politics
Joe Muggs
One of the great untold stories of the past decade is just how potent a cultural force R&B has been. It might not have had the wild musical innovation it did in the 2000s when the likes of Neptunes, Missy Elliot, Timbaland and Rodney Jerkins reigned supreme as producers – but through the 2010s and ‘20s, it has established a whole set of performers who are able to exhibit extreme range in subject matter, style and seriousness, held together with force of artistic personality.Post-Lemonade Beyoncé tends to absorb the majority of critical attention, but Kehlani, Jhene Aiko, Tinashe, SZA, H.E Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The safe transfer of power in post-war Western democracies was once a given. The homely Pickfords Removals van outside Number Ten, a crestfallen now ex-PM and family mooching about, for once trying not to be on camera, it's a tabloid front page cliché. Or the pomp and circumstance on Capitol Hill, cold, crowded and celebratory, a rebuke to the slab-faced gerontocracy, back yet again to survey Moscow’s Red Square parade.Shakespeare knew that such displays concealed dramas both political and personal and poured that knowledge (and a whole lot more) into Hamlet, state and court disintegrating Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There was a time when the only daytime TV (ex-weekends and ex-Wimbledon fortnight) comprised the annual party conferences and the Trade Union Congress. A seemingly endless parade of indistinguishable middle-aged balding white men, with Barbara Castle’s fiery redhead and Margaret Thatcher’s immovable blonde hairdo the only relief, would grab 15 minutes of fame speechifying on the minutiae of policy, some puffing on pipes, some on full-strength Capstans. It was parochial, boring and almost always of no consequence a week or so later, but I rather miss those days… If you do (and even if you don’ Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The reporting of Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building in 2006 – on Vladimir Putin’s birthday, a deranged gift from his loyal security services – is perhaps the nearest thing we have to a full diagnosis of the horrifying corruption and brutality of Russia under his governance.Some of the events depicted in Words of War happened over a quarter of century ago when, as Yeltsin’s Prime Minister, Putin started a war in Chechnya on the same false pretext of anti-terrrorism that now masks his real intentions in Ukraine. However, as Politkovskaya, who Read more ...
Gary Naylor
“Don’t put your co-artistic director on the stage, Mrs Harvey,” as Noel Coward once (almost) sang. Tamara Harvey took no heed and Edward II sees her RSC compadre, Daniel Evans (pictured below, kneeling centre), back on stage after 14 years and in the title role to boot. In Daniel Raggett’s stripped back, helter-skelter, 100 minutes version of Christopher Marlowe’s sex, power and violence fest, Evans has certainly jumped in at the deep end (literally so at one point, which you won’t miss!). The noblemen of England disapprove of the king’s flamboyant "friend", Gaveston (Eloka Ivo, blessed Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Matt Forde gives a warning: “Don’t heckle the disabled – that’s a hate crime.” What an opener for his latest touring show, The End of an Era, which I saw at the Oxford Glee Club. To explain: in 2023 the back pain that Forde thought was sciatica turned out to be spinal cancer. Major surgery that included severing nerves in his nether regions followed, and post-surgery he now uses a stoma bag and self-catheterises. Thankfully Forde has recovered.He mines a slew of jokes here – mostly at the expense of his dignity – and the natural born comic looks on the bright side, as the very good poo Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The railways that we built in India may be well known, but I bet you’ve never heard of the Customs Line, a hedge that stretched 2,500 miles across the subcontinent all the way from the River Indus to the border between Madras and Bengal – the distance between London and Istanbul. Comparable in scale to the great Wall of China, this 40-foot high barrier was created to prevent the smuggling of salt.Before the advent of refrigeration, salt played a crucial role in preserving food. Taxing a substance so essential for survival was a sure way of getting rich and the British East India Company was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems that esteemed former US President George Mullen is subsiding gently into retirement on his luxurious country estate, with a publishing contract for his memoirs if he can ever manage to knuckle down and write them, when fate throws a curve-ball.Without warning, the USA suffers a total blackout of power, communications and computer systems. The resulting chaos in air, road and rail transport, not to mention medical facilities, causes thousands of casualties, and nobody has a clue how it happened.This blackout only lasted a mere 60 seconds, but the perpetrators have sent out ominous Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The date, projected behind the stage before a word is spoken, is a clue - 14th April 1912. “Why so specific?” was my first thought. My second was, “Ah, yes”.Sure enough, Akhila Krishnan’s video and Adam Cork’s sound floats us on a sea of troubles, as Denmark’s ship of state is battered by storms, literal and metaphorical, in a roiling Atlantic. After a fortnight in which that ocean has never looked wider nor choppier, a three hour examination of how a psychologically unstable man could eviscerate a polity seemed both timely and scarily portentous. But that, 425 years on, is why the play Read more ...
India Lewis
As Valentine’s Day crests around us, and lonely hearts come out of their winter hibernation, what better time to publish writer and journalist Shon Faye’s second book Love in Exile? In part an examination of her own life, loves, and loss, Faye is exacting and passionate in her dissection of how we, as a society, understand the state of love: an unwieldy term that hides many painful mysterious, and which, too often, is subject to our unquestioning reverence.While Love in Exile takes love as its overarching theme, it is structured more as a series of interlinking essays. These essays routinely Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In his first weeks in office, Harrison Ford’s US president survives an assassination attempt inside the White House, goes to war with Japan and mutates into Red Hulk when he gets mad, trashing said White House with a Stars and Stripes flag-holder. How unrealistically reasonable this looks, you may wistfully think. If only Ford, or a 10-foot monster, was in charge.Captain America has often been a political figure, sharing his comic’s title with black superhero the Falcon in the Seventies while uneasily confronting black civil unrest and Vietnam, the simply patriotic World War Two hero bearing Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is now an Oscar-nominated refugee, in a bittersweet harvest for his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.The 52-year-old has previously probed the moral cost of his country’s dictatorship in Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013), A Man of Integrity (2017) and There Is No Evil (2020), work where characters suffer and snap, or refuse to participate in repression at great cost. Routinely banned at home, work right up to Sacred Fig was shot in secret, brave guerilla cinema now necessarily common in Iran.Faced with eight years’ jail, flogging and seizure of property for Read more ...