race issues
Helen Hawkins
Clint Dyer is the first black director of Othello at the National Theatre, a venue that once staged the piece with its actor founder Laurence Olivier playing the lead role in blackface. We are reminded of this now-reviled practice before curtain up in a flickering montage of programme covers projected onto the set going back to 1634, and stopping at 2022. An actor arrives with a broom and cart to sweep the stage area clean. So are we going to be seeing a new take on the tragedy? Yes and no. This Is a laudably ambitious production, but one that has jettisoned some of the play's key Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Half a century ago, Michael Tippett’s A Child of our Time felt inescapable. For a youth-choir singer in the London of that period, his wartime “modern oratorio” supplied a reference-point of ambition and achievement to which our exasperated elders always seemed eager to refer – and to defer.Later, if it never quite vanished, Tippett’s epic updating of the sound-world of Messiah and the Bach Passions to dramatise 20th-century tyranny, persecution and revolt slipped into relative neglect.The five African American spirituals that anchor it began to look suspiciously like “cultural appropriation Read more ...
Harriet Mercer
Derek Owusu’s debut That Reminds Me won the Desmond Elliot Prize in 2020. When asked what it was that she loved most about Owusu’s semi-autobiographical 117-page book, Preti Taneja, chair of the judges (and winner of the prize herself in 2018) answered, without hesitation, “the form” and Owusu’s “compression of poetic language”. Owusu’s latest work, Losing the Plot, imagines what life was like for his 18-year-old mother when she arrived in London from Ghana in 1989. His fictional narrator’s mother swaps the “dusty trails of Jamasi” for the grey pavement of Tottenham, “a village of disguised Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Robert Icke is an expert in corporate tragedy. I don’t mean that in a bad way - just that he has a penchant for taking classics (Hamlet, The Oresteia, Mary Stuart) and transporting them, with the help of designer Hildegard Bechtler, to the frosted-glass doors and pale wood of the boardroom. The Doctor, his 2019 swan song at the Almeida Theatre now transferred to the Duke of York’s Theatre, is an adaptation of a 1912 play by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. It’s a sharp-tongued vivisection of identity politics, anchored by an astonishing lead performance from Juliet Stevenson.Like all good Read more ...
David Kettle
"The poem is real," intones entertainer-turned-courtier Ellen solemnly as a prologue and epilogue to Rona Munro’s vivid, vibrant new James IV: Queen of the Fight, presented by Scottish producers Raw Material and Edinburgh’s Capital Theatres in association with the National Theatre of Scotland, and getting its premiere at the city’s Festival Theatre before a Scotland-wide tour.It’s the follow-up – and latest in a projected series of no fewer than seven historical plays (the sixth, Mary, opens soon at London’s Hampstead Theatre) – to Munro’s James Plays trilogy unveiled at the Edinburgh Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As Dipa Baruwa-Etti’s latest play, The Clinic, reminds us, the Tory party has a strong showing of Black MPs – Badenoch, Cleverly, Kwarteng. It was finished long before the latest Cabinet appointments, but presciently picked those three names, all now with key ministerial roles. But the title isn’t strictly a reference to the regular meeting MPs hold with the public, even though one of the characters, Amina (Mercy Ojelade), is a struggling Labour MP. The term is what one upwardly mobile Nigerian family believe they can offer less fortunate Black people – and, in particular, Wunmi (Toyin Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Music plays a big part in the life of Dwight, an 11-year-old black lad growing up in early 80s Leeds. He doesn't fit in at school, bullied because he is "slow", and he doesn't fit in outside school, would-be friends losing patience with him.But he does fit in at home, loved unequivocally by a protective mother, somewhat enviously by a bickering sister, and rather reluctantly by a preoccupied father. Like the records he plays on the gramophone, his life is about to spin – and he'll have to hold on to the warmth of family love in a cold world.Zodwa Nyoni's new play for the Kiln Theatre packs Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’re in New York City, in an upscale loft apartment, with that absence of stuff that speaks of a power to acquire anything. There are paintings on the walls, but we see only their descriptions: we learn that the owner (curator, in his word) really only sees the descriptions, too, and that the aesthetic and artistic elements barely register. The maid has been given the evening off – it’s soon obvious why – and an art dealer flits about nervously waiting for his client to arrive with a view toward arranging a significant purchase. The artist is Black; everyone else, indeed, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I live in Brixton, south London. A few days ago, the borough’s aptly named Windrush Square hosted events which celebrated the contribution of the Windrush Generation and their descendants.With Windrush Day being 22 June, last week was originally going to be the opening night of Roy Williams’s new Hampstead Theatre play, The Fellowship, until plans had to be changed because Lucy Vandi, who was to play the main character, fell sick and performances were postponed. Cherrelle Skeete bravely takes on this major role and her dynamic stage presence, partly with script in hand on press night, is one Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Director Alice Diop read an article by Pierre Bergounioux in which he described how he began writing to draw attention to his overlooked neck of the woods – Correze, in central France. It was a lightbulb moment for her: “My approach as a film-maker suddenly became clear to me, I realised I’d been making films about the suburbs in an obsessive way for the past 15 years… to conserve the existence of ordinary lives, which would have disappeared without trace if I hadn’t filmed them.”We is a celebration of some of those ordinary lives – people who live alongside the RER railway line to and from Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s great to see August Wilson’s early play – the first of his “Century Cycle”, that remarkable decalogy that explored a century of Black American experience through the prism of the playwright’s native Pittsburgh – back on the London stage. It’s been two decades since it premiered at the National Theatre, winning the 2002 Olivier Best New Play award.Another reason to celebrate is Tinuke Craig’s terrific production at the Old Vic (produced with Leeds Playhouse and Headlong), which gives Jitney an energy and sense of wider perspective that the play, concentrated as it is around a single Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Kendrick Lamar is so breathlessly revered it’s sometimes hard to pull apart what’s going on in his records. It’s sometimes felt like he might become the rap game Radiohead: exploratory, aware, hugely technically accomplished, endlessly thematically “important” – but not actually that interesting to listen to.And certainly on the 18 tracks of his comeback album after a near four-year break – five since his last album proper, DAMN. – there’s a lot that’s potentially extremely worthy. There’s a lot of moody piano lines, there’s a lot of ultra-intricate rhyme patterns, and Read more ...