LGBT+
Thomas H. Green
At the Dot To Dot Festival in Nottingham, back in May, I noticed some of the most exciting bands I caught were marinated in grunge. One of them was Grandmas House. Their debut album now arrives and the grunge element turns out to be only part of the deal. The queer Bristol femme-punkin’ quartet try on various musical hats but, even at their poppiest, maintain a creeping sense of threat.Their lead weapon is the rasping voice of singer-guitarist Yasmin Berndt, whose vocals sound like no-one else around, a death metal growl plastered around a tone somewhere between Karen O and Scott Weiland. Yes Read more ...
David Kettle
Linus Karp Was Hit With An Umbrella, Underbelly, Bristo Square ★★★★From hectic Princess Di parody Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story (back at the Fringe next week) to wicked Paltrow take-down Gwyneth Goes Skiing, Awkward Productions – real-life partners Linus Karp and Joseph Martin – are Fringe regulars, and they’ve carved a distinctive niche with their high-camp, extremely silly, barbed and splenetic comedy shows.Their offering this year, however, is something rather different. In the summer of 2024, Karp was struck with an umbrella in a homophobic attack in Soho. Martin apprehended the Read more ...
James Saynor
Anyone who’s ever been to a movie set can’t help but struggle to reconcile the utter dismembered chaos of these workplaces with the smooth joined-up pseudo reality of the finished screen product. This jaunty, knowing third feature from Jane Schoenbrun – in which the teen slasher genre more or less eats itself – half-wants us to believe that the tortured film production process flows backwards. That is, the movie comes first. Then it sets out to assemble itself in the real world, torturing everyone all the more.It tells of a 29-year-old cultish filmmaker called Kris (Hannah Einbinder) with a Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Queerness is subversive – it dissolves gender binaries. You know the kind of thing: male/female, straight/gay, married/single, fixed/fluid. Likewise, queer theatre typically calls into question all the genre norms: comedy/tragedy, naturalism/symbolism, everyday story/tale of horror. In Eleanor Tindall’s haunting play, Tender – which returns to the main stage of the Bush Theatre a couple of years after premiering there in the studio – the usual conventions of both gender and theatre are challenged in a passionate love story. Is it a queer romance? Body horror? Haunted house? Who cares? Not me Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The parade of stage musicals borne from films continues with Pride, which takes the open-hearted, small-scale 2014 movie of the same name and brings it to the stage with many of the film's creatives (director Matthew Warchus and writer Stephen Beresford) along for the ride. The unbridled appeal to the emotions will be familiar to those who know Billy Elliot and Kinky Boots, two other musicals sourced in sweet indie English films that acquired a full-throttle theatrical life of their own. (Like Billy Elliot, this show, too, reserves musical pride of place for a song devoted to solidarity, Read more ...
India Lewis
Madfabulous, director Celyn Jones’ retelling of the true story of an heir who bankrupted a peerage, is a truly beautiful film – worth a watch if only for the excellent outfits worn by its iconic queer antagonist (played by Callum Scott Howells). Sailing into his new life, wearing his mother’s burgundy dress, Henry Paget, fifth Marquess of Anglesey (Ynys Môn), "Toppy" (as he is nicknamed), has come to live by his mother’s rule: “always be true to yourself, Henry, it’s the greatest gift you have.” However, tragedy is already near at hand – Toppy coughs into a handkerchief in the first Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Former Royal Ballet principal Federico Bonelli has brought his Northern Ballet company south in the latest of its trademark narrative ballets. His dancers are a huge credit to him, but I wish they were appearing in a more challenging piece.The television adaptation of Anne Lister’s story put her firmly on the map as an early sighting of an English lesbian. Her sexual preferences, unlike male homosexuality, weren’t technically illegal but were still shocking to the politer parts of Victorian society, Those who saw the two TV series may find this stage version a tad tame, though at least they Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Superbloom is the third chapter in Jessie Ware’s transformation, over the last six years, into a self-proclaimed and full-blown disco diva. How does it differ from 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure? and 2023’s That! Feels Good!? Arguably, it leans further into Seventies stylings, as opposed to the more electronically updated direction of its predecessors. It is also juicy with sex and fleshy queer nightclub shenanigans.Ware is a hugely successful podcaster (Table Manners, with her mum) so she probably doesn’t need to make music anymore. This has clearly freed up her approach and she sounds like she Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s the first date of Manchester rockers Witch Fever’s European tour and things are off to an iffy start. Drummer Annabelle Joyce has food poisoning. It was touch’n’go whether the band would play. But they do. Singer Amy Walpole advices us that Joyce may need to leave and puke at any point. But the crop-haired drummer’s made of sterner stuff. They hold their own. The band shaves two songs off the set but it matters little. Witch Fever rock.But let’s rewind. Support act Cowboy Hunters have a buzz growing. It’s easy to see why. The Glasgow duo are an original. They appear to an initially Read more ...
Sarah Kent
American photographer Catherine Opie took her first self-portrait at the age of nine with a Kodak instamatic she’d been given for her birthday. There she stands in the garden, a little toughie flexing her biceps like a muscle man.And there she is again, twenty four years later. This time she presents herself as Bo (pictured below right), a persona developed among her queer friends in California. Her stance – chest square on, feet apart and thumbs in pockets – makes her look like an off-duty cop, an idea enhanced by what could be a baton dangling from her belt. She looks to camera with a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“So then I go and I make another cup of coffee and two pieces of toast with raspberry jelly and now I’m going to call Allen Ginsberg at exactly noon. Because he does his meditations and they told me to call him either at 11 at night or after 12.”On 18 December 1974, Peter Hujar photographed Ginsberg for The New York Times, his first commission from the paper. The meeting with Ginsberg – it’s a tough assignment, Ginsberg never warms up and when Hujar develops the film he says there was “no contact there” – is just one part of the day that he describes in minute detail on 19 December to his Read more ...
James Saynor
Given that the British Red Cross has slammed Britain’s little archipelago of lock-ups for immigrants, and given that the government seems to have upped its xenophobia of late, this fictional look inside an immigration detention centre lands at a helpful time.It’s based, surprisingly enough, on the personal immigration experiences of producer Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor, who here writes and directs her first feature. The length of the movie – a natty 80 minutes – reminded me at first of the BBC’s Play for Today strand of many aeons past, as did its TV-style 4-by-3 aspect ratio, its social-justice Read more ...