politics
Adam Sweeting
It was a long time coming, but Homeland’s sixth series at last awoke from its early-season slumbers to put on a late surge over the closing episodes. For a while, it had seemed that the story was barely advancing at all, as the screen was self-indulgently hogged by Carrie Mathison’s emotional life, particularly her anguish over her daughter being taken into care. Yet by the end, she found herself in the teeth of the hurricane as the USA was threatened by a brutal coup d'état.Homeland has always been about the personal cost of undercover work, where commitment to the greater cause tends to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Chilean director Pablo Larrain has described Neruda as a “false biopic”, and it’s a film that surprises on many levels in its presentation of Pablo Neruda, the great poet who is his country’s best-known cultural figure. It captivates for the scope of its invention, its ludic combination of reality and artifice, poetry and politics, as well as the contradictions of its central character.Larrain's last film Jackie was also a biopic with a difference, but Neruda goes further in every sense. It’s also something of a departure from the director’s earlier works, such as No and Post Mortem, which Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Politics certainly caught up with Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius. The Brazilian director and his cast appeared at their Cannes competition premiere last year with placards protesting that democracy in their native land was in peril: it was the day after Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff had been suspended. Cut forward a few months, and the film’s autumn release coincided with the announcement that Rousseff would be thrown out of office and impeached.Given that Aquarius tells the story of Clara, a spirited matriarch in the coastal city of Recife – Filho’s hometown is the capital of Brazil’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
What's in a name? Terence Rattigan’s Love in Idleness is a reworking of his 1944 play Less Than Kind (never staged at the time, it was first produced just six years ago). It reached the London stage at the very end of the same year with the Lunts, the premier theatre couple of their time, in the leads. Inter-generational – and inter-family – dispute about the shape of post-war Britain is at its heart, and Rattigan revised the role of his arch-capitalist, War Cabinet minister protagonist to make it more sympathetic for Alfred Lunt.With its story of a son returning to his mother to find another Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Politics is a serious business, but it’s also a spectator sport. Think of the duels in Prime Minister’s Questions; or the marathon that is Brexit. It’s a place of cartoon villains (Corbyn), straight villains (Trump) and plain cartoons (Boris). But while the pace of events makes writing about the present rather perilous, the past is a happy hunting ground, an area full of stories that all seem to prove one depressing thing: that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.Opening on Budget day, Steve Waters’s new play at the Donmar is a delight for politics buffs. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's an irony to be found in the fact that America's 45th president is already abolishing any and all things to do with the arts even as his ascendancy looks set to provide catnip to artists to a degree not seen since the heyday of Margaret Thatcher. By way of proof, consider the smart, savvy theatrical pop-up that is Top Trumps, in which a dozen playwrights provide a kaleidoscopic range of responses to recent events that offers empathy and reason for alarm in equal measure.Battersea's 63-seat Theatre 503 is to be commended on a four-performance-only venture that surely deserves a broader Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“A First Lady must always be ready to pack her suitcases,” remarks Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman). Melania Trump, take note. Jackie, the first English-language film by the Chilean director Pablo Larrain (Neruda, No), is set in the week following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, as Jackie moves out of the White House and before the Johnsons move in. In a disjointed, non-chronological way – the assassination scene keeps recurring – it’s framed through the lens of Jackie’s interview for Life magazine.The unnamed journalist (an unsympathetic Billy Crudup) is based on Theodore H Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It’s hardly the lot of an art critic to be loved and admired, still less to speak to an audience that might reasonably be called “the public”. And how many will find their ideas still current 40 years on? All of these things can be said for John Berger, who has died aged 90, a man whose radical approach to looking at art was an absolute inspiration, and whose ideas were a solid presence in my childhood, woven into my early memories as surely as the pages of a photo album.A committed Marxist, Berger set out as a painter, and his writings range from novels, to essays to poetry. He won the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For a play that ends with 15 minutes of breath-stopping, jaw-dropping theatre that is surely as powerful as anything the departing year has brought us, Alexander Zeldin’s Love has a challenging relationship to the concept of drama itself. For the greater part of its 90-minute run, the writer seems almost to be exploring the possibilities of “fly-on-the-wall” theatre. Is that a contradiction in terms? If drama is about human inter-relationships that propel, and are in turn propelled by action, Love might count as “anti-drama”. At least, until that devastating finale that throws all such Read more ...
Barney Harsent
In the late 1960s, photographer Nick Hedge travelled the country, documenting some truly horrific housing conditions and the people who were forced to live in them. He photographed entire families living in one room with no heating or access to running water – people who had almost literally nothing. These weren’t isolated people on the fringes of society, these were communities, for many of those involved, this was normal.I wouldn’t have bet big money on Channel 5 revisiting some of the children pictured in these slums with care and moving sensitivity, while also highlighting the plight of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As an old Sixties lefty brought up on paranoia-infused thrillers like The Parallax View or All the President's Men, Oliver Stone loves ripping open great American conspiracies. However, in contrast to his earlier labyrinthine epics Nixon and JFK, this account of CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden keeps clutter to a minimum as Stone fashions a tense, fast-moving drama which will leave you pondering over what's really justifiable for the greater good.It's no great surprise to find that Stone portrays Snowden as a noble crusader for free speech and democratic accountability against the might of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This House arrives in the West End with magic timing - a comedy about the farcical horrors of being a government with a wafer-thin majority, frantically wheeling out dying, suicidal and breastfeeding MPs to vote, horsetrading with "odds and sods" to keep their nails on power. James Graham’s play about the 1970s Labour travails, produced by the National Theatre/Chichester Festival, opened in 2012 to a mixed reception, but its reappearance on Charing Cross Road acquired some serendipitous overnight oomph as Tory fellow-traveller Zac Goldsmith lost his seat to the Lib Dems yesterday, Read more ...