prostitution
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 ...
Charlie Stone
Edgar Degas is famous for his depictions of ballet dancers. His drawings, paintings and sculptures of young girls clad in the uniform of the dance are signs of an artistic obsession that spanned a remarkable artistic career. One work in particular – a sculpture of a young ballet dancer in a rest position – cemented his reputation as a pioneering spirit, unafraid of provoking controversy in the pursuit of perfection. It is this sculpture and the story behind it that Camille Laurens explores in Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, whose immersive translation by Willard Wood conveys a deeply Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Anyone who saw Félix Maritaud playing the angry activist Max in Robin Campillo’s Paris ACT UP drama 120 BPM will certainly remember him (main picture). He came to the film as a non-professional, from an arts student background, and builds on that performance to deliver a visceral central role in Sauvage, the feature debut of another French director, Camille Vidal-Naquet. It’s a remarkable achievement for both, a harsh study of life on the street in which Maritaud plays a homeless 22-year-old hustler, Léo – though we don’t hear him called that once in the film, fluidity of names being part of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tonight comes with a caveat, delivered before proceedings begin by the one-woman show’s writer and performer Nicôle Lecky, who’s sitting in a chair centre-stage. She damaged her foot during Sunday’s matinee at the Brighton Festival, dancing about, and has since had to do the whole thing seated. She assures us it was this type of read-through-style show that made the Royal Court Theatre originally commission the production in the first place. She hopes it will, therefore, not disappoint. It does not.Lecky plays Sasha, a 24-year-old mixed-race woman who starts Superhoe living at home with her 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 ...
David Nice
If you can’t put a name to any of Jack the Ripper’s victims – and spin it however you please, victims they remain – then you shouldn’t buy the publicity about this new opera "bringing dignity back" to the murdered women in question. Isn’t it time to stop feeding the troll/killer, much as Jacinda Ardern did so swiftly and movingly under different circumstances last week, and let the five eviscerated corpses return to dust in peace? Composer Iain Bell, disturbed by their fates from an early age, sincerely thought otherwise. But though he serves up some carefully-considered vocal writing at ENO Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Postcards from London is a surprise. You will certainly come away from Steve McLean’s highly stylised film with a new concept of what being an “art lover” can involve, while his subject matter is considerably more specialised, not least in the sexual sense, than its seemingly innocent title might suggest. Mischievously self-conscious in tone, its niche approach to certain established themes – principally gay culture and art history – leavens any pretension with generous humour.Harris Dickinson plays Jim, an 18-year-old naif (pictured below) who leaves behind the restrictions of his Essex home Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Rodney Ackland must be the most well-known forgotten man in postwar British theatre. His legend goes like this: Absolute Hell was originally titled The Pink Room, and first staged in 1952 at the Lyric Hammersmith, where it got a critical mauling. The Sunday Times’s Harold Hobson said that the audience “had the impression of being present, if not at the death of talent, at least at its very serious illness”. Hurt by such criticism, Ackland fell silent for almost four decades. Then, as he struggled against leukemia in the 1980s, he rewrote the play. Produced by the Orange Tree Theatre in 1988, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“I start out as an outsider, usually photographing other outsiders, and then at some point I step over a line and become an insider,” wrote American photographer Bruce Davidson. “I don’t do detached observation.” A large number of the images in Another Kind of Life were taken by photographers who took care to befriend their subjects. Given that these were people on the margins of society – either from choice or necessity – gaining their trust was no mean feat. Once accepted, though, the photographer was in clover.In the mid-1960s, Danny Lyon took many memorable shots of Chicago bikers burning Read more ...
David Kettle
The harsh metallic rasp of a cigarette lighter; a glamorous, vulnerable prostitute in distress; a noble lone crime-fighter standing dejected in the rain. All the familiar tropes of noir are present and correct – in fact, almost self-consciously ticked off – in this entertaining thriller from Pete Travis (Dredd, Endgame). But they’re in a jarringly unfamiliar context: this is modern-day, grimy, multi-ethnic west London – located specifically with mentions of Scrubs Lane and Kensal Rise tube station – with its relentless gentrification, luxury housing developments sprouting all around, small- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We like to think of Georgian England as a wellspring of elegance: the Chippendale chair and the Wedgwood teapot, the landscaped vista and the neoclassical townhouse. But, as subversively embodied in the mock heroic couplet, the seemly Age of Reason had a seamy underbelly. There was order, but also ordure.Take Harris’s Life of Covent Garden Ladies, published in 1789 and updated four years later, advised on the services available to gentlemen of leisure. Miss All-s-n of No 4 Glanville Street, it reported, is “now just in her prime… rising seventeen… can trot, amble, & even gallop, if Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Sex workers come in all shapes and sizes. Everyone knows that. But why do they do it? Why does anyone take the risk of being intimate with a stranger for money? This new show, which was not only devised with the help of genuine prostitutes, but is also acted by them, introduces us to both the enormous variety of sex workers and to their wide range of motives. The play, which was created by director Mimi Poskitt and playwright Molly Taylor, takes us by the hand and gently ushers us into a darkened room, designed by Katrina Lindsay, to show us a slice of life that is mainly invisible to most of Read more ...