feminism
aleks.sierz
Obsession makes for good drama. Looking back over 30 years of in-yer-face theatre in general and female monologues in particular – anything from Fleabag to Superhoe – I’m struck by the power of the individual voice to take us on journeys into the underworlds of extreme feelings. Dark places; dark thoughts; darkness visible. So Tanya-Loretta Dee’s debut play, Loop, which she performs herself, starts with a very promising premise. Described as a “surreal one-woman fever dream”, it plunges us into the mind of a young woman whose infatuation with a man rapidly becomes obsessive and self- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hail the spirit of the dance. And of acting. And of driving and flying. At a time when new writing is clearly in decline, and the most successful shows are adaptations or revivals of the classics, the National Theatre returns to one of its big hits from a year ago, thrillingly recast. Unsurprisingly, it’s an adaptation of a popular book of yesteryear: Kendall Feaver’s version of Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild’s classic 1936 coming-of-age novel about three adopted sisters who go to drama school. Set in a fossil-filled crumbling house in Cromwell Road, the plot is about the absent-minded Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Hamilton may have helped the West End recover from The Covid Years, but it carries its share of blame too. Perhaps that’s not strictly fair on some of its spawn, but do we get Coven without that musical behemoth? If not, this one’s on you Lin-Manuel.
We’re back in the early 1600s, though not in music and speech, natch. Shakespeare had written the (literally) bewitching A Midsummer Night’s Dream 15 years earlier and The Tempest, with a necromancer as its protagonist, two years prior, but, in 1612 and again in 1633, children were denouncing their families for witchcraft. Of course, as is the Read more ...
Heather Neill
Perspectives on Shakespeare's tragedy have changed over the decades. As Nonso Anozie said when playing the title role for Cheek by Jowl in 2004, white actors once "concentrated on their perception of what a black man is". Laurence Olivier, whose 1964 performance in polished ebony make-up was once the gold standard for the part, famously observed black dock workers to learn their gait and mannerisms.Since the 1980s, as numerous actors of colour have tackled the role, the importance of Othello's race has shifted further from the centre of productions. At the National Theatre in 2013, Adrian Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Witch Fever are a rising four-piece, originally formed in Manchester. Their debut album, 2022’s Congregation, was a raw, sludge-punk howl that represented singer Amy Walpole’s livid rejection of the stridently patriarchal Charismatic Church of her upbringing.Since then, they’ve toured with everyone from Biffy Clyro to IDLES, and gathered a righteous amount of attention (and, of course, they look great). Their second album is less laser-focused on religious subject matter. It’s a match for its predecessor but with greater use of atmospheric effects and electronic trimmings.Opener “Dead to Me Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Like fellow New Yorker, Lee Miller, Lee Krasner changed her given name, the better to be accepted into what she called "The Boys Club" of 20th century Modern Art. Like Miller, she was known more for her working and romantic partnership with a major artist – for Man Ray, read Jackson Pollock. And like Miller, Lee Krasner is now belatedly acknowledged as a major artist in her own right – though she does not have a solo Tate show, as Miller does this Autumn (at least not yet). We open on her working in her Long Island studio, surrounded by her paintings, canvases that you can’t quite place – Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If a classic story is going to be told for the umpteenth time, there is a good bet it will come with a novel spin on it. So it proves with a new Dracula by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, directed by Emma Baggott. Here, the Count makes just one heavily disguised appearance, and the focal character is Mina (Umi Myers). After a predictable scary start – a sudden thunderclap and total darkness – Mina appears with a lantern. She is our narrator, sole survivor of the terrible events that she and her team of five helpers are going to re-enact. Fear, she tells us, will be her focus, the anxieties that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I love irony. Especially beautiful irony. So I’m very excited about the ironic gesture of staging a show with no words at the Royal Court, a venue which boasts of being the country’s premier new writing theatre. Billed as “a new experiment in performance”. Cow | Deer uses only sound to evoke the lives of two animals, one domesticated, the other wild.Created by director Katie Mitchell, writer Nina Segal and sound artist Melanie Wilson, the piece is performed using the talents of a quartet of performers and Foley artists (Foley being sound effects usually added post-production to films, and so Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Love was the Norwegian climax of Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo trilogy, the most lovestruck vision of his city and boldest prophesy of how to live there, beyond borders and bonds of sexual identity and shame. Released here between Dreams’ meta-memories of swooning first love and Sex’s look at desire undefined by gender, it also settles in Oslo’s heart.Gay nurse Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen) and his straight doctor colleague Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig) are complementary leads in a film as concerned with female desire as the queer lens Haugerud’s work is conceived through. The set-piece speech, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As the nation basks in the reflected glory of The Lionesses' Euro25 victory, it could hardly be more timely for the Southwark Playhouse to launch a new musical that tells the tale of The Maiden. That was the boat, built and sailed by Tracy Edwards and her crew of resourceful, resilient women, in the Whitbread Round The World Yacht Race 1989, the first such crew to finish the gruelling challenge.It’s hard to credit now, but women, you know, that demographic that do childbirth, were once deemed too fragile for many sports. The first woman allowed to ride the Grand National, Charlotte Brew, only Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
War, pestilence, famine, death. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had my fill of them all. So what better time to visit the genuinely sunny uplands – the long-anticipated second album from Wet Leg.My, those seemingly demure, Amish-styled girls have grown (see the demonic cover, replete with scary talons and an unhinged-looking Rhian Teasdale). They’ve officially supplemented the line-up with the three very hairy boys who’ve been playing with them on live shows and everybody’s been involved in the writing. And everything’s turned out very well indeed.Superlative singles “CPR” and “catch these Read more ...
Tami Neilson
I was born Tamara Lee Neilson. I had an Uncle Kenny and an Aunt Dolly (who played guitar and banjo, respectively). I mean, did I really have a choice to become anything but a Country singer?I fell in love with Dolly Parton when I was six years old, spinning her records on my dad’s record player while dancing on the olive green shag carpet of our living room. At 10 years old, I opened for Kitty Wells, the Queen of Country Music and the first woman to ever have a number one hit on Country radio, with my family band, The Neilsons. I knew I wanted to be like these women when I grew up; wear Read more ...