race issues
Owen Richards
Janelle Monáe had already established herself as pop’s next great innovator with The ArchAndroid and Electric Ladyland, two albums full of earworms, high production and retro-futuristic lyrics. This all-too-brief musical career seemed in jeopardy when Monáe successfully made the jump to film, with her debut features Hidden Figures and Moonlight winning heavily at the Oscars. After all, her act was as much reliant on theatre as it was songwriting, perhaps this was always the endgame. But with the joint release of singles “Django Jane” and “Make Me Feel” in early 2018, it appeared that if Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a ruthless logic to the scheduling of The Long Song (BBC One). Broadcast over three consecutive nights, this fleet-footed adaptation of Andrea Levy’s novel set during the era of abolition in 19th-century Jamaica swiftly gathered momentum and proceeded at pace towards (praise be) a charming denouement. But why Christmas?In fact the season to be jolly came up twice. In the opening episode there were the Christmas riots of 1831 in which rebellious slaves were subjected to a horrific pogrom. And then in the final episode, they greeted their freedom as the opportunity to down tools and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
With the politics of hate alive and well both sides of the Atlantic, this seems a good time to revive Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's 2003 musical, which is set in Civil Rights-era Louisiana. This production was first seen at Chichester Minerva Theatre last year and transfers to the West End via a run at Hampstead Theatre and has a stand-out central performance by Sharon D Clarke.Inspired in part by Kushner’s own Southern Jewish childhood, Caroline, or Change is almost entirely sung-through and Clarke (pictured below) is the titular black maid who is paid a pittance by the Gellman family to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is Natasha Gordon’s first play, and in it she has created an entire world. A world of grief and laughter, conflict and closeness. A world that is very specifically located within Britain's Jamaican community, yet one whose themes of loss and belonging cross boundaries. Between the tears and the recriminations, it is also frequently very, very funny.“Nine Night” refers to the protracted funeral wake ritual that follows a death, which brings family and friends together to remember the departed, to recall the stories over nine nights fuelled by food and drink, music and words. Gordon’s Nine Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Starr Carter is 16 years old and her life straddles two very different worlds, the posh prep school she goes to with its privileged white students and the troubled black neighbourhood she lives in with her family. And like its heroine, The Hate U Give straddles two very different genres, playing as both a teen drama about friendship, bullying and boyfriends and an African-American call-to-arms about police brutality. It’s not always the most seamless of hybrids and occasionally the joins show in the casting choices and the didactic expository dialogue, but the film is held together by a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
After exhausting years of financial and artistic crisis-management at the Coliseum, English National Opera urgently needed an ironclad, feelgood success. This season’s opener, a somewhat idiosyncratic take on Strauss’s Salome, was unlikely to fit that bill. Despite a couple of niggles, however, I’m happy to report that James Robinson’s full-throttle production of Porgy and Bess steers the rocky boat of St Martin’s Lane home in splendid style. Surprisingly, George Gershwin’s 1935 score – with brother Ira’s, and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s, lyrics – has not played in its full operatic glory on Read more ...
Alfred Quantrill
Design/Play/Disrupt at the V&A covers a wide variety of games that are spearheading the gaming world at the moment. It takes a closer look at eight of the most innovative and different games that have changed the world of gaming in the last five years. Concept sketches and art show the games developing as they gradually take their final form. The exhibition also looks at how videogames could be more life-like and give a new perspective on the world.Some of the games cover topics never really seen before in games. Mafia 3 is set in 1968 USA, and addresses racism as an integral part of the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There was once a time when grime music was very angry, and very threatening, but that seems a long time ago now. Today, Dizzee Rascal is less a herald of riot and revolt, and more of a national treasure, exuding charm from every pore, even if his music has become increasing predictable and safe. But, as wordsmith and dancer Debris Stevenson proves in her debut play, Poet in da Corner, Dizzee Rascal still can change minds and influence people. Now on the Royal Court's main stage, the electrifying semi-autobiographical show features Stevenson herself, as well as grime MC Jammz and music by 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 ...
Rachel Halliburton
As the Syrian conflict enters its final convulsions, renewing memories of how the Sykes-Picot agreement – between an Englishman and a Frenchman – would cause more than a century of political resentment in the Arab world, The Outsider seems particularly piquant. Yet Ben Okri’s beautifully measured adaptation of Camus’s piece of existential provocation – in which a man who doesn’t weep at his mother’s death then shoots an Arab – also derives power from the restraint with which it explores its troubling questions.We begin on a tone of a dark comedy as Sam Frenchum’s mesmerising Meursault begins Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Underground Railroad Game is scabrous theatre – in every sense. To start with, Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R Sheppard’s two-hander is as down and dirty as anything you’ll find on the London stage at the moment, with one sex scene that’s belly laugh-out-loud funny, another which creates a silence of unease that chills the house.But it’s scabrous in the original sense, too, about a wound that doesn’t heal, the scab that has formed over it only precarious protection against the original hurt. That hurt, of course, is slavery, the legacy of which simply has not gone away for America, even a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
What happens when you let racism sit and fester in the middle of your culture? That’s the question Spike Lee keeps asking while telling the mostly true story of black policeman Ron Stallworth’s bizarre spell in the Ku Klux Klan.Stallworth (John David Washington, pictured below right with Adam Driver) was “the Jackie Robinson of the Colorado Springs Police Force” in 1972, a lone black recruit who silently endured abuse to become an undercover detective. Absent-mindedly ringing a KKK information line one day, his enthusiastic racism over the phone impresses local Klan Wizard Walter (Ryan Eggold Read more ...