politics
aleks.sierz
Whatever you might think about Brexit, the dreaded B word, the current climate certainly seems to be reinvigorating both feminist playwrights and political playwrights. So welcome back, David Hare, the go-to dramatist for any artistic director wanting to stage a contemporary state-of-the-nation play. His latest, with the rather downbeat title of I'm Not Running, opened at the National Theatre, but it may be a disappointment to anyone looking for answers to burning current questions because it is more concerned with an imaginary female contender for the Labour leadership than with Brexit, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Humdinger! This is a totally brilliant idea for an amazing anthology, although the subtitle “Letters that Changed the World” is slightly misleading. All or any of these letters might substantially or subtly change your view of grandees of all sorts – emperors, tsars and tsarinas, kings, queens, presidents, generals, admirals, dictators, politicians, authors, artists – as well as the ordinary folk who have written them, but not all are letters that fall into that elevated category (there are certainly letters that initiated wars, though).In the age of the internet, who will be writing letters Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For all the bleakness of its subject matter, there’s considerable exhilaration to Ali Soozandeh’s animation feature Tehran Taboo. That’s due, in part, to the film’s breaking of many of the official “rules” of Iranian society, the myths of the theocracy that can’t, and don’t conform with the realities of human life. But there’s something wider as well, almost Dickensian, as the director presents his varied cast as players in a big city drama in which the Iranian capital itself becomes a protagonist, an entity bubbling with life, most of it “not conforming to Islamic virtues”.But what otherwise Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In the video, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner smiles shyly before beginning. As she speaks, her voice gains conviction, momentum, power. Her poem tells of the Marshall Islands inhabitants, a “proud people toasted dark brown”, and a constellation of islands dropped from a giant’s basket to root in the ocean. She describes “papaya golden sunsets”, “skies uncluttered”, and the ocean itself, “terrifying and regal”. She tells of “songs late into the night” and “a crown of fuchsia flowers encircling / aunty Mary’s white sea foam hair”. In a room dominated by a vast appliqué textile of blue tarpaulin slashed Read more ...
Owen Richards
Why is M.I.A. such a problematic pop star? Why can't she just shut up and release a hit? Tellingly, this is the very question the singer poses at the start of Matangi/Maya/M.I.A - a question she's been asked throughout her career, from interviewers to management. Across its runtime, the documentary answers this in no uncertain terms: this is who she’s always been, and mainstream success is a by-product of her unflinching, challenging nature. It builds a compelling picture of one of music’s most singular stars.Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. (titled after her birth name, anglicised nickname and Read more ...
Katherine Waters
It’s the nature of satire to reflect what it mocks, so as you’d expect from a British Museum exhibition curated by Ian Hislop, I object is a curiously establishment take on material anti-establishmentarianism from BC something-or-other right up to the present day.As wheezes go, it’s a fairly good one, a jaunty riposte to the extraordinary plumbing of the museum’s archives conducted by then-director Neil MacGregor through the series A History of the World in 100 Objects. As a premise for collecting together absorbing objects it’s unconventional, but it suffers from continued-on-p.94ism and Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In a small town on the Polish-Czech border where the mobile signal wanders between countries’ operators and only three inhabitants stick it out through the winter, animals are wreaking a terrible revenge. The bodies of murdered men, united in their penchant for hunting, have turned up in the forest, violently dead and rotting. Deer prints surround one corpse, beetles swarm another’s face and torso. Foxes escaped from an illegal fur farm need little motive to exact summary justice on their former jailor.The authorities of the wider conurbation provoke distrust – kickbacks and dirty Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
IDLES' debut album, Brutalism, exploded onto the UK post-punk scene last year, lauded by the music press (myself included) for its lyrical blend of charm, fury, and politics, and musically, for just being a refreshingly original and catchy punk album. While IDLES haven’t moved away from these things on Joy as an Act of Resistance, they've branched out in some different, exciting directions.Taking their cues from the album title, singles “Danny Nedelko” and “Great” are possibly the poppiest songs IDLES have ever written, approaching racism, immigration and Brexit from an utterly danceable, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The bestseller Sapiens (2011, first published in English in 2014) by the hitherto little-known Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari has sold enormously well, and justly so: recommended by Bill Gates no less, it has become a worldwide publishing phenomenon. It is a provocative, stimulating and original synthesis of, well, us and our many millennia on this earth, which of course is still only a moment in the planet’s history. Yes, we humans are a blip, and there were many suggestions as to why we are animals, yet so peculiarly and uniquely destructive in a way no animals ever were before us of Read more ...
David Kettle
Launched just last year to celebrate the country’s 150th anniversary, CanadaHub has quickly become one of the Edinburgh Fringe’s most exciting and intriguing venues, presenting a small but richly provocative programme of work from across that vast country. Here are just three of its offerings this year.Daughter ★★★★ The post-show discussion in CanadaHub’s leafy garden bar following Daughter feels more like group therapy. Well, you might need some reassurance and depressurisation after experiencing the pitch-black whirlwind of Adam Lazarus’s seething solo show.He’s the writer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Cunningly kept under wraps until the last moment, Sacha Baron Coen’s new show is a timely reminder of his gift for trampling the boundaries of good taste and decorum. But despite a certain amount of hyped-up pre-uproar, it doesn’t represent any notable advances from his previous greatest hits with Ali G, Borat or Bruno the cretinous fashionista, although the fact that it arrives in the post-Trump USA lends a certain additional resonance.But, so far, not enough. The shtick remains the same. Cohen disguises himself – with painstaking attention to prosthetic detail and appropriate accents – as a Read more ...
graham.rickson
You come to Christopher Ian Smith’s New Town Utopia expecting a damning indictment of post-war British planning. But while there are melancholy moments, this is mostly an upbeat documentary. Smith manages, without the use of CGI, to make the much-maligned Essex new town of Basildon look uncommonly attractive. The spiritual home of Essex man, this solidly Conservative town isn’t what you’d expect.Basildon was born in the late 1940s, planned to accommodate the thousands of East Enders living in terraced slums. As one veteran resident puts it, “I just wanted a bathroom and a toilet.” It was (and Read more ...