satire
stephen.walsh
The Tchaikovsky de nos jours, is Theodore Gumbril’s dismissal of Skryabin in Aldous Huxley’s Twenties novel Antic Hay. For some reason, Alexander Skryabin has suffered more than most from snap judgements of this kind. He has been the woolly theosophist, the vacuous, over-inflated mystifier, the effete, self-indulgent decorative – everything except the refined, disciplined creative genius. It’s high time these images were consigned to the rubbish dump of history, along with the dull-witted Bach, the mad Beethoven, and for that matter the slushy Tchaikovsky. Skryabin was a superior artist whose Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“You can never embarrass politicians by giving them publicity.” Michael Heseltine’s verdict on Spitting Image – he claimed, of course, he never watched it – was surely one of the truer things said in last night's Arena memorial Whatever Happened to Spitting Image?, marking the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the satirical puppet show. It certainly seemed balanced when set alongside an apoplectic Ted Heath, who accused those behind it of being, basically, a bunch of jealous, irresponsible losers.Antony Wall’s film did achieve a nice sense of balance about a programme that went from Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If anybody is daft enough to argue that the television licence fee isn't worth it, then just usher them before this superb mockumentary, brought to you by the team behind Twenty Twelve.Now that the Olympics are but a pleasant memory, London 2012 head of deliverance Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville, again mastering the art of suppressed exasperation) has been appointed as head of values at the BBC. It's a job - as David Tennant's languid commentary informs us – that was created in the wake of “recent learning opportunities at the Corporation” (a beautifully subtle reference to the Jimmy Savile Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Hito Steyerl is a cool cookie. As well as studying film and television in Munich, she gained a PhD in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and her intelligence shines through in every magical frame of her videos. Three are on show at the ICA along with two recorded talks in which she uses words and pictures to spin beguiling tales that – part fact, part fancy – operate in the space between lecture and performance.Water permeates every pixel of her latest video, Liquidity (main picture and below right) which follows the fortunes of financier Jacob Wood. After losing his job Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It is the fate of political leaders to be played by actors. In the circumstances Richard Nixon hasn’t been dealt a bad hand. He has been portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, by Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon on stage and screen and by tall handsome Christopher Shyer in Clint Eastwood’s J Edgar. But towering over them all is Harry Shearer, who has been impersonating Tricky Dicky since Nixon was actually president.Shearer is best known in the UK for his voicing of Montgomery Burns and other characters in The Simpsons, and for Spinal Tap’s priapically challenged bass player Derek Read more ...
kate.bassett
This political satire is hardly a case of rapid-response playwriting. Opening in London's West End last night, after a month touring the regions,The Duck House is a farce about a fictional MP caught up in the parliamentary expenses scandal which hit the headlines way back in 2009. One certainly might have expected Dan Patterson (of TV’s topical Mock the Week) and Colin Swash (from Have I Got New for You) to have been swifter out of the blocks in co-authoring the script. Or have they just belatedly extracted it from their bottom drawer (adding a prologue wherein the MP looks back on the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Mary J O'Malley's play had its premiere in 1977, it must have seemed quite shocking – vivid descriptions of sex and the male anatomy (albeit only in the minds of boy-obsessed 15-year-old schoolgirls at a convent school), spiteful nuns and the occasional fruity language. Nearly four decades on, though, audiences at Kathy Burke's businesslike production – the first major revival of a play that has become a touring warhorse - wouldn't bat an eyelid at any of this. And, post-Catholic Church sex scandals, even a joke about nuns and rape has lost its power to shock (although it remains Read more ...
David Nice
Now here’s a funny thing, possums. Back in 1990 when one great Australian Dame, Joan Sutherland, gave her farewell performance, another, a certain housewife superstar from the Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds, seemed closer to retirement age.Now La Stupenda is no more, Dame Edna is a gigastar and it’s her turn to shrill a gladdie-waving goodbye to her adoring public. She doesn’t look a day older, nary a hair out of place in that immaculate lilac coiffure. Daring to upstage her in a final speech is manager Barry Humphries, still with his hand in the till while Edna gives all for her art Read more ...
fisun.guner
From Hogarth through to Gillray and Cruikshank, it was Georgian England that gave rise to a graphic tradition of satire. The powerful were lampooned and the pretensions and avarice of the upper and aspiring classes duly ridiculed. But the poor did not escape moral censure. Far from it. Then as now we had the virtuous and the feckless poor, and it was the love of gin that often bought the latter down.But as biting caricature in England waned, giving way to the more genteel illustrations of the Victorian era, one figure in France was to dominate the form: Honoré Daumier, whom Baudelaire – that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although it’s impossible to make a case for The Breaking of Bumbo as a great film, it is a bizarre, compelling, hyper-real slice of Swinging Sixties nonsense as essential to the era as Privilege, What’s Good For the Goose and The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. It gave Joanna Lumley her first proper role and pretends to be radical, but is in fact about as envelope-pushing as a Whitehall farce. The makers were so out of touch with the mood of times that it was primed for release in September 1970, by which time the Sixties bloom had all-but withered and died.After 15 minutes of dull scene- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a great line near the beginning of Fox’s nine-parter Meet the Russians: “Money can’t buy you taste. It can buy you a personal shopper.” If this show's participants had splashed out on a bit of PR advice as well, you wonder whether the answer would have come back to steer clear of such television exposure, even when Fox came knocking. Not because there are any dreadful secrets to be found in those ample closets – unless you count some of the interior design – but because the result makes them look a bit like they’re out of a bad soap.It’s all so easy to mock. Just as it’s easy to Read more ...
Simon Munk
If you think games are for kids, or not art, or beneath you – read on. Grand Theft Auto V, while flawed in many ways, proves you wrong. The latest in the controversial and 18-rated series has already broken first-day sales records for just about every artistic medium ever. Huge numbers of adults across the UK will be sitting down to play it tonight. Take that, Hollywood. Or, Vinewood, as the game would have it.Vinewood as GTA V is set in Los Santos – a virtual replica of Los Angeles and its surroundings. Like its predecessors it's a "freeroaming" or "sandbox" game. There is a spine of plot- Read more ...