politics
joe.muggs
Londoner Shabaka Hutchings's other main groups, The Comet Is Coming and Sons Of Kemet, are pretty modernist. They incorporate dub, post-rock, post punk and rhythm patterns that recall London pirate radio sounds into the playing of his ensembles, with thrillingly adrenalised and / or cosmic results. This ensemble, though – convened in South Africa with with trumpeter Mandla Mlangeni – is altogether more true to a strictly jazz lineage. It's true, in fact, to a very specific jazz lineage: “The New Thing”, the explicitly spiritual, often fiercely political music exemplified by John and Alice Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on the book by former political prisoner Tim Jenkin, Escape from Pretoria is an intermittently engaging jailbreak tale set in South Africa’s apartheid regime in the 1970s, as well as further evidence of Daniel Radcliffe’s determination to run as far as possible in the opposite direction from his past life as Harry Potter. Its only problem is a troubling case of schizophrenia, since it’s not sure whether to be a pared-down thriller or a political statement.Radcliffe plays Jenkin, who with his fellow African National Congress-supporting comrade Stephen Lee (Daniel Webber) gets arrested Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ahir Shah has delivered some very good comedy by performing as a man who knows he is right about everything – that's what a political degree from Cambridge can do for you. But now the comic, rightly lauded for his previous polemicist shows with two Edinburgh Comedy Awards nominations, is casting around for something other than old ideological certainties to believe in.In Dots, which he debuted at last year's Edinburgh Fringe, Shah, 29, tells us that the past 18 months have been emotionally challenging for him, hence the search for a belief system that suits a millennial atheist of Hindu Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Burhan Qurbani isn’t the first director to bring Alfred Döblin’s seminal 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, to the screen. First, there was the Weimar Republic era adaptation that Döblin himself worked on. Fifty years later, Rainer Werner Fassbinder brought us his 15-hour television opus. Both kept to the story’s original setting, focusing on a recently released convict caught in the swirl of the criminal underground and the groundswell of Nazism and Hitler’s ascent to power. Director Burhan Qurbani, who is of Afghan heritage and born in Germany, eschews the historical setting Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s not hard to see why The Sicilian Vespers has struggled since its surprisingly successful opening run at the Paris Opéra in 1855. Verdi had composed it reluctantly, despised the librettist, Eugène Scribe, who he regarded as a well-named cynical scribbler, and tried unsuccessfully to get a release from his contract. The result is undeniably patchy, narratively implausible to the point of silliness, and though tight by the standards of French grand opera, nevertheless at least one scene too long.Yet having said all that, one is left with the impression of a work that overall only just Read more ...
Marianka Swain
With counter-terrorism an urgent concern – and specifically how best to find, track and use the data of suspected threats, without sacrificing our privacy and civil liberties – it’s excellent timing for a meaty drama about the surveillance state. And the second half of this debut full-length stage work from Al Blyth, helmed by Hampstead AD Roxanna Silbert, comes excitingly close to being that play for today.However, you do have to wade through an overlong first half which, unfortunately, trips into every genre cliché going. The GCHQ computer whizzes who supply the security services with Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Since Play Misty For Me in 1971, Clint Eastwood has been tearing up the American myth with a body of muscular, often melancholic work. He continues this theme with Richard Jewell, the story of a security guard falsely accused of the 1996 Atalanta Olympic Park bombing.Eastwood focuses squarely on the witch hunt by the media and FBI that turned Jewell from overnight hero to one of the most hated men in America, showing just how vulnerable a private citizen is to the machinations of state power. The real bomber, white-supremist Eric Rudolph, is barely mentioned.It’s easy to see why a film like Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Matt Forde sets out his stall in Brexit: Pursued by a Bear from the first line: “We meet in diabolical circumstances.” These aren't good times, he says, with two major leaders in the Western world whose relationship with the truth is merely that of passing acquaintance. Add in the UK's continuing divisions over Brexit, and diabolical seems apt.We know where Forde is coming from. He's a proud Remainer and Blairite, a former adviser to the Labour Party and a vehement critic of Jeremy Corbyn – who gets it in the neck just as much as Boris Johnson does. Forde sees little difference between Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Just Mercy, the latest film from Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12), is based on a New York Times bestseller. It has a star-studded cast. It’s emotionally moving as well as intellectually accessible. But it’s no easy film to watch. “They can call it what they want – it’s just another way to lynch a black man.” Just Mercy is about death row in the American South, and it is a bruising and beautiful film. It lights a fire under you.Just Mercy is based on a memoir by Bryan Stevenson, an American civil rights attorney who has spent his life working with adults and children condemned to die in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With Harvey Weinstein about to go on trial, the timing is particularly apt for a film that outlines the fall from grace of another media giant who used his powerful position to sexually victimise women. The late Roger Ailes was the CEO of the right-wing, Trump-supporting Fox News, who was massively influential in American media and politics until forced to resign, in 2016, in the face of sexual harassment accusations by a raft of female staff.Bombshell captures the toxic environment inside the Fox News building, where Ailes would advance or terminate a woman’s career on the basis of sexual Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
All the TV networks like to big up their news journalists as major players, but are they as important as they like to think? Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, is a dogged reporter who rarely seems to sleep, and here we watched as she tracked Boris Johnson from his election as Conservative leader through his struggle to “get Brexit done” by 31 October, in the teeth of countless Parliamentary obstacles. But despite plenty of behind-the-scenes footage, there were few dramatic revelations, just familiar stuff seen from a different angle with added commentary by Kuenssberg. After the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
We’ve had Chess the musical; now, here’s Chess the play. Tom Morton-Smith, who has experience wrestling recent history into dramatic form with the acclaimed Oppenheimer, turns his attention to the 1972 World Chess Championship in Reykjavík, in which American challenger Bobby Fischer battled the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky. The event gained outsize importance from the Cold War propaganda battle – the two men pawns in their countries’ games, and the match characterised as the lone hero versus the Soviet machine.The play follows the tournament through, as both Fischer (Robert Emms, pictured Read more ...