politics
We Own This City, Sky Atlantic review - 'The Wire' creator David Simon is back on the Baltimore beat
Adam Sweeting
It has been 14 years since The Wire, David Simon’s labyrinthine epic about crime and policing in Baltimore, reached the end of the line. Yet it seems he couldn’t let it lie, because he’s back on the Baltimore beat with We Own This City (made by HBO, showing on Sky Atlantic). This time, the series is based on the eponymous non-fiction book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, with crime novelist George Pelecanos sharing the “Creator” credit with Simon.This is not going to be a relaxing or easy watch, and flopping out on the sofa with a large glass of something mellow is not the ideal way Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One effect of the film I Get Knocked Down, a playfully constructed journey around the life of Chumbawamba vocalist Dunstan Bruce, is to remind that socio-political rage was once woven into the fabric of popular music. Old footage from the band’s Leeds squat, Southview House, in the early Eighties, shows one of them jovially composing a song called “Norman Fowler is a Shit-stain in Margaret Thatcher’s Underpants” on an acoustic guitar (Norman Fowler was Thatcher’s Secretary of State at the time). It’s funny and silly, but also made me long for the era when art-fury was a common cultural Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Kendrick Lamar is so breathlessly revered it’s sometimes hard to pull apart what’s going on in his records. It’s sometimes felt like he might become the rap game Radiohead: exploratory, aware, hugely technically accomplished, endlessly thematically “important” – but not actually that interesting to listen to.And certainly on the 18 tracks of his comeback album after a near four-year break – five since his last album proper, DAMN. – there’s a lot that’s potentially extremely worthy. There’s a lot of moody piano lines, there’s a lot of ultra-intricate rhyme patterns, and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
British political life in the Boris Johnson era routinely seems stranger than fiction, and this adaptation of Sarah Vaughan’s novel about a Flashman-style Tory MP should delight all those who view Westminster as a sewer of privilege, corruption and back-slapping old-boy networks. Refreshingly, it doesn’t dabble in actual politics at all, but the action speeds along with an easy fluency which comfortably carries the viewer over its multiple absurdities.Rupert Friend plays James Whitehouse, a Conservative minister under the Prime Ministership of Tom Southern (Geoffrey Streatfeild). A smooth and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
When Rhum + Clay conceived this show, the idea of a comic becoming a political leader might have prompted thoughts of Boris Johnson's carefully cultivated buffoonery on "Have I Got News For You" and elsewhere. Since then, a certain Volodymyr Zelenskyy has given politician-comedians a rather better name. Comedy, as is so often the case, is in thrall to timing.Such thoughts may be inevitable as Matt Wells' attempts to create a show detailing his philosophy of political leadership are repeatedly subverted by his stage assistant, Julian Spooner, who wants politics to be "fun" (main picture Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Few critics become playwrights, but Tim Walker has done just that with Bloody Difficult Women, his debut. It's taking a risk; should any of his less generous critical colleagues wish to take a shot at the poacher turned gamekeeper, it's open season. On the other hand, it could place a friendly critic in an uncomfortable position; what if it's awful? Full disclosure: I used to deputise for Tim Walker at The Sunday Telegraph (he now writes for The New European) but before this press night we had met only once, so I think it's safe to proceed.The play follows the clash between anti-Brexit Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nowadays, the jokes almost write themselves. As each new revelation of the Bacchanalia at 10 Downing Street appears (with much more to come, no doubt), political comics like Matt Forde must rub their hands with glee. It's almost as if he can just state the facts of what has come out that day, do a honk-honk sound and we'll know he's talking about our clown-car government. Thankfully, in his podcast The Political Party, he does more than that.This series' fortnightly podcasts are being recorded at the Duchess Theatre in London, and the audience get more bangs for their buck as they watch the Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
A man sits at a table in an otherwise bare room. Shot in monochrome and positioned off-centre, he reads a newspaper and smokes a cigar, lazily obscured as two other figures drift into and out of shot. A brief fight ensues. A man falls to the floor and is dragged away. Suddenly, a door opens. A new man stands at the foot of a staircase. It leads to another room, where yet more men await.This is early Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the first film in the first volume of Arrow’s new collection of his works. The movie’s title is Love Is Colder Than Death (1969), and its opening is typical of a Read more ...
John Carvill
Thomas Pynchon’s saturnine '70s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) begins with “[a] screaming [that] comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” In contrast, on 10 March 2019, when a Boeing 737 MAX operated by Ethiopian Airlines took off from Addis Abada and, six minutes later, plunged into a field near the town of Bishoftu and killed 157 people, there very much was something to compare it to. Less than six months earlier, a MAX belonging to Indonesia’s Lion Air had crashed into the Java Sea thirteen minutes after takeoff, killing all 189 passengers Read more ...
aleks.sierz
After all the tides of monologue plays have ebbed, British new writing is now paddling in the pools of state-of-the-nation drama. At the Royal Court, there is Al Smith’s Rare Earth Mettle, while the National Theatre is staging Moira Buffini’s Manor, a play set in an English country house, the traditional metaphor for examining the condition of the country and its peoples. Both plays, of course, engage with the hot — or should that be gently warming? — subject of climate change. So, after a gap of more than five years, I was initially excited to see Buffini back at this flagship venue, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“How to explain Theresa May?” Grace Petrie muses from the Summerhall stage as she introduces decade-old opener “Farewell To Welfare”. “Well, in 2010, she was as bad as we thought it was going to get.”That is, on the face of it, the problem with being a protest singer: in a just world, your songs should ultimately lose their potency. But the crowd at this twice-rescheduled Edinburgh show have been waiting a long time to hear Petrie’s powerful messages of solidarity across class, race, gender and ability lines and while the names may change, the sentiments are as relevant as ever.Lockdowns Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Tuesday, 8 November 2016. Vera is in a New York hospital room giving birth to a son. On anxiously checked phones, the votes are piling up for Hillary, but the states are piling up for Trump. Vera’s world will never be the same again.Mathilde Dratwa’s new play, Milk and Gall (directed by Lisa Spirling, Theatre 503's Artistic Director), takes a searingly unsentimental look at 21st century parenting in the big city, mining plenty of laughs along the way. Speaking from experience, I can vouch that it’s all true – except, perhaps, that the reality is even worse!In her mid-thirties, Vera ( Read more ...