LGBT+
Thomas H. Green
Christeene is not so much a musical entity, as a performative assault, an artist who pushes drag somewhere visceral, caustic, wilfully edgy and defiantly unpolished. The creation of New York-based, Louisiana-raised Paul Soileau, her videos and shows have thus far probably been more important than her albums, but her third raises the bar.Where previously her music has been rap-laden, post-electroclash, the excellently titled Midnite Fukk Train is more fully-formed, in New York’s underground punk rock tradition. And she nails it.Accompanied by her Fukkn Band, the album has eight tracks and is Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
As its title suggests, Peter Gill’s Something in the Air is an elusive piece – it’s about catching at instinct, responding to intuition, bringing together overlapping hints of present and past lives. From these different stories, spun out of lived experience and imagination equally, the octogenarian playwright leaves the audience to craft a whole.We first encounter the play’s two main characters in a straightforward setting: the institutional straight-backed chairs suggest that Colin (Christopher Godwin) and Alex (Ian Gelder) are in a care home, but the closeness between them – the intimacy Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Robert Icke is an expert in corporate tragedy. I don’t mean that in a bad way - just that he has a penchant for taking classics (Hamlet, The Oresteia, Mary Stuart) and transporting them, with the help of designer Hildegard Bechtler, to the frosted-glass doors and pale wood of the boardroom. The Doctor, his 2019 swan song at the Almeida Theatre now transferred to the Duke of York’s Theatre, is an adaptation of a 1912 play by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. It’s a sharp-tongued vivisection of identity politics, anchored by an astonishing lead performance from Juliet Stevenson.Like all good Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A tender love story has arrived at the Kings Head theatre from the US, where its author, Tanya Barfield, is an award-winning playwright for both television and theatre. The plot is simple: two women — one white, one Black — meet in an office where one is a supervisor, the other a science teacher turned temp, and their lives become entwined over the next 25 years.But Barfield mixes things up by structuring the narrative like a jigsaw puzzle. The audience then has to put all the pieces together.The structuring device guarantees a degree of pathos — there’s a poignancy in learning a relationship Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Britain is a divided nation, but one of the divisions that we don’t hear that much about is that between Pakistani gay men. Written by Waleed Akhtar (who also stars in this impressively heartfelt two-hander), The P Word is about the differences in life experiences between one asylum seeker and one Londoner, and comes to the Bush Theatre in a production which has been supported by Micro Rainbow, the first safe house in the UK for LGBTQ asylum seekers and refugees. So what’s it all about?Set in contemporary London, the 85-minute play begins with two parallel life stories: one is that of 31-year Read more ...
Mert Dilek
A bare interior with tarnished walls, a single bed, and an oxygen tube. The stage seems to have been set for a Beckett play, but the figure who comes to inhabit this dejected enclosure for 90 minutes is grounded in a far different world.Powerful multitudes collide and combine in Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of Who Killed My Father, the acclaimed French writer Édouard Louis’s autobiographical work from 2018. The Belgian director entrusts the monologue to the Dutch actor Hans Kesting, from the Internationaal Theatre Amsterdam ensemble, whose most recent London appearance was in Age of Rage. Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s polarising discourse and there’s polarising discourse, and then there’s Beyoncé discourse. On the one hand, there’s “the Bey Hive”: the very model of a furious modern fandom who will boost her and monster her critics at a microsecond’s notice. There are the commentators for whom everything she does is by definition profound, moral and important, regardless of any hypercapitalist excesses and hanging out with dicators’ offspring. And they're all buoyed up by a press so desperate for “access” that every profile is done with HELLO! magazine levels of management-vetted swooning. Read more ...
joe.muggs
You can’t really blame Lizzo for playing to her strengths. When she started putting out records some nine years ago, there wasn’t really a niche in the market for a flute playing, twerking, positive-thinking, plus-size rapper-stroke-disco-diva.Roundly ignored by the mainstream “urban” American music industry despite her obvious abundant talent, she went about building her own diverse – but leaning female and/or LGBTQ+ – cult following, which grew fast until she couldn’t be ignored. Without changing or dialling down her approach, this eventually resulted in her 2019 ascent to global mega fame Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Last days of June 2022, I sit in my writing hut. My liver is radioactive jelly, my nose reinforced concrete, my leg muscles marathon-cramped, and poisoned perspiration rolls down my forehead, stinging my eyeballs.You’ll already have seen a trillion Twittering threepenny-bit reports on Glastonbury, but you haven’t taken this trip, I promise. So stroll in, fall over, pick yourself back up, take it all in, sniff it all up, drink it all down. Let’s do this.THURSDAY 23rd JUNEFinetime, my regular Glastonbury partner and photographer, is very proud of the tent he’s bought me from Lidl. My own tent Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It takes some confidence for a first-time feature director to interrupt her essentially realistic first feature with a splash of psychedelic abstraction, but Jacqueline Lentzou doesn’t lack for visual or aural daring. Two-thirds of the way through Moon, 66 Questions, a semi-autobiographical drama written and directed by the Greek filmmaker, an astronomer’s view of a night sky appears. Myriad stars glitter in delicate colours, the image morphing into a silver and gold vortex as low-mixed spectral music plays and a staticky snatch of a telephone call is heard.If a literal interpretation Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The piercing-eyed German actor Udo Kier is best known for his supporting roles in many high-profile films, including those of Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant and Fassbinder. In Swan Song, he carries off his first starring role magnificently as wry ex-drag queen and Ohio hairdresser Pat Pitsenbarger, though the film itself is rather meandering and has mawkish, saccharine moments.Director Todd Stephens (Another Gay Movie; Gypsy 83) based Mr Pat on a real character from his home town of Sandusky, Ohio. The film is a nostalgic journey, looking back at the days before gay dads became a norm (“I Read more ...
joe.muggs
A gothic aesthetic is very common in the left field of electronic/club music these days – but it tends to go with fairly extreme sounds: either industrial pummelling, or glitched-out “deconstructed club” as in artists like Ziúr.But Andy Butler and his Hercules & Love Affair project have gone for something altogether different on the fifth H&LA album. Just as, in his early records, Butler went back to the source building blocks of house and disco music, here he's gone right to the roots of goth. So this album is rife with influences. Woven throughout, you can clearly hear Read more ...