sex
Thomas H. Green
Whitesnake were always the most absurdly priapic of the successful Eighties heavy rockers. It was therefore with some glee that this writer approached their 13th studio album. In the snowflake age, where offence is taken at the slightest politically incorrect infraction, these hoary oldsters would surely be a ball. They did, after all, once infamously release an album entitled Slide It In. It turns out, however, that for much of the time, overblown musical cliché is the lasting aftertaste.David Coverdale has led Whitesnake for just over 40 years although, of the rest of the band, only drummer Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Nicôle Lecky’s one woman show Superhoe has added fire to the reputation of an already fast-rising actress and writer. Based around Sasha, a Plaistow girl who aspires to pop stardom, it’s a clear-eyed, very modern play, filled with its central character’s motor-mouthed bravado and examining the Instagram generation’s relationship with sexual objectification. It comes to the Brighton Festival in May.Raised in London, Lecky, 28, is of mixed British-Jamaican descent. Since training at the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts she has gone on to appear in TV shows such as Death on Paradise, Fresh Meat Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The grand finale of Jamie Lloyd’s remarkable Pinter at the Pinter season is this starry production of one of the writer’s greatest – and certainly most personal – works, inspired by his extramarital affair with Joan Bakewell. The 1978 play is famous for its reverse-chronological structure, however Lloyd’s stylish, expressionistic take emphasises the daring not just of the formal trickery, but of the unsparing scrutiny of humanity.Soutra Gilmour’s stark set resembles a gallery, with the tangled trio as its shades-of-grey exhibits; it’s a reminder, too, that these yarn-spinning schemers Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not just the Peter Pan of Pop, but also its very own Houdini. With the aid of shed-loads of money, an illusion-spinning PR machine and the most aggressive lawyers that money could buy, Michael Jackson managed to make it to his premature exit in 2009 without being sent to jail. Dan Reed’s sprawling two-part documentary Leaving Neverland comes to bury Jackson, and to do posthumously what nobody managed to achieve in his lifetime.Reed focuses on the stories of two boys who became, for a time – or perhaps forever, considering the terrible emotional legacy it all left them with – Jackson’s pets. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Have you ever felt the hot shame of saying or doing the wrong thing? Not just embarrassment – that's for amateurs, says Lou Sanders in her wonderfully honest and revealing show Shame Pig, in which she essays some of her life's red-faced moments. Embarrassment is fleeting and lends itself to a good anecdote (or a fine joke in a stand-up set), she says, while shame is a much more corrosive emotion, and one that young women in particular burden themselves with unnecessarily.The show is part stand-up, part performance, as her brief but whip-smart take-off of a TED talk at the top of the hour Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It's 18 years since the last Royal Trux album, but it might just as well be 18 months, so easily have they slipped back into their sound. OK, Neil Hegarty and Jennifer Herera have been gigging together again on and off since 2015, but even so it's quite astonishing how natural this record sounds. But then again, the Royal Trux sound was always something that sounded more like a channelling of something elemental than anything composed or contrived.As ever, the fundamentals of sleaze rock are here: lashings of Velvets and 1970s Stones, the “no wave” sound of New York, a little bit of Cramps Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Abdellatif Kechiche, the Tunisian-French director, is perhaps best known for the lengthy and explicit sex scenes in La vie d’Adèle (Blue is the Warmest Colour). His latest film opens, slam in your face, with a sequence of passionate love-making: well-shot, edited and played by the actors, but almost as raw as porn. We watch, along with Amin (Shaïn Boumédine), the film’s main character, who peers, fascinated through a gap in the blinds.This voyeuristic moment resonates with the filmmaker’s own almost obsessive need to expose without subtlety the details of sexual activity. A kind of voyeurism Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The first line of this show is “I'm the guy who you meet right after you come out of a long-term relationship.” On the night I see The Guy Who..., Adam Riches has three tries with it before he meets his target, a woman who has been dumped by a long-standing boyfriend.His character, whose name we never learn, is reading the Sunday papers – “the physical edition!” – with reading glasses placed artistically in his mouth as he ponders what he has just read, while we take our seats in this funky bar in King's Cross. He's super woke, super cool and super suave. But he's also super dangerous.He Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Burning, which is the first film directed by the Korean master Lee Chang-dong since 2010’s Poetry, begins as the desultory story of a hook-up between a pair of poor, unmotivated millennials – the girl already a lost soul, the boy a wannabe writer saddled with a criminally angry father. The addition of a Porsche-driving third millennial with a swanky apartment in Seoul’s Gangnam District not only ramps up the tension between the two instantaneously but creates one of the most infernal romantic triangles in modern Asian cinema. Entering its third act, the movie morphs into a noir-steeped Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“No one wants a pervert for a daughter,” thinks Marnie (delightful TV newcomer Charly Clive), a 24-year-old from the Scottish Borders, who has intrusive thoughts. Don’t we all? But relentless graphic images about “fucked-up sex” have been messing with Marnie’s head since the age of 14, most recently featuring her mum (Arabella Weir) and dad, which rather puts her off her stride when she’s trying to give a nice speech at their anniversary party.It’s like The Sixth Sense, she says, but instead of seeing dead people she sees naked ones, usually having sex, occasionally involving animals. This Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A one-night stand between a female college student, Margot, whose part-time job is selling snacks at the cinema, and thirtyish Robert, a customer, goes pathetically awry. It was disappointing, uneasy, perhaps more, and memorialised in all its edgy discomfort in Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person”, published in the New Yorker in December 2017. The tale hit the #MeToo zeitgeist, charting a deeply unsatisfactory sexual encounter, where the girl just thinks it’s more trouble to stop than continue. The tale went ballistic, with something like four million hits on the net. And now it is the centre Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When it was announced that Cate Blanchett was making her National Theatre debut with Martin's Crimp's new play, When We have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, its website exploded with people wishing to buy tickets. To those many thousands disappointed, I say: “Well done, you!”The play's subtitle is “Twelve Variations on Samuel Richardson's Pamela”, so it certainly starts from an interesting place. The epistolary novel from 1740, subtitled “Or, Virtue Rewarded”, concerns a young maid, Pamela, whose master, Mr B, makes frequent and unwanted sexual advances to her. After many refusals, he Read more ...