class system
Bernard Hughes
In some ways I’m an appropriate person to review Hugo Rifkind’s new novel Rabbits, a coming-of-age comedy set in the early Nineties. I’m about the same age as Rifkind, and was going through the agonies of school and university, drinking and girls at the same time as his protagonist Tommo. But safe to say I moved in different circles from this cast of characters, the upper crust of Scottish private schools and hereditary wealth, flying from party to party in a hedonistic whirl of smoking, strong drink, drugs, guns and kilts. My adolescence was very tame in comparison.But Rifkind is, to an Read more ...
Heather Neill
Prolific playwright James Graham was born in 1982, the year Alan Bleasdale's unforgettable series was televised. From Nottingham rather than Liverpool, Graham recognised in his own surroundings the predicaments of the main characters, the bonds between them and the importance to them of place and of shared stories. An admirer of Bleasdale's work, he had already acknowledged the older writer's influence on Sherwood, his television crime drama pulsating with continuing divisions caused by the miners' strike.Billed as "Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff by James Graham", and arriving on Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Cricket has always been a lens through which to examine the legacy of the British Empire. In the 1930s, the infamous Bodyline series saw the new nation, Australia, stand up to its big brother’s bullying tactics. In the 1970s, the all-conquering West Indies team gave pride to the Windrush generation when they vanquished an England whose captain had promised to make them grovel. In the 2010s, the brash and bold Indian Premier League saw the world’s largest democracy flex its financial muscle as global power shifted eastwards. Kate Attwell’s 2019 play, Testmatch (receiving its UK Read more ...
Gary Naylor
"In care". It’s a phrase that, if it penetrates our minds at all, usually leads to distressing tabloid stories of children losing their lives at the hands of abusive parents (“Why oh why wasn’t this child in care?”) or of loving parents separated from their sons and daughters by over-zealous bureaucrats (“Social workers tore our family apart”). It’s a difficult subject to address, which is one reason why it’s more often done in the abstract, the language administrative, quasi-legal or covered a radio phone-in in which we’re invited to sum anecdotes in order to produce data. Well meant Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a too brightly tiled Gentlemen’s public convenience (Nitin Parmar’s beautifully realised set is as much a character as any of the men we meet), a lad is shaving his head. He’s halfway to the skinhead look of the early Seventies, but he hasn’t quite nailed it – he's too young to know the detail.Another walks in, older, confident to the point of arrogance, looking not just for another man, but for this particular man-child. Handing over a pair of oxblood DMs with the garish red laces, he doesn’t just complete the boy’s outfit, he inducts him into the two worlds that he will Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Faith and damnation frequently collide in Abel Ferrara’s films, drawing fiery performances from often starry casts. The New York master who made The Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant now lives in Rome and, like his Pasolini, Padre Pio is a political period film set in his adopted land.With some chronological sleight of hand, Ferrara splices the life of the titular Franciscan priest, a mystic visionary eventually beatified for receiving the stigmata in 1918, and the October 14 1920 massacre of San Giovanni Rotondo, where 14 villagers protesting landowners’ overturning of their first free Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At the turn of the 20th century, London’s smart set queued up to get their portraits painted by American-born artist John Singer Sargent. Sitting for him was a performance, a way to show the world just how rich, glamorous, clever or important you were. And everything – from the pose to the hair, jewellery and clothing – was stage-managed to create the best impression.At Tate Britain, the brilliance of Sargent’s showmanship is on display from the start in his 1907 portrait of Lady Sassoon, who stands decked in an opera cape. Beside the painting is the garment itself, a gorgeous confection that Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Detective Chief Inspector Othello leads a quasi-paramilitary team of Metropolitan Police officers investigating gang activity in Docklands. With a chequered past now behind him, he has reformed and has the respect of both the team he leads and his superior officers. But his secret marriage to Commander Brabantio’s daughter, Desdemona, unleashes a stream of racist invective from her father, triggering memories of abuse that are never far from the surface. Meanwhile his Detective Sergeant, Iago, lurks in the shadows, plotting revenge for his slight in being overlooked for promotion. Ola Ince’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The National Theatre is meant to represent the whole nation – and not just the metropolitan middle classes. So it’s really good to see that Beth Steel – who comes from an East Midlands working-class background and was once writer in residence at this flagship venue – is having her latest play staged here in the Dorfman space. Like The House of Shades, her Almeida Theatre hit from 2022, Till the Stars Come Down is set in Nottinghamshire, in the former mining town of Mansfield, and features a working-class wedding. Although it’s a laugh-out-loud comedy, it does – like the Read more ...
Pandemonium, Soho Theatre review - satire needs a shot of Pfizer's finest to revive tired storylines
Gary Naylor
In 2020, throughout the country, many people’s lives were affected adversely by an ever-present threat to our already fragile society. Though most got over it, many people still bear the cost every day, sapping them of energy, making them cough and splutter frequently, instilling a longing that it would just go away and stay away. Like many, I have been suffering from “Long Boris”, the affliction reactivated last week with his appearance as the Covid Inquiry Variant spread far and wide. And such topicality ought to work in favour of Armando Iannucci’s first venture on to the stage, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It’s 2012 and the London Olympics might as well be happening on the Moon for Jen and Stacey. In fact, you could say the same for everyone else scrabbling a living in Bradford – or anywhere north of Watford – and we know what those left-behind places did when presented with a ballot box in 2016 and 2019.Not that such weighty matters concern our two girls, out for a banging (in more senses than one) £1 Thursday night out, living for the sex and booze and rock’n’roll that get them from one week to the next. (Writer, Kat Rose-Martin, wisely keeps other temptations out of arm’s reach, one of many Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin wrote,"So life was never better than In nineteen sixty-three (Though just too late for me) – Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban And the Beatles' first LP."That might be the only point on which he and Joan Littlewood, a fellow poet, might agree, because she caught the zeitgeist and was doing iconoclastic work of her own in Stratford (emphatically not "upon Avon") with her revolutionary musical Oh What A Lovely War. Though it feels now to be something of an artefact in theatre’s archaeology, it has not lost its sting nor its Read more ...