LGBT+
Russ Coffey
For those unfamiliar with his work, Stephin Merritt is like a modern-day Cole Porter: prolific, highly camp, and with a genius for beautifully crafted witty three-minute songs. He performs with the 6ths, The Gothic Archies, Future Bible Heroes as well under his own name. However it is with The Magnetic Fields that he has achieved greatest recognition. I'm here to discuss their new album, Love at the Bottom of the Sea, out early next month. Fans are hoping that it might match the brilliance of Merritt's magnum opus, 1999’s triple, 69 Love Songs, where he exhausted every permutation of romance Read more ...
ellin.stein
The advent of AIDS tore through San Francisco’s Castro district, the heart of the city’s gay community, with the same ferocity as Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. Obviously there were differences - buildings and infrastructure remained intact and this was a slow-motion disaster that unfolded over years as opposed to days - but a devastated community reeling from loss was similarly left abandoned by indifferent authorities and so forced to fall back on its own resources to cope and rebuild. The other difference, of course, was that everyone knew what a hurricane entailed Read more ...
Jasper Rees
At Thanksgiving in 1999, a 75-year-old retired widowed museum director came out to his family. He had only recently been widowed after a marriage lasting more than four decades. One of the people to whom he broke the news was his son Mike Mills, then in his early thirties and not yet a film director. This year the movie inspired by that moment was released, and it now appears on DVD.Beginners, written and directed by Mills, features a delightful and zesty performance from Christopher Plummer in the role of Hal, who announces his homosexuality to his son, a cartoonist played by Ewan McGregor. Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Nearly 20 years have whizzed by since Jonathan Harvey, then a 24-year-old comprehensive school teacher, wrote a play in the school holidays – and caused a stir. That play was Beautiful Thing, dealing with the then (and now?) contentious issue of two 16-year-old schoolboys, next-flat neighbours in the high-rise south-east London council estate of Thamesmead, who fall in love – and overcome prejudices and obstacles, not least their own self-realisation.It was a daring work. “I wrote it out of anger and outrage,” Harvey says in the programme notes. “The age of consent for gay men was 21, whereas Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Chris New’s nervy intensity is the big news in Weekend, an intermittently affecting British film that ought to bring this terrific theatre actor (he played Alan Cumming's lover in his breakthrough role in Bent) to a larger audience on screen. Playing one half of an incipient duo who are busy negotiating what this still-fledgling couple might mean both to one another and to themselves, New offers up a study in restlessness shot through with charisma that is astonishingly complete – so much so that you want to know far more about his character, Glen, than a contrastingly Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It has been four years since Alan Carr toured with a live show, and he's been much missed from the circuit. From his first appearances at the Edinburgh Fringe when he entertained audiences with tales of his past life as a call-centre worker and being the woefully non-sporty son of a football-manager father, he was destined for stardom.Television appearances – game shows, quizzes and chat shows – followed, and despite his huge recent success I think producers have not yet managed to find the right vehicle for the ever-smiling and hugely engaging Carr. He follows in a line of a certain Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy tells a small-scale story that’s sensitive to its depiction of gender uncertainties. However, because its cast are pre-adolescents, the wider overtones of sexuality don’t really come into the picture (though it won the LGBT Teddy Award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival). It’s not exactly the tale of a “summer of love”, and is resolved in a finally benign way, but there’s much that is poignant in its heroine’s development to a greater self-awareness.Ten-year-old Laure (the very talented Zoé Héran) arrives in her family’s new home, where her father and heavily pregnant Read more ...
philip radcliffe
This is not exactly Edward II the musical. There’s no singing, but music plays a leading role. It is the food of love of the sort that dared not speak its name – and there is excess of it for my taste. The idiom is jazz of the edgy sort fashionable in Paris in the 1950s, reflecting pretty boy Piers Gaveston’s exile there, where he has been banished by Edward I for getting too close to his wayward son.Director Toby Frow chooses to move Marlowe’s play nearly 650 years on to the 1950s, notable amongst other things for the newsworthiness of homosexual causes célèbres, as the timeline diagram in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a recent article, David Hare complained about “a national festival of reaction” in the arts, exemplified by such supposedly Establishment-leaning works as The King’s Speech and Downton Abbey. His real target was Terence Rattigan, currently being hailed in many quarters as a national theatrical treasure enjoying a renaissance in this centenary year of his birth.Far from being neglected, argued Hare, Rattigan has rarely been out of the limelight, but his work now chimes with the “wheedling tone of self-righteous privilege” which he detects as a hallmark of the David Cameron era. I don’t know Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Terence Rattigan’s art of concealment is what makes The Deep Blue Sea so rich and true an observation of the way people behave. Being deprived of his concealing mask is the crucial idea of the interesting new play partnering it at Chichester to mark Rattigan's centenary: Nicholas Wright’s Rattigan’s Nijinsky, which incorporates an unproduced Rattigan TV script into a drama of why it was not produced.The two plays, acutely directed for Chichester by Philip Franks, make illuminating contrast, too, purely in theatrical method - Rattigan’s straight-up focus on people in a room and the things Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The early gurglings of love, full of vulnerability and risk, thrill and discovery, are the very stuff of the movies. Romance is cinema’s basic currency. Whenever the familiar heroic faces of the big screen are not firing pump action weapons from the hip at CGI baddies, they are falling head over heels. So it is in Beginners, but with one or two eye-catching variants. Hal, just widowed after 44 years of marriage, now wishes to play the field. He’s 75. And as he informs his son Oliver, he is keen to give free rein to his long-repressed homosexuality.Beginners is the semi-autobiographical second Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sarah Waters’s highly praised novels have marched from the page to the screen with regimental regularity and no apparent sacrifice in quality. Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, with their big Victorian brushstrokes, were built for television no less than Dickens is. With The Night Watch, adapted last night, her subject was still the love that dare not speak its name. But two things were different. This time Waters’s sweeping saga was compressed into a single film. And it was brought forward in time to the Blitz, when a modern lady’s drawers could be whipped off in a flash.As usual with Read more ...