India
Helen Hawkins
The Indian writer-director Payal Kapadia scored this year’s Cannes Grand Prix with her first fiction film, All We Imagine as Light, which follows three women trying to make a living in modern Mumbai. It’s a deserving winner, both exquisitely delicate and formally bold.Two of the women are nurses, colleagues at a specialist maternity unit, the third an older cook at their clinic, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), the only one who has had a child. Anu (Divya Prabha, pictured below, with Kani Kusruti), the youngest, is a lively young woman on the verge of a sexual liaison with a young tousle-headed Muslim Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
London-born Akram Khan has come a long way in a 35-year career. He performed as a young teen in Peter Brook’s production of The Mahabharata, then progressed to dance training first in kathak then in contemporary dance. He then created his own company, forging alliances as a choreographer with the unlikeliest forces: English National Ballet, Juliette Binoche and Kylie Minogue. Four years ago he announced his retirement from the stage. Now, at 50, he’s back, unable to resist the siren call of his latest creation, GIGENIS: The Generation of the Earth. The capitalisation is typical Khan: he Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s 1648 in Agra, and an excitable young guardsman has come up with an idea: a giant flying platform that he calls an “aeroplat”. As he might slide off it in transit, for good measure he gives it a belt to tie him down. It would be a “seat belt”, he suggests triumphantly.This detail tells you a lot about the world the American playwright Rajiv Joseph has created in Guards at the Taj (2015). It’s a fantasy, semi-surreal, with one foot planted in the quotidian. The terrain is from a distant era that verges on mythology, a time of autocratic emperors with grand projects, though its two Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Queenie is in trouble. Bad trouble. For about a year now, this 68-year-old Indian woman has been forgetful. Losing her car keys; burning rice in the pan; mixing up memories; just plain blank episodes. At various times, she relives distant moments in her life with her husband Ameet, who died more than 20 years ago. Very soon she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.As played by national treasure Meera Syal, who barely leaves the stage during this full-length tragi-comedy by Tanika Gupta, making a very welcome return to the National Theatre, she grows in emotional stature while her incurable condition Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems cricketer-turned-TV star Freddie Flintoff was lucky to survive his crash in a Morgan three-wheeled roadster in December 2022, and his recuperation has been painful and traumatic. As he explained in the opening episode of his second Field of Dreams series, the accident, which occurred during filming for Top Gear, is going to have long-term consequences. “I struggle with anxiety. I have nightmares, I have flashbacks. It’s been so hard to cope with.”He also had to undergo a series of operations, and didn’t appear in public for many months. But he was determined to continue with his Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In the 1960s, Cilla Black was rescued from hat check duties at The Cavern and made a star. In the 1980s, Rick Astley was whisked away from tea-making at the Stock-Aitken-Waterman studios to launch, 30 years later. a billion RickRolls. In the 2020s, Frankie Taylor is spirited away from a Milton Keynes cinema popcorn stand to the bright (and I mean bright) lights of Bollywood. Okay, it’s the least likely of those unlikely routes to stardom, but this is Musical Theatre, a world in which if you just believe hard enough, you too can be the idol of millions, with all the dubious rewards that Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rahul Subramanian is a well-established comic in his native Mumbai, as evidenced by the appreciative audience of Indian expats gathered at Soho Theatre. His sellout dates in London acted as previews to his debut run at the Edinburgh Fringe, which starts on 2 August.Subramanian is one of several South Asian comics Soho Theatre has introduced to London and Edinburgh comedy fans, and it's a mutually productive arrangement; last year, Urooj Ashfaq, another star of the Mumbai standup scene whom the theatre promoted in the UK, made her Fringe debut and walked away with the best newcomer gong at the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Cricket has always been a lens through which to examine the legacy of the British Empire. In the 1930s, the infamous Bodyline series saw the new nation, Australia, stand up to its big brother’s bullying tactics. In the 1970s, the all-conquering West Indies team gave pride to the Windrush generation when they vanquished an England whose captain had promised to make them grovel. In the 2010s, the brash and bold Indian Premier League saw the world’s largest democracy flex its financial muscle as global power shifted eastwards. Kate Attwell’s 2019 play, Testmatch (receiving its UK Read more ...
Liz Thomson
We’ve come a long way since 1971, when the audience at Madison Square Garden for the Concert for Bangladesh applauded when Ravi Shankar tuned up. Western audiences were first exposed to the sitar in 1965 when George Harrison played one on Rubber Soul, the earliest instance of the instrument being used in rock music. Soon it was all over the place, most often in the form of the Danelectro electric sitar, with its “buzz” bridge design offering an imitation of the sitar’s distinctive sound on an instrument easily playable by guitarists: unlike George Harrison, few took the time to master the Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“It’s nothing like Christmas,” Rachel (Amy-Leigh Hickman) hisses at her brother David (Kishore Walker). She’s trying to wrangle her family into their first ever Diwali celebration, but everything’s going wrong. Her dad Yash (Bhasker Patel) is getting on far too well with her boyfriend Matt (Jack Flammiger). And to top it off, mum Ruth (Catherine Cusack) has found everything but the most important item on Rachel’s meticulous shopping list: the matches.Passing, Dan Sareen’s new “family comedy-drama” at the Park Theatre, raises some interesting points about identity and belonging. But it goes Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
In a fusion of musical traditions both eastern and western, old and new, Scottish Ensemble were joined by virtuoso sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun for an evocative performance of Degun’s own work plus reimagined music by Terry Riley and Hildegard von Bingen at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall.Opening with Veer, from Degun’s 2022 album Anomaly, Degun’s sitar playing is instantly arresting, against a pulsating pedal from the lower strings. As the piece progresses, pizzicato strings create unexpected harmonies and the work progresses through interesting tonal shifts. The musical metamorphosis Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
From the moment that the blood-stained Nathuram Godse rises out of the floor of the National Theatre's Olivier stage and demands ‘What are you staring at? Have you never seen a murderer up close before?’, we are locked into a queasy, teasing relationship with the man who killed Mohandas Gandhi, the latter renowned throughout the world for his passive but effective resistance to British colonial rule in India. Returning for a second run, Indhu Rubasingham’s production has several new cast members, including Hiran Abeysekera as Godse. Playwright Anupama Chandrasekhar was the National’s first Read more ...