politics
aleks.sierz
While Britain is experiencing a "summer of discontent", with inflation, strikes and other conflicts, it is odd that so few plays are as overtly political, and as overtly resonant as Sonali Bhattacharyya’s Chasing Hares, which won the activist Theatre Uncut’s Political Playwriting Award, and is now on the main stage at the Young Vic.Although the play is set in Kolkata in the 2000s, it makes connections with Britain today, and includes a passionate argument in praise of the power of theatre to change people’s attitudes. The story focuses on Prab, a machine operator in a West Bengali factory who Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Music plays a big part in the life of Dwight, an 11-year-old black lad growing up in early 80s Leeds. He doesn't fit in at school, bullied because he is "slow", and he doesn't fit in outside school, would-be friends losing patience with him.But he does fit in at home, loved unequivocally by a protective mother, somewhat enviously by a bickering sister, and rather reluctantly by a preoccupied father. Like the records he plays on the gramophone, his life is about to spin – and he'll have to hold on to the warmth of family love in a cold world.Zodwa Nyoni's new play for the Kiln Theatre packs Read more ...
peter.quinn
The winners of this year's Parliamentary Jazz Awards were announced at a convivial ceremony held on Tuesday night at Pizza Express Live Holborn.Organised by the All-Party Parliamentary Jazz Appreciation Group (APPJAG), and co-chaired by John Spellar MP and Lord Mann, the Awards celebrate the vibrancy, diversity, talent, and breadth of the jazz scene throughout the UK.Ross Dines, Pizza Express’s urbane Music Manager and MC for the evening, kicked off this 18th edition of the annual awards by listing the 2020 and 2021 winners (both editions having taken place online). “Twelve years I waited for Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Stanislav Aseyev is a Ukrainian writer who came in from the cold. Until the spring of 2014, he was an aspiring poet and novelist based in the eastern Donbas region: when, however, its main city and surrounding area fell under the control of pro-Russian militants, he began to document the alternative reality of life in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).Now collected and translated into English by Lidia Wolandskyji, his dispatches (written for the Mirror Weekly newspaper under the pen name Stanislav Vasin) provide a fascinating insight into the culture war at the heart of the fight Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Renowned for an impressive body of work that includes This House, Quiz and Brexit: The Uncivil War, playwright and screenwriter James Graham has looked inwards and backwards for his new six-part series Sherwood.Set in a former mining community in Nottinghamshire, based on the author’s own home town, Sherwood (BBC One) charts a story of increasing violence and bitterness, based on real-life incidents that took place in the miners’ strike back in 1984.The historical background is evoked by newsreel footage from the Eighties of lines of police battling miners, and Prime Minister Margaret Read more ...
joe.muggs
A gothic aesthetic is very common in the left field of electronic/club music these days – but it tends to go with fairly extreme sounds: either industrial pummelling, or glitched-out “deconstructed club” as in artists like Ziúr.But Andy Butler and his Hercules & Love Affair project have gone for something altogether different on the fifth H&LA album. Just as, in his early records, Butler went back to the source building blocks of house and disco music, here he's gone right to the roots of goth. So this album is rife with influences. Woven throughout, you can clearly hear Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Has there ever been a smarter television series than DR’s Borgen? It’s regularly compared to The West Wing for its twisty interrogation of government shenanigans – and certainly it pays to get to grips with the coalition-driven political scene at the Castle, seat of the Danish government, just as it did with Aaron Sorkin’s take on the Hill. But what The West Wing didn’t have was a character as beguiling as Birgitte Nyborg, played by Sidse Babett Knudsen, to guide its audience. The truly clever thing about Borgen is how palatable its politics are, even when they seem mind-numbing on the Read more ...
We Own This City, Sky Atlantic review - 'The Wire' creator David Simon is back on the Baltimore beat
Adam Sweeting
It has been 14 years since The Wire, David Simon’s labyrinthine epic about crime and policing in Baltimore, reached the end of the line. Yet it seems he couldn’t let it lie, because he’s back on the Baltimore beat with We Own This City (made by HBO, showing on Sky Atlantic). This time, the series is based on the eponymous non-fiction book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, with crime novelist George Pelecanos sharing the “Creator” credit with Simon.This is not going to be a relaxing or easy watch, and flopping out on the sofa with a large glass of something mellow is not the ideal way Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One effect of the film I Get Knocked Down, a playfully constructed journey around the life of Chumbawamba vocalist Dunstan Bruce, is to remind that socio-political rage was once woven into the fabric of popular music. Old footage from the band’s Leeds squat, Southview House, in the early Eighties, shows one of them jovially composing a song called “Norman Fowler is a Shit-stain in Margaret Thatcher’s Underpants” on an acoustic guitar (Norman Fowler was Thatcher’s Secretary of State at the time). It’s funny and silly, but also made me long for the era when art-fury was a common cultural Read more ...
joe.muggs
Kendrick Lamar is so breathlessly revered it’s sometimes hard to pull apart what’s going on in his records. It’s sometimes felt like he might become the rap game Radiohead: exploratory, aware, hugely technically accomplished, endlessly thematically “important” – but not actually that interesting to listen to.And certainly on the 18 tracks of his comeback album after a near four-year break – five since his last album proper, DAMN. – there’s a lot that’s potentially extremely worthy. There’s a lot of moody piano lines, there’s a lot of ultra-intricate rhyme patterns, and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
British political life in the Boris Johnson era routinely seems stranger than fiction, and this adaptation of Sarah Vaughan’s novel about a Flashman-style Tory MP should delight all those who view Westminster as a sewer of privilege, corruption and back-slapping old-boy networks. Refreshingly, it doesn’t dabble in actual politics at all, but the action speeds along with an easy fluency which comfortably carries the viewer over its multiple absurdities.Rupert Friend plays James Whitehouse, a Conservative minister under the Prime Ministership of Tom Southern (Geoffrey Streatfeild). A smooth and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
When Rhum + Clay conceived this show, the idea of a comic becoming a political leader might have prompted thoughts of Boris Johnson's carefully cultivated buffoonery on "Have I Got News For You" and elsewhere. Since then, a certain Volodymyr Zelenskyy has given politician-comedians a rather better name. Comedy, as is so often the case, is in thrall to timing.Such thoughts may be inevitable as Matt Wells' attempts to create a show detailing his philosophy of political leadership are repeatedly subverted by his stage assistant, Julian Spooner, who wants politics to be "fun" (main picture Read more ...