sex
Thomas H. Green
In 2012 Dexys returned with their fourth album, and first in 27 years, One Day I’m Going to Soar. It was a concept piece, original and funny, chewing over the volatility of love, containing wonderful set-pieces, most especially a trio of songs at its centre (“I’m Thinking of You”, “I’m Always Going to Love You” and “Incapable of Love”) which humorously excoriated the fickleness of romance.Their latest, is similarly constructed, albeit around a different theme. Anyone who connected with One Day I’m Going to Soar will likely find much to enjoy. Dexys mainstay Kevin Rowland gives us a suite of Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It’s been more than 20 years since the premiere of The Shape of Things, Neil LaBute’s prickly drama about couples and friends and the ways we change each other. And boy, does it show. Director Nicky Allpress and a talented young cast try their best with a script that, though updated for this version at the Park Theatre, still feels behind the times.Evelyn (Amber Anderson) meets Adam (Luke Newton, of Bridgerton fame) at work. His work, that is – he’s a security guard at an art gallery, she’s an art student with a can of spray paint she eventually uses to draw a penis on a sculpture. She gives Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There’s been a good deal of discussion on “the socials” about how much Janelle Monáe’s sexy image is a new thing or a big deal.Casual viewers, still stuck on the sharp-suited, theatrically coiffured look with which she crashed into public consciousness in 2010, have acted shocked at her going almost or completely unclad in recent videos and shoots. In turn fans have pointed out the obvious – that her outré sense of fashion and costumery has manifested in many ways over the years, including in plenty of flesh-baring. However, while her looks may have pre-empted it, artistically Monáe Read more ...
Lia Rockey
Sophia Giovannitti begins selling sex because it promises to make her the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time. She also has a “near categorical hatred of work.”I nearly – mentally – tweak that sentence to read “of conventional types of work”, but that simply wouldn’t be true: throughout Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex, Giovannitti asserts that the problem is work itself, which brings us back to the selling of sex as a no-brainer solution for somebody who is actively disengaged with the entire system. Sex work is her unconventional – though no less valid – ticket Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“This audience is very diverse, isn’t it?” joked one of the audience members at Fucking Men at Waterloo East Theatre, a reworking of Tony-winning writer Joe DiPietro’s seminal 2008 play (itself a reworking of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, written in 1897).True in one sense and not in another: the crowd was mostly gay men of a certain age. But then, Fucking Men does what it says on the tin – it’s about gay men falling in and out of bed, and a few other places besides.The format (carried over from La Ronde) is pleasingly circular: 10 scenes, post- or pre-coital, with one character from the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sometimes I go outside and look at our kitchen drain. Where there should be a vortex there’s a largely static pool. Tree roots have recently grown through the old pipes, their clumps colonised with fat, dog hair and coleslaw bits, and though a bit of handpumping will shift some of the stale water for a while, it really needs systemic attention from Dyno-rod. A good Dyno-rodding is what Chichester’s new production of Noel Coward’s The Vortex needs too.The catchline for the staging is that a real-life mother and son play the sex-mad mother and drug-addicted son of the drama, the subtle and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Brandon Cronenberg has inherited his father David’s eye for the twisted and the sinister. After the creepy mind-meld dystopia of 2020’s Possessor, Infinity Pool finds Cronenberg turning his attention to horror-tourism. It’s like The White Lotus on bad acid.Infinity Pool is set in the fictional coastal nation of Li Tolqa – the film was shot in Croatia, but wherever it is, Li Tolqa is an impoverished police state with a draconian legal system which stipulates the death penalty for all crimes. Queasily inverted camera angles and shots of a menacing sunset and dark, roiling waves suggest Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Compared to her peers, Lana del Rey is mightily prolific. This is her eighth album since her breakthough 11 years ago (her ninth in total). Her last album appeared 15 months ago. There’s still much she wants us to hear. Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd is an hour-and-a-quarter long. It sprawls. It could do with an edit, but as so often when talented musicians sprawl, there are also gems.The mood of the album is mostly built around stunningly deft piano, presumably from her usual keys person Byron Thomas. Many of the tracks are becalmed, delicate things. There’s a section of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As films and television series based in New York City tend to do, Fleishman Is in Trouble opens with an aerial shot of Manhattan – except, significantly, this sequence is presented upside down. To the celestial sound of tinkling arpeggios, the slim skyscrapers of the Upper East Side hang down from the sky into a blue cloudless ocean like futuristic stalactites, the camera moving gently through them before dipping, Psycho-style, through a window. There, the man whose life has similarly been upended is lying on a bed in an austere room, with a buzzing phone beside him. Its screensaver is a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Magic Mike began as a cautionary tale rooted in Channing Tatum’s spell as a teenage stripper, then morphed into a franchise of reality and theatre shows. Now this second sequel brings original director Steven Soderbergh back, and leaps into pure fantasy.We find Tatum’s super-stripper Mike washed up at 40, with his much touted furniture business killed by Covid. “Alone and adrift in an ocean of failed relationships and unrealised dreams,” as the initially mysterious female narrator noir-ishly puts it, his stripping days are done. Until, that is, he’s recognised while bartending for unhappy Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A play’s title can be an almost arbitrary matter – there’s no streetcar but plenty of desire in that one for example – and it might have crossed Kim Davies’ mind to call her play Ms Julie, since it is a reimagining of August Strindberg’s 1888 masterpiece, Miss Julie. Thankfully, that title was spiked and not just because it’s trite. Smoke gives us a key to unlock a complicated, clever and challenging play unafraid to treat its audience as grown-ups and all the more rewarding for that.Sami Fendall’s set comprises a square shallow pit filled with black sand with an upturned Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
In the past, playwright Terry Johnson has mixed sex and comedy with hilarious results. His Freudian farce, Hysteria, and his tribute to traditional British Benny-Hill-style comedians, Dead Funny, share a bed of giggling gyrations with his love letter to Carry On films, the innuendo heavy Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick.But now, as his latest show reopens the Menier Chocolate Factory, which has been closed for a while, does he still have the magic touch? With its lurid title, The Sex Party is certainly a come-on, but is it also a turn-off?Johnson’s idea for a sex comedy is very promising: a Read more ...