race issues
aleks.sierz
Ethnic tensions in France have been in the news this week, with the siege of the gunman Mohammed Merah, so award-winning South-African penman Craig Higginson’s new play seems really timely. First seen in this country at the Salisbury Playhouse, and opening last night at Theatre 503 in south London, this story about the relationship between a French-Congolese student and an English teacher during a hot Parisian summer is full of emotion, and ideas.Set in the chic flat of Celia, an attractive young teacher of English, this two-hander is a story about her encounter with Pierre, an equally young Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's a quintessential Channel 4 idea. Take one hot-button issue (racial integration, or lack of it), go to Bradford ("one of Britain's most segregated cities," according to the voiceover), and shove a racially mixed bunch of locals into a thinly-disguised Big Brother house to see how they'll get along. To stir the pot a bit more, the eight chosen "contestants" all failed the government's UK Citizenship test.Not that that singles them out, particularly. The programme-makers staged test-sittings all around Bradford, from the Asian-dominated city centre or Manningham to predominantly white areas Read more ...
David Benedict
You can accuse Alfred Uhry's 1987 play Driving Miss Daisy of many things – being overtly sentimental is top of the charge sheet – but you certainly cannot claim that it’s a case of false advertising. Even if, like this critic, you missed the original stage version or any of its revivals, not to mention the Oscar-winning movie, it’s painfully clear from the opening scene in which the heroine is forced to hire a chauffeur that this is not just precisely but wholly a play about Miss Daisy being driven. With the, excuse me, Rolls-Royce casting of Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones, it Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A couple of series ago Alan Yentob took himself off to Monte Carlo to grill Dame Shirley Bassey for Imagine about her life in showbiz. Kissinger got more out of Gromyko at the height of the Cold War. (The Soviet foreign minister’s nickname was Nyet.) The BBC have had another stab at showing what makes the girl from Tiger Bay tick, this time in the form of drama, where there is licence to make things up.The first thing Shelagh Stephenson’s script put straight is this business about Tiger Bay. The multiracial dockside slums of Cardiff was her home for only a couple of years before her black Read more ...
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 ...
hilary.whitney
Pauline Black, the lead singer of 2-Tone band The Selecter, was born in 1953 to an Anglo-Jewish mother and Nigerian father and was adopted as a baby by a white working-class couple from Essex, who refused to acknowledge she was black. However, by adolescence she was determined to define herself as society saw her and changed her surname to Black by deed poll when she was in her twenties.During her early career with The Selecter, Black toured alongside fellow 2-Tone bands The Specials and Madness, determined to spread a multicultural musical message through the band's fusion of ska, reggae and 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 ...
Veronica Lee
Jason Cook has masterly audience skills, and he needed them all the night I saw him. A middle-aged teacher (who really should know better), whose refreshment clearly led her to the delusion that she was the person people had paid to see, kept interrupting. Even the engaging and unfailingly polite Geordie comic's patience was wearing thin, but he constantly bested her and got on with the job of making us laugh.The Search for Happiness isn't as high-concept Cook's previous Fringe outings, but no less enjoyable for that because can make a room happy just by chatting - the gags Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chris Lilley may not be a household name, but he is well known to comedy connoisseurs. The Australian's work, which he writes, produces and appears in - in several roles, male and female, adult and teenager - is exceptional, and is by turns funny and challenging, offensive and poignant. You may have seen We Can Be Heroes, about teenage identical twins Daniel and Nathan (played by Lilley), and Summer Heights High, set in a secondary school where the egregious fool Mr G taught drama to the self-obsessed Ja’mie (both played by Lilley); now comes Angry Boys, about young men in modern society. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Australia's cricketers used to call batsman Mark Waugh "Afghanistan", because (compared to his brother Steve) he was the Forgotten Waugh. It was a reference to the Soviet campaign against the Mujahideen during the 1980s. But few wars in recent-ish memory have been so deprived of the oxygen of damaging publicity as France's brutal struggle to hang on to colonial Algeria.It was a conflict that had been bubbling up since the end of World War Two, during which Algerian and other colonial troops had fought with the Free French. They reckoned that had earned them some control over their own destiny Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Let us begin with the nots. Fashionably weird is not enough. Edgy, whatever that means, is not enough. The repeated use of the word “vagina” is not enough and semi-improvised ensemble acting is not, in itself, quite enough. These were just some of the many not-thoughts which ran through my mind during the opening episode of the much-touted Campus. So what did picky me want? I wanted funny.Created by Green Wing supremo Vicky Pile and written by six of the same team behind that fondly recalled surreal-com, it was difficult not to make comparisons between Green Wing and Campus simply because it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following yesterday's season-opening Australian Grand Prix, McLaren's team boss Martin Whitmarsh was extremely unhappy that his driver Jenson Button had been given a drive-through penalty. Button had overtaken a Ferrari by cutting a corner, and should have yielded the position back, but McLaren requested guidance from the race controllers. Instead, all they got was a punishment from the stewards which retarded Button's progress by 23 seconds. "I feel a bit harshly treated," moaned Whitmarsh.Increasingly, this sort of technical quibbling is what passes for "action" in Formula 1, but back in Read more ...