politics
James Dowsett
Readers of Left Out may be surprised to find out how much of party politics is conducted over WhatsApp. The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn had an encrypted chat for every occasion – whether it was to smear a colleague, to slime the “scumbag” press, or (as was the case with two rogue party staffers) to plot the demise of the “Project” from the inside. In their new book, The Times’ Patrick Maguire and Sunday Times’ Gabriel Pogrund exploit their access to dozens of party insiders and a myriad of leaks in order to tell the story of the Labour Party from “Glastonbury to catastrophe.”An 860-page Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
One of the most evocative tracks on James Dean Bradfield’s second solo album is hardly his at all. The Manic Street Preacher takes “La Partida”, a haunting, finger-picked melody by the Chilean musician Victor Jara, and blows it up to the size of an arena, its central refrain echoed back by a stadium’s worth of voices. As a tribute to Jara who, with thousands of his countrymen, was tortured and shot by General Pinochet’s troops in the stadium which now bears his name, it’s both apt, and breathtaking.Fans of the Manic Street Preachers are quick to list the art, music and literature they have Read more ...
David Nice
Things fell apart; the Centre Right could not hold. Anne Applebaum knows it from the inside. A Reaganite with whom I imagine a civilized conversation would have been possible even in former times married to a Polish politician, now MEP, Radek Sikorski, whose many good deeds speak louder than his views, Applebaum has produced a concise, lucid and very readable summary of how it all went wrong. She reminds us of key happenings in the unhappy chronology while summoning up a range of figures on the scene, now so-called populists and including erstwhile friends, to root it all in the specific.The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
We're easing out of lockdown, haircuts are being had, and the theatre continually shape-shifts to accommodate these changing times. All credit to the 14 writers who have conjoined forces in urgency and haste to create 846, a collection of audio plays responding to the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. National Theatre at Home goes out on a real high with its transformative production of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, with Lucian Msamati inheriting a role previously played by Ian McKellen on Broadway and F Murray Abraham onscreen. And the time is always right to hear Audra Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the midst of our increasingly confrontational politics of race and gender, it was a timely move to make this series (on BBC Two) about Seventies radical feminism and the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the USA, even if some of the minutiae are liable to sound abstract or alien to British viewers. Cate Blanchett storms brilliantly to the fore as Phyllis Schlafly, a proud Republican housewife and champion of traditional family values, and staunch opponent of the Amendment.Schlafly is that bewildering paradox, a conservative revolutionary, which apparently is what lured Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights was meant to hit cinemas this summer, but, in response to Covid-19, has been put back to 2021. Instead, we get the early release on Disney+ of Miranda’s Hamilton – filmed, NT Live style, with the original Broadway cast at three performances in June 2016, and now available to a wide audience for the first time. Who could say no to this? Stage director Thomas Kail also helms the film, and the result is an exhilarating, immersive experience of this dynamic musical about America’s forgotten Founding Father, who travels from Read more ...
On the Record review - #MeToo turns its lens to the music industry, gives the mic to women of colour
Jill Chuah Masters
On the Record, the latest documentary from Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (acclaimed directors of The Hunting Ground), dives into the sexual misconduct allegations against music mogul Russell Simmons, the so-called ‘Godfather of Hip Hop.’ It centres on interviews with Drew Dixon (pictured below), who — as a twentysomething music executive — launched Whitney Houston hits and scouted a young Kanye West. She left the industry after Simmons allegedly raped her.This is an elegant, stinging addition to the #MeToo dialogue, which gives due emphasis to black women and the music industry — a Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Why don’t you have children? Why aren’t you married? Why don’t you own your own home? Why are you a failure? These are the societally enforced questions that, as a 34-year-old woman, Nadine Shah finds inescapable. Much like the rest of us. When talking to friends who also considered themselves “non-achievers”, she realised something was very wrong. And that nothing much has changed in what used to be termed “the battle of the sexes” (hence the Abigail’s Party style artwork). Having covered the refugee crisis, suicide and the state of the nation, now sexual inequality comes under her Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
There is a line of argument that – unfairly – blames playwright James Graham for Dominic Cummings. Would Cummings, some might ask, have achieved the influence he has now if it hadn’t been for his depiction in Graham’s brilliant TV drama Brexit: The Uncivil War in which he was played as an obsessive genius by Benedict Cumberbatch? The question’s unfair not least because Graham himself is horrified by the phenomenon of Cummings-driven politics and all it represents. A more interesting question is how a then 36-year-old had the insight to identify the impact and ascendancy of a Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Like an asp eating its own tail, the National Theatre's 2018 production of Antony and Cleopatra, streaming on YouTube until 14 May, begins as it will end. Director Simon Godwin's first tableau is the play's finale: Cleopatra (Sophie Okonedo) lies in queenly repose, a snakebite on her neck; her servants, Charmian (Gloria Obianyo) and Iras (Georgia Landers), slump around her. How did this triple suicide come to pass, ask thwarted Caesar (Tunji Kasim) and Agrippa (Katy Stephens), before answering their own question: behold, and see.It's a neat trick for Godwin, a National semi-regular since 2013 Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Drew Daniel is never short of concepts, invention or mischief. As one half of Matmos, with his life partner M.C. Schmidt, he has made some 10 official albums and many more collaborative ones – all pushing the boundaries of electronic bricolage and sound processing in the pursuit of extremely complex ideas about American history, plastic surgery, philosophy, queer identity and all that kind of stuff. Occasionally, as Soft Pink Truth, he has made more overtly dance records, but even these are heavily loaded with twisted intellect, including as they do an album of anarcho-punk covers and one of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
London’s Hampstead Theatre has recently been very successful in bringing some of its best shows to a wider public – despite coronavirus. This week, it’s the turn of Howard Brenton’s #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei, which was first staged at this venue in April 2013, and in the intervening years it has gained in resonance and relevance. Because of COVID-19, the ideology and mentality of the Chinese government has become once again deserving of keen scrutiny. So what exactly happened to this fêted Chinese contemporary conceptual artist when he fell foul of his country’s regime?On 3 April 2011, Read more ...