LGBT+
gerard.gilbert
Far more than gay men, lesbians are one of the great invisible minorities of British TV drama – British TV generally, in fact. Sure, there have been the milestone moments – the Brookside kiss that titillated the nation back in 1994 and was the making of the then 18-year-old Anna Friel, or Jeanette Winterson’s terrific 1989 adaptation of her own novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Both featured lesbianism as an issue or a problem rather than a well-adjusted sexual orientation.More recent dramas have set the Sapphism in the past, with the likes of Fingersmith, Tipping the Velvet or The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Theatrical conceits, much like London buses, seem these days to come in threes. Or so it is suggested by the Neil Bartlett/Handspring collaboration Or You Could Kiss Me, the third Cottesloe production this year to peer into the future, albeit only as far as 2036, whereas Mike Bartlett's Earthquakes in London leapt forward to 2525. (Completing the trifecta: Tamsin Oglesby's Really Old, Like Forty Five, set a comparatively imminent 40 years ahead.) And while Oglesby's play featured a robotic nurse, this latest opening puts some very singular puppets centre-stage, alongside a vision of Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Simon Callow is on the phone when I arrive at his five-star digs, booming his apparently considerable misgivings vis-a-vis appearing in some reality TV exercise in which he will be asked to tutor disadvantaged kids in the mysterious arts of Shakespeare. “They keep saying it will be great”, he rumbles, “but it will only be great if it’s great.” And Amen to that.All voice, gesture and bustle, Callow (b 1949) couldn’t really be anything other than a certain kind of actor. Indeed, if you could bottle the quite extraordinary way in which he wraps lips, tongue and molars around the phrase “post hoc Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
How did vampires manage to stage a near-total hijack of the popular media? It used to be just Christopher Lee in a cloak with Hammer Films’ home-made cardboard bats hanging on wires over his head, but now we’re up to our throats in Buffy, Angel, The Twilight Saga, Blade, Van Helsing… and True Blood, HBO’s somewhat superior exercise in blood-squirting southern Gothic, now back for its second series on Channel 4.Is the lionisation of vampires a way of embracing the “other” in a suffocatingly formatted society? Is it an artistic metaphor for sexual liberation? Or is it just a celebration of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Design For Living is one of Noël Coward’s less performed plays but it fair crackles with bons mots - you know you’re in good hands when delightfully old-fashioned words like “horrid”, “bloody”, “cheap” and “vulgar” are tossed around with, well, gay abandon. What a shame, then, that Anthony Page’s production, while wonderfully easy on the eye and despite some spirited performances from its three leads, doesn’t quite catch fire.Even though it’s about three bohemians - Otto, a painter, playwright Leo and designer Gilda - nearly 80 years ago Design For Living was considered a very daring sex Read more ...
David Nice
Never have the Tudors seemed so real. After decades of TV and film characters keeping us at a teasing, ermined distance, Hilary Mantel's dazzling novel Wolf Hall brings it all to life as never before, and the Globe's still-running Henry VIII has vigorously built on that. But the Stuarts? You wouldn't expect James I to dominate in Howard Brenton's new play ostensibly about a tragic-heroic vision of the Tudor queen. Yet Brenton may have started something: the bisexual transvestite intellectual Scot with Tourette's and epilepsy, as spellbindingly played by James Garnon, could become the new Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Ten years after Justin Fashanu - not only the first openly gay footballer, but the first black player to command a £1 million transfer fee - committed suicide in a lock-up garage in the East End, his former agent, Eric Hall, breezily informed the BBC that football was “not a world that attracts gay people". Has anyone told Elton John, Watford FC’s most famous fan? Yet however implausible Hall’s comment may seem, the evidence is stacked solidly in his favour: no other professional footballer apart from Fashanu has ever come out. “The simple reason is that homophobia is still Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month's most interesting new music CDs according to theartsdesk music team includes a dark take on sex and consumerism by The-Dream, which is CD of the Month, "morally ambiguous" South London gangsta rap from Giggs, disco pop from Sia, Scissor Sisters and Robyn, "indietronica" from Grasscut and Tobacco, heritage rock from Tom Petty, immaculate jazz from David Weiss and a compilation of old Colombian dance music. Stinker of the Month is Eminem who is cordially advised to take up religion, get fat or do charity work. Reviewers this month are Joe Muggs, Thomas H Green, Bruce Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the least lamented (by me at least) genres that has fallen foul of social changes in the past two decades is the 1980s gay drama. You know the kind of thing: right-on coming-out speeches, painful but ridiculous instances of homophobia, and the compulsory dying-of-AIDS scene. The irony is that Jonathan Harvey, whose 1993 classic Beautiful Thing did so much to pull the gay play out of its ghetto, has now returned to this 1980s genre. His latest play, which opened last night and marks his long-overdue return to the stage, revisits gay culture between the 1960s and today. Okay, it’s retro Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Religion, and a sense of the revival of belief, is such an important part of everyday life in the wider population that it is one of the stranger facts about contemporary theatre that so few plays tackle this subject. In fact, the last new British play to do this at the National was David Hare’s Racing Demon in 1990. Now, 20 years later, the same Cottesloe theatre space bears witness to a new play, which opened last night, about the same subject.Canadian-born playwright Drew Pautz’s Love the Sinner begins at an international meeting of church leaders in a hotel somewhere in Africa. As these Read more ...
luiza.sauma
Jews may or may not have built the pyramids, but we know for certain that they built Hollywood. The names of the men who founded MGM, 20th Century Fox and Paramount speak for themselves: Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B Mayer, Marcus Loew, Joseph Schenck, William Goetz, Adolph Zukor et al. It's no wonder, then, that Hollywood history overflows with Jewish filmmakers, actors and producers. But for all the Spielbergs, Allens, Hoffmans and Weinsteins, one corner of Jewish life has often escaped the cinema: the world of the Orthodox Jew.Some traditional religious sects such as the Amish in Pennsylvania ( Read more ...
David Nice
Everything happens so quickly in India. It seems like only yesterday that homosexuality was legalised; and now Bombay has just hosted the first Kashish-Mumbai International Queer Film Festival. As one of its very literary organisers pointed out, his country used to be so open to all forms of worship and sensuality; it's the home of the Kama Sutra, after all. It was time to reclaim gay love, he said, and give Indians of all kinds the chance to learn about it through the farthest-reaching medium. And it worked - even if many younger folk had to tell their parents they were 'just off to Read more ...