politics
Nick Hasted
“Your term is about to end,” Italian president De Santis (Toni Servillo) is told, with implications which extend far past politics. Director Paolo Sorrentino is second only to old maestro Marco Bellocchio in his current fascination with Italian power, from The Young Pope (2016) to Berlusconi satire Loro (2018). His muse Servillo’s bunga-bunga act in the latter contrasted with his gnomic reserve as post-war Machiavelli Guilio Andreotti in Il Divo (2009) and now this fictional sphinx, lizard-still even as damped passions threaten to finally erupt. His last half-year as head of state may anyway Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
In director Paolo Sorrentino’s new film La Grazia, Tony Servillo portrays a fictitious Italian president, the ageing Mariano De Santis, who – in the last six months of his successful seven-year term – must grapples with two moral dilemmas. De Santis must decide whether to sign into law a bill legalizing euthanasia, certain to end his friendship with the Pope, and whether to pardon two prisoners who killed their partners. He is meanwhile haunted by the knowledge that his late wife, for whom he grieves, was unfaithful.Grazia (the word means "grace" and "pardon" in Italian) is the seventh Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want. Er… another nostalgic play about growing up in a Yorkshire post-industrial city?Hard on the heels of John Godber’s Leeds-set Do I Love You? running last week at Wilton’s and Kat Rose Martin’s marvellous Bradford-set £1 Thursdays at the Finborough (my best new play of 2023), we take a 30-mile trip south to Doncaster (Donny to friends) for Children of the Night. Is it something in the air? Besides the coal dust of course.
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If those earlier productions traded primarily on the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
American photographer Catherine Opie took her first self-portrait at the age of nine with a Kodak instamatic she’d been given for her birthday. There she stands in the garden, a little toughie flexing her biceps like a muscle man.And there she is again, twenty four years later. This time she presents herself as Bo (pictured below right), a persona developed among her queer friends in California. Her stance – chest square on, feet apart and thumbs in pockets – makes her look like an off-duty cop, an idea enhanced by what could be a baton dangling from her belt. She looks to camera with a Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
As a disillusioned ex-admirer – like so many – it’s with a degree of dread that I approach Morrissey’s 14th solo album (the first for six years) not least because of the positively Kafkaesque struggle to actually hear it. But an open mind is necessary.What if there were no axe to grind? What if the hopeless search for love had been answered? What if there were no conspiracy theories? Why, then, there would be no new album (and – let’s face it – we’re all thigh-high in conspiracy theories right now). So we must buckle up and hear what the once-great man has to opine. The hilarious album Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In his illustrious career, director Michael Waldman has profiled all manner of divas, from Elizabeth Taylor and Lord Byron to Karl Lagerfeld and Christian Louboutin. So why not Tony Blair?His three-part series traces Blair’s story from his schooldays at Fettes College in Edinburgh to the present day, although perhaps not all points in between, with a string of contributors (alongside plenty of Blair himself) including Jack Straw, Clare Short, former Labour supporter Robert Harris, David Miliband, Harriet Harman, Jonathan Powell and more. Peter Mandelson delivers some typically slippery Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Would you want to marry a spy? After watching Betrayal, probably not.Writer David Eldridge has used the paradigm of the secret world as a means of exploring relationships both personal and professional, and how one is liable to corrode and distort the other. A quote from the 13th Century Persian poet Rumi is dropped in as a clue – “the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces.”The Persian link is apposite, since the story orbits around an Iranian plot to stage a terrorist outrage somewhere in the Manchester area. Our somewhat flawed protagonist is MI5 agent John Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Such is the USA administration’s overwhelming saturation of the news cycle that, even with the comforting presence of an ocean between, it’s hard not to find Talking Heads’ unforgettable lyric relentlessly buzzing through your brain on repeat – “And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?”. It is the mission of The American Vicarious theatre company to “... create art that challenges us to confront the gap between America’s ideals and its lived realities”. Guys, there’s never been a better time.Almost three years on from their electrifying Debate: Baldwin vs Buckley recreated Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Lawlessness and lack of accountability seem, tragically, on the verge of becoming a new American norm, so what better time to re-consider High Noon, the classic 1952 Western that forefronts issues of moral rectitude. Will Kane, the marshal who stays on in his tight-knit New Mexico community to square off against an outlaw whom he sentenced to hanging five years before, possesses a moral propriety akin to the likes of Atticus Finch. And look how often To Kill A Mockingbird lands on stage. On the face of it, you can see the sense in adapting Fred Zinnemann's four-time Oscar-winner to the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Among the many versions of America on parade in the ever-expanding universe of Taylor Sheridan, the one portrayed in Mayor of Kingstown is surely the bleakest. As AI helpfully informs us: “The show offers little respite, depicting extreme violence, moral ambiguity, and systemic failure without much sugarcoating.”Yet the longer it goes on, the more addictive it becomes. Now in the middle of season 4, the show continues to tighten its tendrils of menace, thuggery and corruption with seemingly no concern for the viewer’s delicate sensibilities. Much of its allure stems from its impeccable Read more ...
Gilbert & George, 21st Century Pictures, Hayward Gallery review - brash, bright and not so beautiful
Sarah Kent
There was a time when Gilbert & George made provocative pictures that probed the body politic for sore points that others preferred to ignore. Trawling the streets of East London, where they’ve lived since the 1960s, the artist duo chronicled the poverty and squalor of their neighbourhood in large photographic panels that feature the angry, the debased and the destitute.
Scrawled on decaying walls, the racist, sexist and homophobic slogans they recorded on their wanderings, create an atmosphere of dread – of impending and actual violence. The streets were mean and, especially as gay men Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Armageddon is here again, as Kathryn Bigelow’s first film in eight years examines the minutes before a nuclear missile hits Chicago from multiple perspectives, finding no hope anywhere.Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) is our first witness, clocking on as normal in the White House Situation Room, where a missile launch at a febrile international moment is at first logged as inconsequential. When it sickeningly dips from orbit towards the US, Ferguson’s patrician cool exudes the comforting professionalism you’d wish for at the potential end of the world, till she calls her husband and Read more ...