politics
fisun.guner
There’s a rich vein of comic and satirical humour that runs through British art. Hogarth set the trend in the mid-1700s and heralded a golden age of graphic satirists. These included the three masters of the form: Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruickshank. There’s a direct line that links their work to the political cartoonists of our own day, and Tate Britain’s sweeping survey Rude Britannia: British Comic Art features both the historical and the contemporary: Gerald Scarfe, with his excoriating visions of Thatcher; Steve Bell, who most notably put John Major in a pair of Superman underpants; and Read more ...
fisun.guner
Satire, like roast beef, is what Brits are famous for and this exhibition takes us right back to its earliest days in graphic print. In the 1600s, Dutch allegorical prints were adapted by British printmakers to comment on contemporary issues and one of the first examples in this exhibition is a print that illustrates the purportedly cruel and barbarous treatment meted out by the Dutch to the English at the outset of the Anglo-Dutch war - so it’s hardly rib-tickling stuff.This is before we get to Hogarth’s moral outrage and thence to the birth of political satire’s golden age with the big Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Dystopia is a genre that works like a rhetorical device. Take a government policy — let’s say the war in Afghanistan — then list the bad effects that this has had on the British people, exaggerate by a factor of ten, or more, add some obscure but sinister language, extrapolate by throwing in some nightmarish horrors, and then wrap it all up for a small cast. If you’re lucky, as Beth Steel has been with her debut play which opened last night at the Old Vic Tunnels, you’ll get a really atmospheric venue, and, in her case, Kevin Spacey sitting in the first-night audience.The Old Vic Tunnels are Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Most people’s experience of the 120 or so Victorian asylums that littered the UK landscape for more than a century is, thankfully, oohing and aahing over the “sophisticated and sensitive” conversions they have become, providing “astonishing, unusual and stylish” apartments, as estate-agent-speak has it. Those fortunate enough to move into these beautiful new homes are doing so of their own accord, of course, but many of those held in their previous incarnations would have preferred to be anywhere else at all.This documentary, made by Chris Boulding for the BBC’s Open University strand, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Most people know Andy Hamilton from his frequent (and very droll) appearances on panel shows such as Have I Got News For You and The News Quiz on television and radio, but he is also a prolific writer. His writing credits could take up the whole of this review, but a brief CV includes Not the Nine O’Clock News, Drop the Dead Donkey, Old Harry’s Game and, most recently, the equally excellent Outnumbered on BBC One, which he co-writes with Guy Jenkin. But now, with Hat of Doom, he is going back to where he started in comedy and doing a stand-up tour.He gets the measure of his audience straight Read more ...
william.ward
Applauded by the audiences at Cannes last year, where it was the only Italian film in the competition, and nominated for a Palme d’Or, awarded four prizes at the Chicago International Film Festival, and favourably received at home, Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere is now being released in the UK, increasingly a rare event for films of Italian origin.And not without good reason: the flair of originality combined with an attention to the quality of the dialogue, the acting and the entire editing process is a skill set not often encountered these last 30 years in Italian cinema. It is often said Read more ...
Veronica Lee
I had a slightly surreal experience last night, when an actor playing the butler of a future Cabinet minister in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband announced during the interval that David Cameron had just departed Buckingham Place en route to 10 Downing Street to form the next UK government. It was just one of a few pleasing convergences of art and life of the evening, not least of which was that we were gathered in something called the Churchill Room at the time.The play, which has several political references that could have been written just before curtain-up, was performed by a group of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s an accepted truth that Chris Morris is a comedy genius. Now the word "genius" is so overused in some quarters as to be rendered meaningless, but in Morris’s case it's a richly deserved description; he created or co-created some of the funniest, cleverest and most original comedy on British television, including The Day Today, Brass Eye and Jam. Not a bad CV, even if it also contains the rather less amusing Nathan Barley. So what of his feature-film debut, Four Lions, which he directed and co-wrote with Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong (of Peep Show fame)?Well it has the Morris trademark of a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mamma mia! The last Leaders' Debate has come and gone, so what on earth are we going to do on Thursday evenings now? I was half expecting an announcement at the end of the show telling us that the Debates will be coming back for a new series in the autumn. Next Thursday of course is the election itself, which will be a straggly, bleary-eyed, long-drawn-out affair. How much nicer if it could be compressed into a crisp 90 minutes and then decided on a viewers' poll.But I'm just wallowing in the Neverland aura which has shrouded this entire election campaign. It has been a phony war waged in a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One can only speculate about why More4 would want to broadcast a documentary about bare-faced electoral fraud in the week before the climax of our own unimpeachably democratic process. However, this rather long film about 2009's Afghan presidential election gradually marshalled its arguments into a pointed critique of how the “democracy” which the West has unloaded over Afghanistan like a badly aimed air strike is anything but. Of course, this may not strike many people as front page news.Interestingly, even such complete novices at the free elections game as the Afghans had beaten the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Four podia occupy the Wellcome Collection’s temporary gallery space. Three are stage sets: a living room, a pub and a funeral parlour, all recognisable as “typical” working class - in fact, the living room might have been based on Pauline Fowler’s dog-eared front room. The fourth, placed further back, is where Billy Bragg will intercut the dramatic action with a new set of songs with his three-piece band, plus engage in a bit of ad-lib banter that will direct the audience back and forth across the promenade auditorium.Linking up all four sets is a thick, ragged, blood-red strip that runs the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's difficult to reach a rational verdict in the midst of the blog-barrage, Twitter-frenzy and crass party point-scoring that surround our new national pastime, but as the party leaders neared the 90-minute time limit, it was at least obvious that this second debate had brought feistier and more committed performances from all three of them. David Cameron and Gordon Brown wasted no time in demonstrating how well they'd learned Nick Clegg's trick of looking straight into the camera and addressing us viewers, though frankly you'd have thought that should always have been pretty bleeding Read more ...