politics
Oslo, National Theatre review - informative, gripping and movingTuesday, 19 September 2017
Documentary theatre has a poor reputation. It’s boring in form, boring to look at (all those middle-aged men in suits), and usually only tells you what you already know. It’s journalism without the immediacy of the news. But there are other ways of... Read more... |
Adam Macqueen: The Lies of the Land review - light, but enlighteningSunday, 17 September 2017
We are now firmly in the post-truth era as defined by Oxford Dictionaries: "adjective - relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." Never... Read more... |
What Shadows, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh review - compelling, urgent, unashamedly provocativeThursday, 14 September 2017
You’ve got to hand it to David Greig. The artistic director of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre has shown quite a knack for surfing the zeitgeist with his programming – and more importantly, tackling urgent political issues in a properly theatrical way.He... Read more... |
Wasting Away, Channel 4 review - we can't fix people while the NHS is brokenFriday, 25 August 2017
Journalist Mark Austin is no stranger to conflict, having reported from war-torn landscapes including Rwanda, Iraq and even the ITN newsdesk. However, when the battle lines were drawn closer to home and involved an enemy he couldn’t see, the veteran... Read more... |
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power review - Al Gore's urgent updateFriday, 18 August 2017
When An Inconvenient Truth won the best documentary Oscar 10 years ago, the film’s success marked two significant events: a positive turning point in the campaign to avert environmental catastrophe; and the resurrection of the public career of Al... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Director Peter Kosminsky, Part 2Friday, 18 August 2017
It was only at the dawn of the Blair age that Peter Kosminsky truly emerged as a basilisk-eyed observer of the nation’s moral health. By the time New Labour came to power in 1997, Kosminsky had been working for several years on a film which was... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Director Peter Kosminsky, Part 1Wednesday, 16 August 2017
The name will never trip off the public tongue. Millions watch his work - most recently his superb realisation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. But there is no hall of fame for television directors. It’s only on the big screen that they get to be big... Read more... |
The Majority, National Theatre review – a minority interestTuesday, 15 August 2017
A new plague is sweeping British theatre: audience participation. Instead of just sitting back and enjoying the show, your visit to a venue is now likely to involve voting on the guilt or innocence of terror suspects (as in Terror or Blurred Justice... Read more... |
Prom 29 review: BBCSO, Bychkov - Musorgsky's Khovanshchina sears in concertMonday, 07 August 2017
"Ura!" as soldiers cry in Russian epic opera's last fling, Prokofiev's War and Peace: supertitles have arrived at the Proms, after much special pleading here and elsewhere. They're needed more than ever in Musorgsky's typically quirky survey of... Read more... |
A Tale of Two Cities, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre review - it was the longest of timesMonday, 17 July 2017
Much loved, yes. But Dickens’s novel is probably little read by modern audiences and so a chance to see a new adaptation of this tale of discontent, riot and general mayhem set in the French revolution and spread across London and Paris in the late... Read more... |
Committee review - we're all on trial in new Kids Company musicalTuesday, 04 July 2017
A memorable 2015 parliamentary select committee hearing asked Kids Company CEO Camila Batmanghelidjh and chair of trustees Alan Yentob whether the organisation was ever fit for purpose. Tom Deering, Hadley Fraser and Josie Rourke’s new verbatim... Read more... |
Jonathan Miles: St Petersburg review - culture and calamitySunday, 02 July 2017
Talk about survival: St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, now again St Petersburg, all the same city, has it nailed down. It was founded through the mad enthusiasm, intelligence, determination and just off-the-scale energy of Peter the Great in 1703... Read more... |
