politics
Thomas H. Green
Taking place at the Theatre Royal, Andy Hamilton’s show is entitled An Evening with… rather than a straight stand-up and mainly consists of the comedy writer/performer and gameshow regular answering audience questions. During the first half this is done via raising a hand and shouting out questions; during the second half by leaving pieces of paper on the stage front during the interval. This isn’t, then, a riotous evening of laughs but more a gentle one of easy Sunday night chuckles, with Hamilton as much a raconteur as a comedian.The stage-set is simple, a mic, a table and a chair. Hamilton Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Benedikt Erlingsson (b.1969) was already an established theatre director and actor in Iceland when he directed his debut film, Of Horses And Men, an uncategorisable blend of humour, romance and horror, set away from Reykjavik amongst stubbornly individual, isolated farmers. Its indelible first scene, when a proud horse-breeder parades his prize steed to his neighbours, only for another horny horse to leap a fence for a shag with the mortified owner still on board, making him then shoot his horse in the head, shows Erlingsson’s talent for tackling radical shifts in tone with dry nonchalance. Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
What is it about Nordic women and the environment? Hot on the heels of the London visit by Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg – the most inspiring climate change campaigner since Al Gore – comes this timely, singular, enormously enjoyable comedy-drama from Iceland, whose heroine is another no-nonsense Nordic eco-warrior, albeit one with a very different modus operandi than young Greta. Halla (Halldóra Geirharosdóttir) is a middle-aged choir conductor, with a double life as an environmental activist whose exploits win her the moniker, ‘the mountain woman’. We first see her Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Mediterranean’s massacres of the refugee innocent come uncomfortably close to a lone female sailor in this stark parable of European helplessness and indifference.When German doctor Rike (Susanne Wolff) casts off from Gibraltar, the ocean’s vastness seems a challenging backdrop for a testing voyage. For a while in Wolfgang Fischer’s austerely beautiful film, she is silent and peacefully alone, relishing her freedom. When a storm rolls in, and her ship repeatedly slips into the trench between waves with her at the helm, Robert Redford’s lonely stoicism as the sailor of a sinking ship in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mark Thomas issues a health warning for Check-Up: Our NHS at 70 at Battersea Arts Centre – “This show contains swearing, a video of an operation on a stomach and a description of being in A&E when a patient dies.” Indeed it does, but it also contains a heartfelt love letter to the health service Thomas was born in and, as a lifelong socialist, hopes to die in. But as he points to creeping commercialisation, what are the chances of that being so?The show, a highly entertaining 75 minutes, is based on a series of interviews that Thomas conducted with leading experts in Read more ...
David Nice
"Them" - the "loro" of the title (with a further play on “l’oro”, gold) - denotes the mostly sleazy opportunists willing to use and be used by "him" ("lui"), "Presidente" Silvio Berlusconi in his septuagenarian bid for an extended sexual and political life. "Us," it's implied, are the crowd and the workers present at the salvaging of a Christ statue from the ruins of the earthquake in L'Aquila at the very end of the film, an image that especially stuns in the light of the Notre Dame fire. Paolo Sorrentino is too magisterially fluid a filmmaker to suggest anything as pat as a moral comeuppance Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Brighton Festival begins in May. Since 2014 theartsdesk has had a media partnership with this lively, multi-faceted event which takes place over three weeks. This year the Guest Director is the Malian musician Rokia Traoré, who inhabits a position previously filled by cultural figures such as Brian Eno, David Shrigley, Kate Tempest, Anish Kapoor and Vanessa Redgrave.Overseeing the whole event every year since 2008, however, is Brighton Festival CEO Andrew Comben. A singer and horn player in a previous life, the 45-year-old Comben is now a full-time driving force within the festival Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Let me be clear. The agonising process of the UK’s departure, or not, from the EU will be an infinite field of academic study over the decades to come. Road to Brexit (BBC Two) will not be a valuable source of research material, because it was a farrago of misinformation and fantasy, but it least it delivered a reasonable percentage of cheap belly laughs.It was a vehicle for Matt Toast of London Berry, appearing here as the imaginary historian Michael Squeamish. Slobbish, bearded and long-haired, Squeamish exuded a bellicose air of entirely unjustified certainty as he rode roughshod over 60- Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Birmingham’s reggae veterans UB40 are a band who have often worn their politics on their sleeves, and the title of their new album is taken from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party mantra. The parallels between the two have already been noted, of course. After a turbulent time, a split saw a new man thrust into the spotlight while divisions raged and claims were made over who had the rights to the soul of a British institution. Sound familiar? In fairness to Duncan Campbell, brother of former singer Ali, he seems to have adapted to his role rather better than the current Labour leader (fair Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Great libraries burning, historians murdered: someone somewhere is removing the past by obliterating the ways the world remembers. Erasing the histories of slavery and the Holocaust, of blacks and Jews, is just the beginning. The premise of Sam Bourne’s thrilling novel is the existence of a conspiracy to annihilate all the evidence of historic atrocities through the millennia. Books, of course, must go, and in a neat twist even the biggest book distribution centres, Amazon included, are targeted. Bourne’s great gift is to take reality and give it a good shove, a what if? that we are persuaded Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s always interesting to see how presenters make their presence known in documentaries. Louis Theroux hovers on the sidelines like an ethereal presence, Stacey Dooley connects immediately on an emotional level, and one-time host Keith Allen handled proceedings like a fight before a Millwall game. Alice Levine wasn’t the most obvious choice to tackle the rise of the far right; she’s best known for her work on Radio 1 and comedy podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno. In her first foray into TV journalism, there was some promising headway but her inexperience ultimately shone through.Levine is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Just when you think you may have heard (and seen) enough of Donald J Trump to last a lifetime, along comes Anne Washburn's ceaselessly smart and tantalising Shipwreck to focus renewed attention on the psychic fallout left by 45. How did we get here from there? Washburn certainly brushes up against the topic that animated a recent, similarly Trump-inflected play, Sweat. But Washburn's purposefully baggy, shape-shifting play resists categorisation at every turn: equal measures history play, polemic, and generational saga, Shipwreck confounds expectation and may at times confound an Read more ...