politics
Gary Naylor
The misadventures and misbehaviours of the English upper-middle class is catnip for TV executives. All those posh types on which us hoi polloi can sit in delicious self-righteous judgement, as we marvel at their cut glass accents, well-tailored clothes and ostentatious wealth. Meanwhile their worlds are always collapsing due to villainy, venality or misconceived virtue. Lovely stuff! While such tales are seldom far from a screen, they are often far from a stage, the challenge of scaling down just too intimidating for most adaptors. Not so Shaun McKenna and Lion Couglan who took on the Read more ...
James Saynor
It’s common to say that Shakespeare would have liked such-and-such a modern story, but I think he actually might have gone for this one. The Bard’s eye was drawn to cruelty at every turn, and bad-to-the-bone cruelty seeps from each scene of The Apprentice, a drama about Donald Trump’s rise to fame and gain.There will be many more Trump biopics over the coming century, but this early contender (leaving aside the Funny or Die spoof of 2016, which no one is laughing at now) is a venomously good start. Republicans have attacked its release date, three weeks from the 2024 election, as dirty pool, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Straddling the USA Presidential elections, Simple8’s run of Land of the Free could not be better timed, teaching us an old lesson that wants continual learning – the more things change, the more they stay the same.We open on the Booth family kids rehearsing Julius Caesar (a motif that runs through the play) with John Wilkes Booth already displaying narcissistic tendencies in kids’ squabbles. That changes when their father, a successful British-born actor with a murky past, returns from touring to dominate the space, physical and mental. It’s easy to spot the damage done to Wilkes and one’s Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s a moment in writer/co-director, Jonathan Brown’s, gritty new play, Knife on the Table, that justifies its run almost on its own. Flint, a decent kid going astray, is "invited" to prove he’s ready for the next step in his drug-dealing career by stabbing Bragg, another "soldier", who has become more trouble than he’s worth.I immediately thought of The Godfather and the iconic, seductive, even beautiful language in which this rite of passage is labelled "making your bones". So much gangster culture is framed by the script, cinematography and charismatic acting of Francis Ford Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The clue is in the title – not Then in America or Over There in America or even a more apposite, if more misleading, Now in America, but an urgent, pin you to the wall and stick a finger in your face, Here in America.Pre-Trump 2.0, David Edgar’s new play tells us (at least twice, Edgar not shy of driving home a point) that we can learn from past trauma in order to guide current behaviour. So, 300 million+ Americans are to draw on Stanislavski's Method in the polling booths come November?The memories Edgar conjures are from the 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee went Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album only has one serious flaw: LL COOL J didn’t open it with “OK you can call it a comeback”. Sorry, cheap joke (if you didn’t know, his classic hit “Mama Said Knock You Out” starts with the lyric “Don’t call it a comeback!” and this, his 14th album, is his first in 11 years).But honestly no, there really isn’t a lot wrong with this record: LL is in fine voice and furious flow, and the beats – entirely produced by Q Tip from A Tribe Called Quest – are a reminder that old-school, sample-based hip hop can be as heavyweight, as compelling, as mind-bending as anything post-trap youngsters Read more ...
Gary Naylor
On opening night, there’s always a little tension in the air. Tech rehearsals and previews can only go so far – this is the moment when an audience, some wielding pens like scalpels, sit in judgement. Having attended thousands on the critics’ side of the fourth wall, I can tell you that there’s plenty of crackling expectation and a touch of fear in the stalls, too. None more so than when the show is billed as a new musical.By the interval (much before that if it’s a hit), you’re locating the production on a multi-dimensional spectrum, assessing its component parts (acting, plot, design), its Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Before a word is spoken, a pause held, we hear the seagulls squawking outside, see the (let’s say brown) walls that remind you of the H-Block protests of the 1980s, witness the pitifully small portions for breakfast. If you were in any doubt that we were anywhere other than submerged beneath the fag end of the post-war years of austerity, the clothes confirm it. And a thought surfaces and will jab throughout the two hours runtime: “How different are things today in, say, Clacton?”But Ultz’s design work has grounded Harold Pinter’s second play firmly in pre-Beatles England, where even Elvis Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If I were a rich man, I'd be inclined to put together a touring production of Fiddler on the Roof and send it around the world, a week here, a week there, to educate and entertain. But, like Tevye, I also have to sell a little milk to put food on the table, so I’ll just revel in the delights of this marvellous show in the theatrical village nestling within Regent’s Park.The book (by Joseph Stein based on the short stories of Sholem Aleichem) pulls off one of great art’s essential tricks - it finds the universal in the specific. That’s why it ran for 3000+ performances on Broadway Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The music scene on the New Jersey shore in the late Sixties and early Seventies must have been a thing of wonder, a kind of Merseymania-on-Sea. Its mix of soul, R&B and primitive rock’n’roll fuelled countless groups, not least Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes and eventually Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Stevie Van Zandt was a key member of both of those outfits.While history has decreed that Springsteen’s vast shadow should eclipse everything, Bill Teck’s documentary (originally made for HBO) does a solid job of reminding us that maybe the Boss did need a little help, and he got Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent at the Whitechapel Gallery includes many of the artists’s most iconic political photomontages. Beginning in the 1970s, Kennard created images that by speaking truth to power, gave protest movements like CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), the Anti-Apartheid Movement and Stop the War Coalition the visual equivalent of marching songs.Influenced by John Heartfield who, in 1930s Germany, used his scissors to create lacerating images denouncing Nazism, Kennard has similarly gone on the attack to reveal the hypocrisy of politicians, his revulsion at war Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Forty years later, they have haggard faces, grey hair if any, and sorrowful expressions tinged with incredulity at the outrages perpetrated against them. At one point, the burliest of them cries. One who struggled with drink and drugs says four of his colleagues committed suicide.To different degrees these British men, interviewees in the latest documentary by Hillsborough director Daniel Gordon, are suffering from PTSD. Most were born into the generation that fought in the Falklands War – one, in fact, served in Northern Ireland. It’s not as ex-servicemen that they tell their stories to the Read more ...