sex
Joe Muggs
Knowing a deceased artist's archives are available for re-release is a double-edged sword. Will there be a shoddy flood of any and every old bit of tat a la Jimi Hendrix? Will there be half-arsed, half-finished and even fake songs bodged together by trashy but popular modern dance remixers like Michael Jackson? Will the vaults just stay infuriatingly locked? With the impossibly prolific, but often self-indulgent Prince, it is doubly worrying: who has the rights? What will the quality control filter be like?Well, thank all that is holy, on the evidence of this release they're taking the right Read more ...
Owen Richards
What signals the end of a relationship? The loss of attraction? Infidelity? Or is it, as Wanderlust explores, something more innocuous? The opening episode of BBC One's latest show packed in enough domestic drama to sustain most series, but found its pressure points in unexpected places. This is not a story of betrayal, but an honest conversation on what happens when lust leaves but love remains.When we met Joy and Alan (Toni Collette and Steven Mackintosh, main picture), they're going through the motions. Foreplay consists of a disinterested strip and a mild reassurance of “ready?” This isn’ Read more ...
Veronica Lee
As we enter the venue, Rose Matafeo is playing a game of mini table tennis with a member of the audience. Nothing that follows seems to relate to this “just a bit of fun to start the show” – but, trust me, it's one of the cleverest bits of misdirection you will ever see. The penny drops only at the end of Horndog, for which the New Zealander deservedly won the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Award for best show at the Fringe at the weekend.It's a high-energy hour, as Matafeo gallops through heaps of gag-laden material in a show that she says more than once is just about having fun, but which Read more ...
David Kettle
La maladie de la mort ★★★ Toxic masculinity in all its appalling variety is a hot topic across Edinburgh’s festivals this year – just check out Daughter at CanadaHub and even Ulster American at the Traverse for two particularly fine and shocking examinations.But few works can provide quite as clinical and uncompromising a dissection of the male gaze as the International Festival’s La maladie de la mort, written by Alice Birch and directed by Katie Mitchell, based on the 1982 novella by Marguerite Duras, and one third of the residency from Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Read more ...
Owen Richards
When director Jenny Lu graduated from university, the promise of a big city career quickly turned into a series of rejections. Around this time, a close friend of hers committed suicide by jumping off a bridge – unbeknownst to their circle of friends, this girl was working in the sex industry. Lu has mined these real-world experiences to craft an unflinching but deeply touching film.Taiwanese graduate Tina (Teresa Daley, pictured above right) is our gateway into this world. With post-university funds running low, and a boyfriend recently made redundant, her job hunt eventually leads her to a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Iconoclasm, orgasms, and rampant rhetoric are all on irrepressible display in The Wooster Group’s recreation of the 1971 Manhattan debate that pitted Norman Mailer against some of the leading feminists of the day. The evening proved almost as notable for who didn’t attend (feminists Kate Millet and Gloria Steinem refused to debate him) as who did (Germaine Greer, Lesbian Nation author Jill Johnston), but its electric anarchy resonates powerfully in today’s confused world.The Wooster Group – under the simultaneously deadpan and excoriating eye of its director Elizabeth LeCompte – has been Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Not far into Aftermath, Tate Britain’s new exhibition looking at how the experience of World War One shaped artists working in its wake, hangs a group of photographs by Pierre Anthony-Thouret depicting the damage inflicted on Reims. Heavy censorship during the war combined with the traumatic human toll meant that lone helmets and ravaged trees came to stand easily for the dead, while wrecked landscapes and crumbling buildings questioned the senselessness of such utter destruction.In one photograph the cathedral crouches like an abject creature, low and painful behind a foreground strafed with Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Would it come as a terrible surprise to learn that this record is highly problematic? Well, duh. Kanye West is the sad clown narrating the global tragicomedy, a troll on an epochal scale, a bundle of contradictory drives all attempting to express themselves to reductio ad absurdum levels. Every time he seems to trip himself up and the world acts as if he's humiliated, it just spurs him on to go “uhuh, you think that's bad? Watch this.” The most powerful of all among those tangled drives seems to be an appetite for preposterousness: hip hop's natural flamboyance expanded way beyond a Read more ...
Katherine Waters
A body can be pushed to the brink, to the point where thoughts flatten to a line of light, and come back from death, but the heart is complex and the damage it wreaks barely controllable. For Grace, Lia and Sky, the three sisters of Sophie Mackintosh’s debut novel The Water Cure, living by a discipline which tames their bodies and emotions to strict rituals is more than a matter of self-control – it is a matter of survival.They’ve been brought up by Mother and King, their father, in a sprawling dilapidated island hotel, away from the mainland where a toxic scourge to which men are Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Mario Vargas Llosa has written a thriller which opens eye-poppingly. Two wives, one staying over with the other, discover in the course of the night that they are in fact bisexual. “Chabela stayed and slept in the bed with Marisa,” it says towards the bottom of page one, “and now Marisa felt the sole of her friend’s foot on her right instep.” One thing leads to another and for the duration of the novel, set in Lima, the two best friends, whose husbands are also best friends, nip off to Miami or the sauna to pleasure each other in quite some detail. The author has plunged his readers into the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Rodney Ackland must be the most well-known forgotten man in postwar British theatre. His legend goes like this: Absolute Hell was originally titled The Pink Room, and first staged in 1952 at the Lyric Hammersmith, where it got a critical mauling. The Sunday Times’s Harold Hobson said that the audience “had the impression of being present, if not at the death of talent, at least at its very serious illness”. Hurt by such criticism, Ackland fell silent for almost four decades. Then, as he struggled against leukemia in the 1980s, he rewrote the play. Produced by the Orange Tree Theatre in 1988, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Anthony Neilson has always been fascinated by sex. I mean, who isn’t? But he has made it a central part of his career. In his bad-boy in-yer-face phase, from the early 1990s to about the mid-2000s, he pioneered a type of theatre that talked explicitly about sex and sexuality. I remember watching his searing and provocative plays, such as Penetrator (1993), The Censor (1997) and Stitching (2002), with my heart in my mouth, and my legs crossed. The content was explicit, emotionally grounded and rarely heard in public. Since then, the playwright has diversified his output, but his new Read more ...