race issues
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 ...
Saskia Baron
Charles Burnett is one of the neglected pioneers of African-American film-making. He first won attention back in 1978 with his poetic, powerful debut film, Killer of Sheep. Acclaimed by critics and respected by his fellow directors, Burnett has always struggled to get his scripts on screen, focusing as they do on the reality of black American lives.The Glass Shield, made in 1994, was his best-funded movie and doubtless the film’s producers thought their investment would pay off if they highlighted rapper Ice Cube’s name (he’s a minor character) and sold it as a racy cop drama off the back of Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Khaled Hosseini's 2003 bestseller ticks all the boxes as an A-level text. A personal story with epic sweep, it interweaves the bloody recent history of Afghanistan with a gripping family saga. Its treatment of racism and radicalism is timely. Other themes too might have been hand-picked for classroom discussion: bullying, betrayal, bad parenting, family secrets. Its first-person narrative makes it feel real.The trouble with this stage adaptation newly arrived in the West End is that only a small portion of the audience is using it for exam revision. Those merely hoping for a theatre Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What is light entertainment for? It won’t save the world or heal the sick or bring warring factions to the negotiating table. It’s teeth and smiles and bread and circuses on a Saturday night and it shouldn’t have to bear any greater weight. The Generation Game was never required to offer vital balm during the Three-Day Week. Barrymore didn’t nurse us all through Black Wednesday and Britain’s exit from the ERM. And yet there have been times this autumn when the last line of defence between civilisation and the abyss has been a fat failed politician called Balls making a glorious tit of himself Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When, back in October, Donald Trump sulked that his political opponent was being a “nasty woman”, little did he realise the cultural impact it would have.Those two words – a fit of pique that was impressive even amidst an ever-lengthening line of cry baby incidents from the man who went on to become president-elect of the United States of America – have become a rallying cry of sorts for those of us unprepared to take the 12-month garbage fire that was 2016 lying down. Of course, you can get Nasty Woman mugs, T-shirts and baseball caps. The name has lent itself to essays and anthologies. But Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
DW Griffiths's 1915 silent epic, The Birth of a Nation, became notorious for its pejorative portrayal of black people and its heroic vision of the Ku Klux Klan. For his directorial debut, Nate Parker has appropriated Griffiths's title and whipped it into a molten onslaught against America's history of slavery and racial prejudice.Arriving in an America outraged – yet again – by police violence and witnessing the rise of Black Lives Matter, Parker's The Birth of a Nation was uncannily timely, and it prompted a studio bidding war when it premiered at Sundance in January this year. It's a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“This is an emergency. Homicides in Chicago, Illinois have surpassed the death toll of American special forces in Iraq.” This news bulletin forms the opening of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, pronounced Shy-Rack, a stylised, bombastic take on the gang violence that’s decimating Chicago’s South Side (7,916 Americans have been killed there since 2001, as opposed to 6,888 in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Based on the ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes in which women ended the Peloponnesian war by withholding sex, Lee’s advice is for the ladies of the ‘hood to do the same until their men Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Robert Wise directed the 1959 bank heist thriller Odds Against Tomorrow after the classic film noir cycle had ended, but it's an exemplary noir nonetheless. In its day it was an important transitional work – a race-relations allegory, less well-known or hopeful than Stanley Kramer's 1958 The Defiant Ones, that played its part in the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. Harry Belafonte initiated the project for his production company and hired the blacklisted screenwriter Abraham Polonsky to adapt the novel by William P. McGivern (author, too, of The Big Heat). The loot Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Why is everyone from your school a criminal crackhead?” “Why is everyone from yours a Tory minister?” These questions lie at the heart of Zadie Smith’s NW. Keisha (the wonderful Nikki Amuka-Bird), aka Natalie, is married to wealthy Frank (Jake Fairbrother), who’s asking the crackhead question. Leah (Phoebe Fox), who answers back, is her best friend – though that’s no longer a given.Keisha and Leah went to school together and grew up on Caldwell, a Willesden estate; they still live nearby. Keisha is a success story, a perfectionist black barrister – “Life was a problem that could be solved by Read more ...
aleks.sierz
With the Bush Theatre’s main building undergoing renovations, this company’s shows are being staged in a selection of temporary spaces in West London. So, on this dark and freezing evening, I make my way to The Tabernacle, a Grade II-listed building in Powis Square, Notting Hill. It was once a church and is now a community centre. In the 1990s, the North Kensington Sports Academy trained young boxers here, so it’s a particularly apt venue for this restaging of American playwright Marco Orange-Is-the-New-Black Ramirez’s 2015 Bush-hit The Royale, a drama about this bloody sport.If storm clouds Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The original 1961 poster for Paris Blues trumpeted it as “a love-spectacular so personally exciting you feel it’s happening to you”. Would it were actually thus. Instead, it’s ponderous and features a cast so obviously “acting” that any verve implied by being filmed in Paris and set in the world of jazz is missing in action. Paris Blues is worth seeing, but don’t expect the pulse to quicken.Ram Bowen (Paul Newman) and Eddie Cook (Sidney Poitier) are American jazzers living in Paris with a residency in a smoky basement. One member of their band is a drug addict and a local Juliette Gréco type Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The parallel universe of what was known as “race” cinema gets five packed DVDs here. Instead of cringing with sympathy at small, racistly conceived black roles in a classic Hollywood era which coincided with an American Apartheid, these are indie films made inside black neighbourhoods between the wars. Even when white writers or directors are involved – just as in the period’s record labels – authentic culture gets through.Hollywood itself produced some wonders aimed at the impoverished black cinema circuit (mostly musicals, such as the jaw-dropping song and dance bonanza Stormy Weather, Read more ...