politics
Mark Sanderson
And now the end is near… and so Inspector George Gently faces his final case. Deemed too political to be broadcast in its original slot in May – 10 days before the General Election – Gently and the New Age was postponed until 8.30pm last night. An ignominious time for a crime show that often burst the bonds of genre to create drama of real power. At least, in more ways than one, it went out with a bang.It is December 1970 and yet the winter of discontent seems to have already begun. A scab – or, as John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby) suggests, “a non-union worker” – is stabbed as he crosses Read more ...
mark.kidel
The much-respected visual artist Isaac Julien made his name as one of the first great black British filmmakers, not least with Looking for Langston (1989) and Young Soul Rebels (1991). While Steve McQueen moved from gallery art and installations to big-budget fiction movies, Julien has gone the other way, leaving narrative behind and finding his vocation as an artist rather than a story-teller.His BFI film on Frantz Fanon, made in 1995, co-written and directed with Mark Nash, focuses on the story of the psychiatrist from Martinique who made his name as a vivid and penetrating theoretician of Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Both Rhode Island’s Downtown Boys, and Washington D.C.’s Priests sit at the centre of today’s feminist punk scene. As stated in a recent Downtown Boys press release, they oppose “the prison-industrial complex, racism, queerphobia, capitalism, fascism, boredom, and all things people use to try to close our minds, eyes and hearts”. This, perhaps, explains why the promoters have listed the night as a “radical double bill”. Having also both released extremely well received albums this year - Cost of Living and Nothing is Natural respectively - they descend on Manchester’s Deaf Institute amid a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The controversial historian Niall Ferguson is the author of some dozen books, including substantial narratives of the Rothschild dynasty, a history of money, and a study of Henry Kissinger up to and including the Vietnam war. His new one has the subtitle Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power, and in it he turns his attention to analysing that most overworked 21st century word, “network”, as well as one that makes many uncomfortable in its encapsulation of inequality, “hierarchy”.We are given to conspiracy theories, but Ferguson goes well beyond exploding such myths – we are Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Prolific playwright James Graham aspires to be nothing if not timely. His latest, a play about the Labour Party, was originally due to open during the week of that party’s conference, when our ears were once again ringing to the chant of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” Unfortunately, the play’s TV star Sarah Lancashire had to pull out, so its West End opening was delayed until tonight. Her replacement, Tamsin Greig, joins Martin Freeman in this epic comedy about a Labour MP in an era of change. It’s a starry cast, but does the play’s content live up to its billing?Opening with familiar chords of the Read more ...
David Kettle
The Reagan administration produced as much video content as the previous five administrations combined. That’s the claim early on in The Reagan Show, an engaging but ultimately frustrating documentary compiled entirely from archive footage by co-directors Sierra Pettengill and Pacho Velez. So remorseless was the administration’s taping of carefully staged scenes or managed press conferences that it even got its own name – White House TV.And if JFK was the first US president to harness the power of television, then Reagan was the first to embark on a concerted attempt to manipulate the broader Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Documentary theatre has a poor reputation. It’s boring in form, boring to look at (all those middle-aged men in suits), and usually only tells you what you already know. It’s journalism without the immediacy of the news. But there are other ways of writing contemporary history. In telling the story of the 1993 Oslo Accords – the first ever agreement between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation – American playwright JT Rogers gets around the disadvantages of documentary theatre by writing what he calls “a scrupulously researched, meticulously written fiction”. And he Read more ...
Liz Thomson
We are now firmly in the post-truth era as defined by Oxford Dictionaries: "adjective - relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." Never have we been more in need of honest discourse, but dishonesty – or what Alan Clark memorably described as “being economical with the actualité” – has somehow become the order of the day.We don’t expect honesty from Fox or the Daily Mail but other media sources we once believed existed to tell the truth no longer feel compelled to do so: The Times Read more ...
David Kettle
You’ve got to hand it to David Greig. The artistic director of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre has shown quite a knack for surfing the zeitgeist with his programming – and more importantly, tackling urgent political issues in a properly theatrical way.He did it with last year’s season opener, Aeschylus’s The Suppliant Women, and its parallels with today’s refugee crises. He did it in August with Rhinoceros for the Edinburgh International Festival (a production that returns to the Lyceum in February), Zinnie Harris’s new Ionesco adaptation as a thinly veiled critique of Trump and how easily people Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Journalist Mark Austin is no stranger to conflict, having reported from war-torn landscapes including Rwanda, Iraq and even the ITN newsdesk. However, when the battle lines were drawn closer to home and involved an enemy he couldn’t see, the veteran journalist found himself in unfamiliar territory and without any kind of roadmap. When his teenage daughter, Maddy, was suffering from anorexia, Austin, by his own admission, was found wanting, not knowing what to do and struggling with a situation he didn’t understand and could do little to influence. This Channel 4 documentary seemed Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When An Inconvenient Truth won the best documentary Oscar 10 years ago, the film’s success marked two significant events: a positive turning point in the campaign to avert environmental catastrophe; and the resurrection of the public career of Al Gore, after his presidential defeat at the hands of George W Bush. It also happened to be a very good documentary.That first film galvanised both debate and action related to climate change. The aim of the cutely titled second has a textbook campaigning duality: to trumpet the efforts and successes of the past decade, while reminding Gore’s growing Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was only at the dawn of the Blair age that Peter Kosminsky truly emerged as a basilisk-eyed observer of the nation’s moral health. By the time New Labour came to power in 1997, Kosminsky had been working for several years on a film which was eventually broadcast in 1999. Warriors, an award-winning account of the traumatic fallout of peacekeeping in Bosnia, served as a prequel to a trilogy of films in which he tracked the ethical degradation of the Blair decade.In The Project (2002) he dramatised the curdling of idealism occasioned by Millbank’s win-at-all-costs skullduggery. The Government Read more ...