race issues
Karen Krizanovich
As a movie it’s a little too neat and a little too worthy but as a benchmark The Butler is a triumph with a strong cast. Director Lee Daniels doesn’t get arty with this story of racial divide and American unrest. Roughly based on the real-life story of Eugene Allen, Daniels' approach is straightforward and highly emotive. There’s plenty for the crowd here, and, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon, the fact that The Butler is accessible across almost every demographic will get its message through to those who need to see it - those who maybe wouldn't see it if it were, say, art house. In some Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the best kept secrets about contemporary theatre is that audiences rather like short plays. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with epic classics, but sometimes it makes a change to witness a playwright who has something to say and manages to say it with economy in 90 minutes or less. New writing’s master of this trend is Debbie Tucker Green, whose plays don’t linger too long on stage, nor do they burden you with an interval. Her latest, Nut, is typically short, just 70 minutes — but is it any good?Elayne, a young black woman, is depressed. When the plays starts she is discussing Read more ...
kate.bassett
Forever breaking into song and dance, musicals are fun, fun, fun. They are primarily what folks go to for uplifting entertainment, are they not? Actually, many of the best aren't anything like that simplistic. Opening at the Young Vic last night, The Scottsboro Boys is no mere barrel of vacuous laughs, though it is comical and buoyant along the way.With its score and lyrics by America’s John Kander and Fred Ebb, and its book by David Thompson, this is a barbed biomusical about racism and miscarriages of justice. Set in the Deep South of the 1930s, it plays – sometimes very sharply – with the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
American ladies, in the 18th and 19th centuries, passed their time in fashionable pursuits such as embroidering samplers and cutting out portraits of family and friends. Harking back to those days, Kara Walker has covered three walls of the Camden Arts Centre with a panoramic installation of cut-paper silhouettes, which she calls Auntie Walker’s Wall Samplers (main picture and below right: Auntie Walker’s Wall Sampler for Savages). Instead of sharing genteel pleasantries, though, she dishes the dirt on the plantation-owning white elite. Her top-hatted gents and southern belles may dance Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Awful crimes are being committed in an Australian outback town: young girls murdered, and dumped in culverts. But what makes it worse for Aboriginal detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), newly returned to his small hometown from the city, is the barely coded and bare-faced racism he encounters, from his cop colleagues most of all; the sense that these girls, because they’re Aboriginal too, don’t matter. They’re just expendable pawns in bigger, evil games being played out in eerie countryside, and the parched streets of an Aboriginal part of town which looks like it’s been left in the sun to Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
It's often a sign of a good drama when, as it concludes, you find it hard to tell which character you dislike most. And so it is with Adult Supervision - all the way through, first-time playwright Sarah Rutherford skilfully manipulates your allegiances, causing your sympathies to shift and shift again until there is no one left to be redeemed.The action of this play takes place on the night of the US election in 2008. Natasha, an uptight, anxious woman with a shiny, too-perfect hairstyle, is hosting a results party for what we assume are a group of her friends. However, it soon becomes clear Read more ...
Joe Muggs
I am increasingly finding it almost impossible to express just how bored I am by Miley Cyrus. I mean, seriously, are we really in such a fix that this guff is a serious talking point? A second-generation celebrity and former child star seems to be going off the rails a bit? OH REALLY, GOSH, THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE, PLEASE TELL ME MORE. A young female celebrity is flashing her parts? SWEET BABY JESUS ON A BORIS BIKE THIS IS AMAZING. A white pop star is crassly adopting the tropes of black culture? WOW NO WAY, YOU'RE LITERALLY SHITTING ME. An American TV awards show has indulged in tacky Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Newcomer Ronny Chieng doesn't waste any time trying to get the audience on his side. He outlines his interesting ethnic background – born in Malaysia to Chinese parents, several years spent in the United States and Singapore, and he did a law degree in Australia - but that mix is distilled into his Chinese ethnicity and its innate superiority to anything Western.He says he's tried reclaiming the word 'chink', in the style of black rappers and the n-wordIt's a refreshing approach, as generally comics crave our affection. In The Ron Way Chieng runs through various stereotypes about Chinese and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Australian stand-up Matt Okine made his UK debut at the Edinburgh Fringe last month and earned himself a best newcomer nomination in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, to add to his best newcomer award at 2012's Melbourne Comedy Festival (jointly won with Ronny Chieng). He's certainly an assured performer, even if his observational humour relies too heavily on the everyday in Being Black & Chicken & S#%t.Chicken – whether the companies Okine keeps in business to feed his habit or a controversial television advertisement back home in Australia – features prominently in the first 10 minutes, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It was only today I learned that, for copyright reasons, it is impossible to use Martin Luther King’s iconic “I Have A Dream” speech in its entirety without paying a hefty licensing fee to his estate. That knowledge made it easier to understand why a new documentary to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington seemed to gloss over its figurehead’s famous words.That those lines ring with familiarity half a century later is testament not only to King’s skills as an orator, but to the activists and civil rights leaders who pulled together what remains one of the largest, and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A magical folktale, a male duet, a classical jewel-box - programmes like this should be a rich part of the warp and weft of a ballet company, a night of rich interest and variety, stimulating dancers with challenges to their grace and storytelling skills. That it comes as the briefest glimpse in English National Ballet’s year is truly a pity, especially as it pays tribute to that superlative catalyst in ballet, Rudolf Nureyev.As a legend he almost instinctively attracts the adjective “blinding”, so impossible an act to follow was he as a stage creature, particularly for the men - but in fact Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Cush Jumbo could very easily have put on a hit show about Josephine Baker. There would have been a chorus line of flappers, replete with spangles and feathers. She would have belted out some of the more enduringly popular hits from Baker’s glory days in Paris. Perhaps the infamous banana skirt would even have made an appearance in what could, essentially, have been a crowd-pleasing jukebox musical.Instead, Jumbo has written a one-woman show so layered and nuanced that occasionally you feel like asking her to pause her performance while you take it all in. Civil rights, domestic violence, Read more ...