race issues
aleks.sierz
One of the absolute highpoints of new writing in the past couple of years has been the Death of England trilogy. Written by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, these three brilliant monologues have not only explored vital questions of race and racism, identity and belonging, but have also provided a record of theatre-going before, during and after the pandemic lockdown.From the first episode, which was staged live at the National Theatre in January 2020, to the second which only had one performance but was then streamed in October 2020, to this final part, which is a film, the story of fractious Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can we turn off the script and simply leave the music to do its soul-stirring bit? That's likely to be a not uncommon response to Get Up Stand Up!, which gives Bob Marley much the same biomusical treatment currently on view in Tina across town (and in New York). The difference, of course, is that Tina Turner is soon to be 82, whereas Marley died 40 years ago, at the preposterously premature age of 36. All the more reason to be reminded of both the music, and the message, of the Jamaican legend whose work comes with an inbuilt call and response, as was movingly evident on press Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“Careful, there’s a hole in the floor.” The warning’s an unusual one, passed along conscientiously by the stewards at the door of the tiny Orange Tree Theatre.The hole in question is long and angular and will soon be filled with water, stretching around one side of the pristine white set of Rice, a new play by Australian-Hmong writer Michele Lee. It’s an intimate two-hander about immigration and belonging, directed ably by Matthew Xia – but, like its characters, it’s suffering an identity crisis.Our heroines are two women of colour: Nisha (Zainab Hasan, pictured below), a young executive at Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"I can't sleep": So goes the fateful opening line of White Noise, the Suzan-Lori Parks play disturbing enough to spark many a restless night in playgoers who are prepared to take its numerous provocations on board. To do so requires various suspensions of disbelief, one quite substantial, on the way to a finish that, in Polly Findlay's Bridge Theatre UK premiere, comes at least 20 minutes earlier than I recall from this play's Off Broadway debut in spring 2019. Comparative speed (the play still feels overwritten) isn't all that's changed in the trans-Atlantic crossing of this portrait of Read more ...
Bill Mayblin
The opening sentence of Andrea’s 2010 historical novel The Long Song is in the voice of Thomas Kinsman, who is introducing the reader to his mother, July."The book you are now holding in your hand was born of a craving," Kinsman declares. "My mama had a story – a story that lay so fat within her breast that she felt impelled, by some force that was mightier than her own will, to relay this tale to me."I have always felt that if you substitute "Andrea Levy" for "my mama" that we have a pretty accurate description here of Andrea’s own literary career. The Long Song was the last of the Read more ...
theartsdesk
How do we mother “at the end of the world”? Among the ruins of late capitalism, climate catastrophe, and entrenched white state violence?Julietta Singh “admit[s] that at a conceptual level there is a crucial part of me that wants to throw in the towel on human life.” Yet, she adds, “motherhood complicates this conceptual willingness.” The Breaks, addressed to Singh’s daughter for her to read (at six years old) and re-read throughout her lifetime, meditates on the rupture between mother and child that will be necessary for her to inherit and transform this world: “I know it is not just me you Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Jasmine Lee-Jones has a hard act to follow – namely, herself. Her award-winning 2019 debut play, seven methods of killing kylie jenner, announced the arrival at the Royal Court of a blistering writing talent whose two sparring women made the room crackle and pop. Still only 22, she has for her second stage piece opted for something rather different, as if to show she has more than just a sharp ear for great dialogue.Curious, which its author performs solo at the Soho Theatre, begins with a striking image: in a full skirted ballgown, she runs on the spot under strobe lighting, so Read more ...
aleks.sierz
God is a tricky one. Or should that be One? And definitely not a He. So when she says take revenge, then vengeance is definitely not only hers, but ours too. American playwright Aleshea Harris’s dazzlingly satirical 2018 extravaganza is about two women seeking justice and getting even, and it comes to the Royal Court from New York, trailing shouts of enthusiasm and the Obie Award for Playwriting. Unlike many plays about African-Americans this one is refreshingly free from cliché, and this new production does it complete justice.The set up is gloriously surreal. Two 21-year-old twins, Racine Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This Danish police drama attempts to tackle the country’s uneasy relationship with the immigrants it’s allowed into its cities over the last 30 years. The result is a somewhat clumsy attempt at fusing social commentary with the visceral thrills of an action movie, complete with car chases, shoot outs and muscle-bound fistfights.The title is the Arabic word for police and Shorta opens with a close up of a black teenager, Talib Ben Hassi, shouting "I can’t breathe" as he's held down on the floor by a white officer. It’s a little cheap to reference a real-life atrocity for Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Is it a thriller? Is it a character study? Leopards, Alys Metcalf’s two-hander about a middle-aged white charity executive – male – and a young job applicant of mixed race – female – goes under the colours of both, but falls short of either genre.A windy retread of a thesis with which few could safely disagree nowadays (let’s say – leopards don’t change their spots, especially male white salaried ones), it makes an underwhelming opener for Christopher Haydon’s tenure of the Rose Theatre, Kingston.Requested by the publicity team not to reveal the final twist of the 90-minute drama, I can Read more ...
aleks.sierz
For more than three decades, playwright Winsome Pinnock has been at the forefront of new writing, often experimenting with form as well as documenting the lives of black Britons. Her new play’s original opening at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester was halted due to you know what in March last year, so it was then broadcast as part of the BBC’s Lockdown theatre festival on Radio 3, and it now arrives at the National Theatre, having already won the 2018 Alfred Fagon Award. As the story moves between London in the present and in 1840, multiple perspectives on the black British experience Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s hard to imagine a movie more of its time than Zola, as it takes on sex, race, the glamorisation of porn and the allure of the ever-online world. For 90 minutes we are embedded in the lives of two young American sex workers and it’s a wild ride that leaves its audience breathless as they try to keep up with the hand-brake turns and sudden changes of pace and tone. Is it another feminist comedy reminding us that it’s every woman’s right to deploy her body any way they want? Or is it a nightmarish true portrait of the sex trade? Or is it a film about the covert racism that comes into play Read more ...