Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want. Er… another nostalgic play about growing up in a Yorkshire post-industrial city?Hard on the heels of John Godber’s Leeds-set Do I Love You? running last week at Wilton’s and Kat Rose Martin’s marvellous Bradford-set £1 Thursdays at the Finborough (my best new play of 2023), we take a 30-mile trip south to Doncaster (Donny to friends) for Children of the Night. Is it something in the air? Besides the coal dust of course. Image If those earlier productions traded primarily on the Read more ...

American photographer Catherine Opie took her first self-portrait at the age of nine with a Kodak instamatic she’d been given for her birthday. There she stands in the garden, a little toughie flexing her biceps like a muscle man.And there she is again, twenty four years later. This time she presents herself as Bo (pictured below right), a persona developed among her queer friends in California. Her stance – chest square on, feet apart and thumbs in pockets – makes her look like an off-duty cop, an idea enhanced by what could be a baton dangling from her belt. She looks to camera with a Read more ...

As a disillusioned ex-admirer – like so many – it’s with a degree of dread that I approach Morrissey’s 14th solo album (the first for six years) not least because of the positively Kafkaesque struggle to actually hear it. But an open mind is necessary.What if there were no axe to grind? What if the hopeless search for love had been answered? What if there were no conspiracy theories? Why, then, there would be no new album (and – let’s face it – we’re all thigh-high in conspiracy theories right now). So we must buckle up and hear what the once-great man has to opine. The hilarious album Read more ...

In his illustrious career, director Michael Waldman has profiled all manner of divas, from Elizabeth Taylor and Lord Byron to Karl Lagerfeld and Christian Louboutin. So why not Tony Blair?His three-part series traces Blair’s story from his schooldays at Fettes College in Edinburgh to the present day, although perhaps not all points in between, with a string of contributors (alongside plenty of Blair himself) including Jack Straw, Clare Short, former Labour supporter Robert Harris, David Miliband, Harriet Harman, Jonathan Powell and more. Peter Mandelson delivers some typically slippery Read more ...

Would you want to marry a spy? After watching Betrayal, probably not.Writer David Eldridge has used the paradigm of the secret world as a means of exploring relationships both personal and professional, and how one is liable to corrode and distort the other. A quote from the 13th Century Persian poet Rumi is dropped in as a clue – “the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces.”The Persian link is apposite, since the story orbits around an Iranian plot to stage a terrorist outrage somewhere in the Manchester area. Our somewhat flawed protagonist is MI5 agent John Read more ...

Such is the USA administration’s overwhelming saturation of the news cycle that, even with the comforting presence of an ocean between, it’s hard not to find Talking Heads’ unforgettable lyric relentlessly buzzing through your brain on repeat – “And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?”. It is the mission of The American Vicarious theatre company to “... create art that challenges us to confront the gap between America’s ideals and its lived realities”. Guys, there’s never been a better time.Almost three years on from their electrifying Debate: Baldwin vs Buckley recreated Read more ...