politics
aleks.sierz
Can an ordinary wooden chair be an instrument of torture? Of course, every brute investigation makes use of such furniture, whether as a place to tie the victim down, or as a weapon to attack them with. But, as Debbie Tucker Green’s new play so eloquently shows, the wooden chair can also be a more subtle and unexpected instrument of fraught emotion: at every meeting of a truth and reconciliation commission, the wooden chair is there in the hall, itself a dumb witness to the clash of old enemies.Dealing as it does with the horrors of genocide, war and violent conflict, Truth and Reconciliation Read more ...
ash.smyth
I think I owe David Hare an apology. When I sat down to watch Page Eight, last night – being, as it is, his latest probing of our moral and political universe – I just assumed that our national intelligence services would be in for a trendy-lefty-type shoeing. But I was wrong.Enter Johnny Worricker, a senior MI5 intelligence analyst with the complexion of yesterday’s porridge and a heart as warm as today’s (this much is established very quickly). He was a late-middle-aged man, in a reassuringly tailored suit, on a nondescript evening in London. You might have been forgiven for missing Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Last year, Josie Long, famous for her whimsical comedy and fey delivery, decided to get serious. Disheartened by the election result, she started to do political comedy, but sadly her level of analysis was along the lines of: “Anyone who voted Tory in May's election is a fucking cunt.” One year on in The Future is Another Place, the level hasn't been raised.It speaks volumes that someone who broadly shares my politics can be so irritating, but suggesting that royalists dying is worth a whoop is just plain mean. Her suggestion that if, were the 95 per cent tax rate to be brought back, the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Part of the fun of watching The Hour, in the absence of a coherent plot, convincing characters and plausible period dialogue, was ruminating on the myriad different ways it could be sliced: a grown-up Press Gang meets Mad Men? The Spy Who Came in From the Cold versus Spooks? All the President’s Men crossbred with Foyle’s War?What a confused and cross-eyed load of old nonsense it was, but oddly enjoyable nonsense for all that. What it did well it did very well: the drab, shabby, hospital pallor of Fifties London was convincingly evoked. The casting was excellent and the attention to detail Read more ...
Joe Muggs
At the start of September, the fourth Outlook Festival takes place in a 19th-century fort on the Croatian coast. Already this festival has become a vital point in the calendar for those involved with dubstep, grime and other UK underground scenes – not only a jolly in the sun (“dubstep's Ibiza”), but the one time in the year when everyone involved takes a break from international touring and comes together in the same place, a time to compare notes and take stock of the progress. Its British organisers make even bigger claims for it, though: they see it as drawing together decades' worth of “ Read more ...
Joe Muggs
I'm not claiming some major prescience or insight here. I am as guilty as anyone of dipping into the music of the sink estates for a small dose of frisson then returning to art and music that confirm my own worldview. But maybe, just maybe, if we had all paid more attention to what was being said by young British men and women from those estates over the last decade, the events of the past few days might not have come as such a horrific surprise. After all, French rappers had been explicitly predicting the riots that took place there in 2005 for a decade beforehand, as I noted (with, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Tim Minchin, the Australian minstrel comedian, is known by his catweazel hair, thickly kohled eyes and dazzlingly witty songs bashed out at a grand piano about, among other things, the debatable existence of the Almighty. Lately his repertoire of tricks has been expanding. He has toured his show with a full orchestra, he wrote the songs for the RSC's rapturously received stage adaptation of Roald Dahl's Matilda (which comes to the West End this autumn) and on Saturday he is hosting the first ever Comedy Prom. Resuming theartsdesk's series featuring the summer reading habits of significant Read more ...
Jasper Rees
I Resign. It’s not a phrase you hear that often these days. Unlike, obviously, You’re Fired. There was a time, largely synonymous with the era when Tory toffs and grandees had sufficient private income to walk away from employment, that a chap could afford to resign, as the phrase has it, with honour. And it usually was a chap, usually after he’d been found to be hopping on and off strippers or tarts or his secretary or handing over the Falklands to some jumped-up tinpot little Johnny Foreigner. Nowadays politicians prefer to wriggle on a spit and keep the chauffeur. Honour be damned, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You don’t tend to get many films from the breakaway republics of the former Soviet Union. And certainly not from Kyrgyzstan. The Light Thief is the kind of work which schleps respectably around the festival circuit harvesting nods of approval from film aficionados but not, more importantly, the support of distributors. So the fact that, as of this week, the film has made it past Go is worth cracking open the orange juice (its titular main character does not drink). And it more than repays a look. The Light Thief is light on its feet at only 75 minutes, and it melds gentle lyricism with a very Read more ...
terry.friel
As hot, sweaty tourists dangle their feet in pools for Thai Nibble Fish to eat the dead skin from their feet at Kuala Lumpur’s quirky Art Deco Central Market, a small theatre upstairs is packed for a play about racial divisions and the myth of social unity here. The performance of Parah ( which means "severe") at the market’s Annexe Gallery by the young team from The Instant Café Theatre Company is a daring look at race and division in a country that paints itself as a shining example of unity, but whose policies are increasingly driving a wedge between the main groups – Malays, Chinese, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Can journalists write good plays? Sarah Helm has been a Washington correspondent for The Independent during the first Gulf War in 1990, reported from Baghdad in the mid-1990s, and was based in Jerusalem for three years. So her debut play about the Iraq War, which stars Maxine Peake and opened last night, is grounded on a career of watching the Middle East. It is also based on experiences much nearer to home: she is married to Jonathan Powell, who was Prime Minister Tony Blair’s close personal adviser during the ill-fated invasion of Iraq.Certainly, after 9/11, Helm was in the thick of things Read more ...
David Nice
Whatever the quality of the material with which they're grappling, there are two undeniable truths about the Belarusian actors who've put their already curtailed freedom on the line by coming to the Almeida Festival this week: they're skilled practitioners of their art and courageous human beings. Read their biographies in the programme and you'll see that the words "detained", "arrested", "attacked", "dismissed" crop up rather a lot. In Europe's last dictatorship, stepping out on stage and speaking a line, a word even, can lead to imprisonment.Be cynical if you will about Western actors Read more ...