race issues
Samuel Takes a Break... in Male Dungeon No. 5 after a long but generally successful day of tours, The Yard Theatre review - funny and thought-provokingFriday, 23 February 2024
You do not need to be Einstein to feel it. If the only dimension missing is time, 75% of a place’s identity can invade your very being, hollow you out, replace your soul with a void. It happened to me at Auschwitz and it’s happening to Samuel at... Read more... |
Just For One Day, The Old Vic review - clunky scenes and self-conscious exposition between great songsThursday, 15 February 2024
So, a jukebox musical celebrating the apotheosis of the White Saviour, the ultimate carnival of rock stars’ self-aggrandisement and the Boomers’ biggest bonanza of feelgood posturing? One is tempted to stand opposite The Old Vic, point at the... Read more... |
The Settlers review - a western populated only by anti-heroesFriday, 09 February 2024
From its opening shot – of a flock of sheep backlit by the sun’s rays – The Settlers is visually stunning. But the beauty ends there; as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that everything else about this episode in Chile’s history is cruel and... Read more... |
Entangled Pasts 1768-now, Royal Academy review - an institution exploring its racist pastTuesday, 06 February 2024
In Titian’s painting Diana and Actaeon,1559, a cluster of naked beauties bathes beside a stream. Scarcely visible in the right hand corner is a black woman helping the goddess hide her nudity from Acteon who has stumbled into her private glade. The... Read more... |
The Most Precious of Goods, Marylebone Theatre review - old-fashioned storytelling of an all-too relevant taleTuesday, 30 January 2024
As last week’s news evidenced, genocide never really goes out of fashion. So it’s only right and proper that art continues to address the hideous concept and, while nothing, not even Primo Levi’s shattering If This Is a Man, can capture the scale of... Read more... |
The Color Purple review - sensational second time round for Alice Walker's novel on screenSaturday, 27 January 2024
How many re-tellings can Alice Walker's The Color Purple take? A helluva lot, as the candid Sofia, one of the work's seminal characters, might put it.Adapted by Steven Spielberg for the screen in 1985, and then as a Broadway musical that had two... Read more... |
Dreaming and Drowning, Bush Theatre - dense and intense monologue about Black queer identityTuesday, 05 December 2023
Kwame Owusu’s 55-minute one-hander does just what it says on the tin: it features a young student who dreams he is drowning. But its brevity is no bar to its being a dense and intense experience, worthy winner of last year’s Mustapha Matura Award.... Read more... |
Passing, Park Theatre review - where do we go from here?Monday, 20 November 2023
“It’s nothing like Christmas,” Rachel (Amy-Leigh Hickman) hisses at her brother David (Kishore Walker). She’s trying to wrangle her family into their first ever Diwali celebration, but everything’s going wrong. Her dad Yash (Bhasker Patel) is... Read more... |
Ishion Hutchinson: School of Instructions review - learning against estrangementMonday, 20 November 2023
School of Instructions, a book-length poem composed of six sections, is a virtuosic dance between memory and forgetting, distant tragedy and personal grief. At times, Hutchinson’s language perhaps forgets itself in its own excess. His lines are... Read more... |
Othello, Riverside Studios review - three Iagos pitch Shakespeare's villain into the 21st centuryMonday, 09 October 2023
Shakespeare gives Iago over 1000 lines to implant the jealous rage in Othello, so there’s plenty to of raw material to work with. The director Sinéad Rushe has had the idea to split these weaselly words between three actors, a device that seems so... Read more... |
The Old Oak review - a searing ode to solidarityFriday, 29 September 2023
Ken Loach has occasionally invested his realist TV dramas and movies with moments of magical realism – football inspiring them in The Golden Vision (1968) and Looking for Eric (2009) – but magical spaces in them are rare. In The Old Oak,... Read more... |
R.M.N. review - ethnic cleansing in rural RomaniaThursday, 21 September 2023
If you think we’ve got culture wars, then welcome to Transylvania. This rugged Romanian region is home to a bewildering overlap of ethnicities and tongues – Hungarian, a bit of German and Romanian itself – such that Cristian Mungiu’s new movie... Read more... |
