history
aleks.sierz
Unlike the National, the RSC has not had a good record of producing exciting new plays in the past 20 years or so. But one exception to this rule is the theatre’s support for the work of David Edgar, whose masterpiece Pentecost was put on by them in 1994. Now, with his latest, Written on the Heart, arriving in the West End, where it opened last night in a production directed by Gregory Doran (the RSC’s newly appointed artistic director), audiences will have a chance to travel back in time to explore a crucial event in the creation of English culture and national identity.But they will need to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Immediately before Edgar Reitz (pictured below) made Heimat - the 52-hour film sequence begun in 1984 telling 20th-century German history in profound provincial detail - he was washed up, a New German cinema revolutionary who was no longer new, outpaced by Wenders, Herzog and Fassbinder. In his 80th year, Heimat has secured him a unique place in German culture, and now these first two releases in The Edgar Reitz Collection (both UK DVD debuts) excavate his own buried past.Lust for Life, his 1967 feature debut, begins as a nouvelle vague-beholden, breezily erotic romance between Elizabeth ( Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It's about as close to a spiritual awakening as I’ve had in my entire life,” said Lionel Richie. He was standing close to the unmarked grave of his great-grandfather, in the pauper’s section of an overgrown Chattanooga cemetery. Richie began the search for the man he’d discovered was called John Louis Brown thinking he was on the trail of a scoundrel. He ended it discovering Brown was a former slave who had become a pioneer of the American civil rights movement. Throughout the programme, Richie wasn’t given to emotional displays and wasn’t verbose. His usual comment as each discovery was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Throughout our history, women and power have made an uneasy combination." Dr Helen Castor made it clear the path to power depended on more than the right alliances, lineage, and marriage partner. Even if all those were spot on, being female was enough to halt any rise. The series began with the medieval Queens Matilda and her daughter-in-law Eleanor of Aquitaine. Both wanted to rule, not reign like Queen Elizabeth II.She Wolves brought Castor’s book She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth to television. The programme’s sensational title was a given. With an audience beyond Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's a quintessential Channel 4 idea. Take one hot-button issue (racial integration, or lack of it), go to Bradford ("one of Britain's most segregated cities," according to the voiceover), and shove a racially mixed bunch of locals into a thinly-disguised Big Brother house to see how they'll get along. To stir the pot a bit more, the eight chosen "contestants" all failed the government's UK Citizenship test.Not that that singles them out, particularly. The programme-makers staged test-sittings all around Bradford, from the Asian-dominated city centre or Manningham to predominantly white areas Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The scene is ineffably English. The thock of mallet on ball, the clack of ball through hoop, the gentle sun adding a benediction. A senior gent in natty English threads looks on from the pavilion, a member of this club for 55 years. Everything is just so, apart the setting: Cairo. “Was there nothing good the British did here?” wondered Jeremy Paxman. Apart from croquet. “All kinds of imperialism is bad,” ventured his host with a wily smile.Technically Egypt wasn’t part of the empire. We just hung around there for 70 years to keep an eye on the canal connecting the tiny island called home with Read more ...
josh.spero
I had misgivings before watching Britain's Greatest Codebreaker last night on Channel 4: the advertised mix of drama and documentary tends to send a signal that neither half is sufficiently well done. And within a minute, it was clear that this was such a chimera: over-dramatic voiceovers for the documentary part, Ed Stoppard acting to the back row in the drama part.From a documentary, I want an understanding of the man's context, his career, his thought, his achievements. None of these were present in any meaningful way. There was no clear explanation of what his genius was - his idea of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Steve Buscemi says he’s “from the country of Brooklyn”. In the wake of Boardwalk Empire he could have said the empire of Brooklyn. Although the family history disinterred was genuinely strange, this first entry in the new series of Who Do You Think You Are? USA was no emotional roller coaster, mostly because of Buscemi’s low-key affability.At times, he looked surprised to be the subject of the programme. Yeah, he’s the cadaverous, snaggle-toothed, weasel-faced Buscemi we love. But look at those dark-rimmed eyes. Bush baby big, they’re made for surprise. He was taken aback by what the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Don't be misled by the mini-history lesson with which Trevor Nunn's belated London stage premiere of The Lion in Winter begins, a sequence of dates, facts and maps that scroll up a decoratively appointed screen and threaten to turn the sumptuous Haymarket Theatre (Nunn's home now across four productions) into an upscale schoolroom. Set over the Christmas season in 1183, James Goldman's play is deliberately anachronistic, often pretty silly fare in which a rancorous family have a gleeful go at one another, the difference being that this envenomed brood isn't just any Tom, Dick or Harry but, Read more ...
fisun.guner
For dull reasons to do with a dodgy digital box and a very old analogue telly, I can’t tune in to BBC Four during live transmissions, so I either catch up on iPlayer, or (lucky me as a journalist) get to see programmes early. But I’m very glad I can get it at all, for when the BBC cuts come to pass and its premier arts channel starts broadcasting archive-only material, as it proposes to do, then I think I might just stop watching telly altogether.This is because everything, but everything, that the BBC stands for is encapsulated by BBC Four’s original programming. And in the visual arts it Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This is a strangely kaleidoscopic approach to documentary. A selection of recently unearthed footage and interviews which shows the Black Power movement in the USA through the eyes of idealistic Swedish film-makers, now re-edited and framed with the voices and music of both modern and veteran black radical cultural figures, it provides a disorienting, shifting set of superimposed viewpoints of a period in which in any case change seemed to be the only certainty.The footage itself is gripping and often truly eye-opening, particularly when it's at its most ordinary. The stories of dramatic Read more ...
fisun.guner
Tracey Emin once made a tent for which she gained some notoriety. On it, she’d appliquéd the names of everyone she had ever slept with – including, as a child, her beloved Granny Hodgkins. Sadly, the tent, called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, was destroyed in a fire at Momart, the art-storage warehouse, in 2004. The loss of her tent was keenly felt, and she refused to recreate it. But genealogists in Who Do You Think You Are? gave Emin something to smile about when they dug deep into her family history: Emin comes from a long line of tent-dwellers. When she was shown Read more ...