politics
Rachel Halliburton
There is a line of argument that – unfairly – blames playwright James Graham for Dominic Cummings. Would Cummings, some might ask, have achieved the influence he has now if it hadn’t been for his depiction in Graham’s brilliant TV drama Brexit: The Uncivil War in which he was played as an obsessive genius by Benedict Cumberbatch? The question’s unfair not least because Graham himself is horrified by the phenomenon of Cummings-driven politics and all it represents. A more interesting question is how a then 36-year-old had the insight to identify the impact and ascendancy of a Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Like an asp eating its own tail, the National Theatre's 2018 production of Antony and Cleopatra, streaming on YouTube until 14 May, begins as it will end. Director Simon Godwin's first tableau is the play's finale: Cleopatra (Sophie Okonedo) lies in queenly repose, a snakebite on her neck; her servants, Charmian (Gloria Obianyo) and Iras (Georgia Landers), slump around her. How did this triple suicide come to pass, ask thwarted Caesar (Tunji Kasim) and Agrippa (Katy Stephens), before answering their own question: behold, and see.It's a neat trick for Godwin, a National semi-regular since 2013 Read more ...
joe.muggs
Drew Daniel is never short of concepts, invention or mischief. As one half of Matmos, with his life partner M.C. Schmidt, he has made some 10 official albums and many more collaborative ones – all pushing the boundaries of electronic bricolage and sound processing in the pursuit of extremely complex ideas about American history, plastic surgery, philosophy, queer identity and all that kind of stuff. Occasionally, as Soft Pink Truth, he has made more overtly dance records, but even these are heavily loaded with twisted intellect, including as they do an album of anarcho-punk covers and one of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
London’s Hampstead Theatre has recently been very successful in bringing some of its best shows to a wider public – despite coronavirus. This week, it’s the turn of Howard Brenton’s #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei, which was first staged at this venue in April 2013, and in the intervening years it has gained in resonance and relevance. Because of COVID-19, the ideology and mentality of the Chinese government has become once again deserving of keen scrutiny. So what exactly happened to this fêted Chinese contemporary conceptual artist when he fell foul of his country’s regime?On 3 April 2011, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This week’s gem from the Hampstead’s vaults is Howard Brenton’s political drama from 2013, telling the extraordinary, stranger-than-fiction story of Cyril Radcliffe and his 1947 mission: to arrange the Partition of India in just five weeks. A tale of battling ideologies, gross colonial arrogance and disregard, and the unlikely significance of an extramarital affair, this history lesson makes for surprisingly gripping theatre – and, to Brenton’s great credit, he manages a lucid account of this complex, seismic undertaking in less than two hours.Lawyer-turned-bureaucrat Cyril Radcliffe (Tom Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The talk is of an “economy in ruin [with] unemployment through the roof”: a précis of Britain in lockdown? In fact, this is one of the many eerily apposite remarks to be found in Wonderland, the Beth Steel drama set in the early 1980s that marks the second in the Hampstead Theatre’s sequence of three productions streamed across as many weeks: Howard Brenton’s Drawing the Line comes next, and last.And what a pleasure it is to be reacquainted with the muscular drama – the author’s second-ever play – that brought Steel a 2014 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright. The Read more ...
Sarah Collins
When Amer Deghayes departed for Syria in a truck leaving from Birmingham, a worker from a youth arts organisation in Brighton had been trying to get in touch with him. She wanted to inform Amer, an intelligent and creative 18-year-old who had once harboured journalistic ambitions, that his pitch to develop a project about identity in his hometown had been successful. The Heritage Lottery fund had decided to award him £50,000.The news of his success came too late. On route to another life as a jihadi fighting for Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al Qaeda affiliated rebel group in Syria, Amer Deghayes had Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Netflix’s ReMastered series is one of the streaming channel’s undersung gems. Launching in 2018, when Tricky Dick and the Man in Black first aired, it has proved to be a solidly well-made set of music documentaries. Some of its subjects have been raked over many times before, but the saga of President Richard Nixon inviting country superstar Johnny Cash to play the White House’s East Room (capacity 250) on April 17th 1970, while hardly obscure, is a lesser known event that proves fascinating.The hour-long film quickly sets the scene, pinballing between Cash’s youth and his status in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
After his two mysterious, tightly-coiled and idiosyncratic first features, Neighbouring Sounds and Aquarius, the masterful Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho lets his hair down with an exhilarating, all-guns-blazing venture into genre. Bacurau is equal parts spaghetti western, ultra-violent horror and political conspiracy, with a dash of sci-fi for good measure. While paying homage to John Carpenter, Sergio Leone and Eastwood, among others, it also evokes a rich period of Brazil’s own film lore and, as ever with Filho, offers commentary on Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Director Nick Green’s new three-parter follows on the heels of his A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad and comparisons are sure to be made between his two subjects. Though the finer degrees of political power-play – and the sheer quantity of attendant blood-letting – may vary, both investigate how the two autocratic regimes concerned came into being and how they have managed to enjoy such almost total power for so long (and look likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future).The two stories share a central paradox, too, namely the personalities of their leaders. When Syria’s Bashar Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This patchwork of interviews and comments from male journalists and politicians interspersed with clips from television news and films, from The Godfather to The Avengers, was a zig-zag narrative of Dominic Cummings’s unique career as a political strategist. Complete with portentous throbbing music, this BBC Two film was also a Hamlet without the Prince. Cummings was seen in moments from broadcast programmes or filmed addressing his troops, like a kaleidoscope reflected in the opinions of others.Presenter Emily Maitlis elicited a variety of comments: he is fearless in his views (but what are Read more ...
joe.muggs
Normally we'd put a descriptor - "cellist", "film maker", "techno producer" for example - in the title of this interview, but for Irina Nalis there isn't space. Like, "10 Questions for psychologist, ministerial adviser, festival founder, architectural consultant, digital humanism activist and techno veteran Irina Nalis" wouldn't fit across the page. But that's the multidisciplinary world for you. Irina Nalis is a co-founder of the Vienna Bienniale for fine arts, has worked for the Austrian culture ministry, is currently a uni:docs fellow at the University of Vienna, and works with the Read more ...