Caribbean
Gary Naylor
The impact of great art is physical as much as it is psychological. I recall the first time I saw Perry Henzell’s 1972 film, The Harder They Come. I’d been in the pub and, as we did then with just four channels, slumped in front of the television to see what was on late on a Friday night. Within minutes, I was sitting up straight, seeing an exotic, other world unfold before me in a genre I couldn’t place (was it documentary or drama?) and a performance, by Jimmy Cliff, that reached across time and space with an urgent charisma. It wasn’t the last physical surprise the work held for me – more Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A glamorous black woman sits in a Forties bar under a Vichy cop’s gaze, cigarette tilted at an angle, till two male companions join her in clandestine conversation. The woman is Suzanne Césaire (Zita Hanrot), an influential Martinican journalist and essayist on Surrealism, feminism, Négritude (Francophone black consciousness) and an anti-colonial philosophy honed to a dangerous edge by the Fascist-aligned authorities. More intriguingly for director Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, following this feverishly productive period, Césaire never published another word.That conventional biopic scenario, with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of The Gold in 2023 was received rapturously, though apparently it only told one half of the story of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery at Heathrow airport. Now screenwriter Neil Forsyth has returned to the scene of the crime to reveal what happened – or might have happened, since there’s a fair bit of artistic licence at play here – to the missing portion of the £26 million quid’s worth of stolen gold.Though this time around we no longer have the likes of Sean Harris and Dominic Cooper in the cast, there are still plenty of sharply-drawn characters to savour. There is, for Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As something of an immigrant to the capital myself in the long hot summer of 1984, I gobbled up Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes’s novel of an outsider embracing the temptations and dangers of London.Written a couple of years earlier and set a couple of miles east, Sam Selvon’s seminal book, The Lonely Londoners, focuses more specifically on Caribbean immigrants’ experience of a metropolis emerging from post-war austerity, of the cold, of the racism, of the possibilities always just out of reach.Roy Williams’ adaptation of Selvon’s dazzling narrative was a big hit at the intimate Jermyn Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though Death in Paradise is an Anglo-French production filmed in Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies, the Frenchness seems to have mysteriously leaked away. Where Sara Martins was a long-standing regular as DS Camille Bordey, and other French actors have rotated through the cast, the only glimmer of Gallicness remaining in this seasonal special was the vestigial presence of Elizabeth Bourgine as Catherine Bordey (Camille’s mum, pictured below with Danny John-Jules as Dwayne Myers). Otherwise we might have been on Jamaica or Barbados or St Lucia, such was the general lack of any trace of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Cesar Diaz’s debut feature film was made on a modest budget and confines its running time to a crisp 78 minutes, but its impact is like being hit over the head with a sandbag. We frequently hear the word “genocide” being bandied about, but Our Mothers revisits a monstrous specimen of it which most of the world has forgotten about.It occurred during the 1980s, as the civil war in Guatemala ground remorselessly on and the indigenous Mayan people were subjected to systematic extermination. Their villages were destroyed, more than 200,000 people were “disappeared”, and 1.5 million Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Is there a healthier sound than that of laughter ringing round a theatre? There are plenty of opportunities to test that theory in Tinuke Craig’s riotous revival of The Big Life, two decades on from its first run at this very venue. Much has changed in that time, specifically the coming to light of the appalling mistreatment of the Windrush Generation at the hands of a callous, racist state. What might have felt then like an unnecessarily heavy-handed political undertow now feels, if anything, underplayed. If that’s the grit in the oyster, the substance of this feelgood musical is a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was only a matter of time before Bob Marley got his own posthumous biopic, and One Love isn’t the worst you’ll see. For instance, it’s miles ahead of the Elton John flick Rocketman, and at least it’s an hour shorter than Baz Luhrmann’s bloated Elvis misfire.However, turning the life and artistry of a “soul rebel, natural mystic” into a mainstream film biography was always going to involve compromises and over-simplifications. Director Reinaldo Marcus Green (who helmed the King Richard tennis movie) has corralled a batch of screenwriters including Terence The Sopranos Winter. They’ve Read more ...
Leila Greening
School of Instructions, a book-length poem composed of six sections, is a virtuosic dance between memory and forgetting, distant tragedy and personal grief. At times, Hutchinson’s language perhaps forgets itself in its own excess. His lines are richly luminescent, never cold or monochromatic.However, criticism of this opulence, a style described by Carol Rumens as "sea-lit", disintegrates when the radiance of lines like "the cherry-magnified boy who felt keenly fractures in / his bones clicking like wings" appear. Hutchinson marries words emphatically, with a constant attention to music. His Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Mustapha Matura’s 1981 play, Meetings, is still a knockout. Supply the characters with mobile phones and it could be set in the present day. What makes it topical is the central issue it chews on: is the modern world all it’s cracked up to be, or is progress a toxic brand? Jean, an advertising executive who loves all things contemporary, including fast food, is married to a businessman, Hugh, who is increasingly hankering for the tastes of his youth – swordfish in yellow gravy, okra and rice, manicou, that kind of thing. The culinary quest that begins in their snazzy Trinidad Read more ...
Glory to Sound: Linton Kwesi Johnson, Brighton Festival 2023 review - a reggae rebel's life in music
Nick Hasted
Straight-backed at 70, Linton Kwesi Johnson wears the smart garb of a British Caribbean elder – trilby, cream jacket, West Indies maroon jumper and tie, grey trousers, blue socks and grey shoes. His voice has resonant, slow-rolling authority befitting Britain’s pioneer, premier dub poet. He folds his legs, but raises a lecturing finger. Though relatively relaxed and ready to laugh, he shows, in attitude as much as posture, a stern, iron backbone.Marking his prose collection Time Come’s publication, LKJ has sold out the grand Theatre Royal for this talk and selection of laptop-played tracks Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Inspiration jostles irritation in Marys Seacole, Jackie Sibblies Drury's Off Broadway hit from 2019 that has arrived at the Donmar as part of a banner season of late for Black American writing in the capital (cf. "Daddy": A Melodrama at the Almeida and Is God Is last year at the Royal Court).Riffing on the life and legacy of the Anglo-Jamaican nurse of the title who knew Florence Nightingale and lent invaluable assistance during the Crimean War, Drury's one-act play asks probing questions about the very workings of biography and the nature of bequest. And Nadia Latif's deeply felt production Read more ...