politics
Jasper Rees
You don’t tend to get many films from the breakaway republics of the former Soviet Union. And certainly not from Kyrgyzstan. The Light Thief is the kind of work which schleps respectably around the festival circuit harvesting nods of approval from film aficionados but not, more importantly, the support of distributors. So the fact that, as of this week, the film has made it past Go is worth cracking open the orange juice (its titular main character does not drink). And it more than repays a look. The Light Thief is light on its feet at only 75 minutes, and it melds gentle lyricism with a very Read more ...
terry.friel
As hot, sweaty tourists dangle their feet in pools for Thai Nibble Fish to eat the dead skin from their feet at Kuala Lumpur’s quirky Art Deco Central Market, a small theatre upstairs is packed for a play about racial divisions and the myth of social unity here. The performance of Parah ( which means "severe") at the market’s Annexe Gallery by the young team from The Instant Café Theatre Company is a daring look at race and division in a country that paints itself as a shining example of unity, but whose policies are increasingly driving a wedge between the main groups – Malays, Chinese, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Can journalists write good plays? Sarah Helm has been a Washington correspondent for The Independent during the first Gulf War in 1990, reported from Baghdad in the mid-1990s, and was based in Jerusalem for three years. So her debut play about the Iraq War, which stars Maxine Peake and opened last night, is grounded on a career of watching the Middle East. It is also based on experiences much nearer to home: she is married to Jonathan Powell, who was Prime Minister Tony Blair’s close personal adviser during the ill-fated invasion of Iraq.Certainly, after 9/11, Helm was in the thick of things Read more ...
David Nice
Whatever the quality of the material with which they're grappling, there are two undeniable truths about the Belarusian actors who've put their already curtailed freedom on the line by coming to the Almeida Festival this week: they're skilled practitioners of their art and courageous human beings. Read their biographies in the programme and you'll see that the words "detained", "arrested", "attacked", "dismissed" crop up rather a lot. In Europe's last dictatorship, stepping out on stage and speaking a line, a word even, can lead to imprisonment.Be cynical if you will about Western actors Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Although it's a period drama set in the dim and shadowy London of 1956, The Hour can’t help reminding us that the more things change, the more inclined they feel to do a brisk U-turn and fly back to hit us in the teeth. I even wondered whether the BBC had felt like pulling this first episode from the schedules, on account of the scene where chippy young BBC news journalist Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) slipped a bribe to a police officer to gain access to the corpse of a murder victim. In this particular week, it was uncannily close to the bone.Lyon himself would surely have relished being Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Situation comedy relies on strong brands, and some ideas just run and run. Yes, Prime Minister is the stage version of the long-running 1980s BBC television shows Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, which memorably starred Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington. First seen at Chichester last year, the play now returns, with a new cast, for a second West End season. But how does this trusty old brand stand up to the stresses and strains of current political life?Updated to include references to the Coalition Government, the story starts, and indeed remains, at Chequers, with Prime Minister Jim Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Time lurches when you see a historical play. But is it a case of autre temps, autres moeurs, or of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose? Either way, the history needs to slap your face hard with recognition. Schiller’s Luise Miller is a 1784 play that clearly fires at its own vicious contemporary world, a catastrophically corrupt and unruly coalition of German states, and is its world just too far from our own to believe in the tragic young lovers at its core? By no means, in Michael Grandage’s stirring, lucid production at the Donmar, his penultimate before he steps down as artistic Read more ...
fisun.guner
It owns almost twice as many artworks as the Arts Council, and two-thirds of its 13,500-strong hoard is on display at any given time, yet it’s a collection the public never usually gets to see. Since its foundation in 1898, the Government Art Collection has been purchasing work by British artists not for the nation, but to hang exclusively in the corridors of power, from Downing Street to the British consulate’s office in Azerbaijan. Perhaps, in these cost-cutting times, it now feels impelled to justify its existence to the taxpayer by giving it a taster of its work – though, in all Read more ...
fisun.guner
There’s nothing like a reality TV programme to bring a community together. Or maybe not. The Street That Cut Everything took one suburban cul-de-sac in Preston and shook up its residents thus: if they wanted their bins emptied, their street cleaned, their benefits paid and their elderly and needy looked after, they had to do it themselves. The council were going to withdraw all services - bar the emergency services and schools - for six whole weeks. And if that doesn’t sound terribly long, it was certainly long enough to pit neighbour against neighbour when it came to voting over who Read more ...
joe.muggs
The last time I saw Atari Teenage Riot play was in a gig venue above a pub some time around 1999 and it was one of the most intense gigs I've ever experienced. Then-member Carl Crack – who would take his own life not long after – was clearly a man on the edge, and the entire group were acting wired, scared and weird. They made the most stupendous racket, and the well-over-capacity audience reacted by leaping about so violently that the building needed structural repairs afterwards. To be part of that seething crowd required commitment, passion and complete obliteration of ego – it was easy to Read more ...
fisun.guner
How easy is it to stage a dialogue between two artists when they are, in fact, separated by over a century? And is it really an artistic conversation that takes place or merely an imposition of values by the living over the dead? This pertinent question confronts the viewer in an exhibition of two photographers of war-torn Afghanistan. The first, John Burke, took sepia-toned documentary photographs of the second Anglo-Afghan war, from 1878 to 1880 (the first having taken place in 1839-1842), while the second, Simon Norfolk, takes artfully constructed contemporary photographs that blur the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
One of Britain’s most esteemed and influential folk artists, Martin Carthy (b 1941) celebrates his 70th birthday on 21 May. The occasion is being marked by the release of a two-disc career overview, Martin Carthy Essential, and next weekend's celebratory concert at the Southbank Centre, London. Much as he obviously appreciates the gesture, there's an unmistakable sense that this self-effacing man would be just as happy spending the night crammed into a howff, eyeballing his audience from a distance of no more than 10 paces. “A concert like this is the jam on the bread and butter,” he says. “ Read more ...