Cultural News Today

Metaphysical mysteries and political dangers come to the fore in a teeming program of international films by Céline Sciamma, Hong Sangsoo, and others. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3mgRjRV

The generals acknowledged America’s “strategic failure” in its longest war, and their differences with Biden. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3usxLOa

In my rural corner of Sonoma County, there is no longer a question of whether fire will come to us; it’s only a matter of when. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2XZ59jy

Please enjoy both screaming and hearing “Get off the phone!” every day of your pubescent life. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3mtjGgb

Star has sought liberation from Jamie Spears’ control of her finances and personal life for years A Los Angeles judge has suspended Britney Spears’ father from the conservatorship that has controlled her life for 13 years, marking a major victory for the singer, who has long objected to the arrangement that has stripped her of independence. At a court hearing on Wednesday, Judge Brenda Penny ordered Jamie Spears suspended as conservator effective immediately. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3kSWuID

From wielding axes to rescuing parachutists, Mitchell’s new show gives comics wacky missions to complete. It’s great fun – but it would be far better if a certain other series didn’t exist When Taskmaster defected to Channel 4 last year, it blew a gigantic hole into the side of Dave. Not only was it the channel’s highest-rated (and arguably signature) show, but its ingenious format had won awards, inspired international remakes and boosted the profile of dozens of comedians. But now the hole has to be filled. Enter Outsiders, Dave’s new comedy entertainment format, which feels a little like the result of a long consultation about how close a television programme can legally be to Taskmaster without actually being Taskmaster. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3kPd3oB

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Beano’s longest-running character, comic strip The Epic Yarn of Awesomeness will tell the garment’s backstory Cruella de Vil was recently given a new backstory by Disney; the Wicked Witch of the West’s past was reimagined by Gregory Maguire in Wicked . Now the Beano is to reveal an origin story of its own: that of Dennis the Menace’s red and black stripy jumper. The roguish Dennis made his first appearance in the pages of the Beano on 17 March 1951, wearing a shirt and tie. A month later, the 10-year-old hero was clad in his iconic jumper, which was originally portrayed in black and white. Colour was added shortly afterwards, with the red and black tones chosen because they were the strongest colours of ink available to printers in the 1950s. Now a new comic strip created to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Beano’s longest-running character will unveil the jumper’s secret history. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https:

The pop-punk musician was given the all-clear after being diagnosed with stage-four lymphoma earlier this year Mark Hoppus, the bassist and vocalist with US pop-punk band Blink-182, has announced that he is cancer-free, six months after he began chemotherapy for stage-four lymphoma. Hoppus posted a message on Instagram saying that his oncologist had given him the news. “It’ll take me until the end of the year to get back to normal,” he wrote, “but today is an amazing day and I feel so blessed.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3zU2sx8

Cooper Raiff stars as an immature student awkwardly adjusting to college life – and the idea that love might not be easy to come by Cooper Raiff is the 24-year-old actor, writer and director making his feature debut with this intimate microbudget feature in the mumblecore style; it was a prize winner at the 2020 online SXSW festival, which led to Jay Duplass shepherding this wider release. Alex (played by Raiff) is a first-year college student who is desperately shy and has a childhood soft toy in his room. (In the first scene, Alex imagines this creature speaking to him silently and derisively in subtitles, a gag and a style of comedy not developed in the rest of the film.) Alex also has a mortifying habit of bursting into tears when he telephones his mother and sister, whom he misses desperately. One night at a party, Alex has a wonderful romantic connection with supercool Maggie (Dylan Gelula); they have sex and hang out all night, and poor Alex thinks that this could be a wonder

In a strange new docuseries, the dark world of the Remnant Fellowship and its ‘pray yourself thin’ leader Gwen Shamblin is brought to light In May of this year, film-makers Marina Zenovich and Nile Cappello had nearly wrapped on a documentary series about Remnant Fellowship, an insular, eerily cheery church in Brentwood, Tennessee, which preached weight loss as a spiritual assignment. For more than three years Cappello and her team had researched Remnant, which had faced accusations of being a cult that promoted child abuse, and its charismatic leader, Gwen Shamblin Lara, a stick-thin woman with an inflated blonde beehive who gained fame for a theological diet program to pray one’s way to thinness. Related: ‘It’s very culty’: the bizarre billion-dollar downfall of fashion company LuLaRoe Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3kRMijq

The latest take on the Shakespearean tragedy will reunite the actor with his 007 producer Barbara Broccoli Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga are set to star in a new adaptation of Macbeth on Broadway. The production will reunite Craig with his James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli after his final performance as 007 in No Time to Die. Broccoli’s previous stage credits include 2002’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and 2012’s Chariots of Fire. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3CWkaBP

Recruitment of people of colour and disabled staff into junior roles yet to be replicated at senior level British television and radio broadcasters remain “woeful” at promoting staff from diverse backgrounds to senior management positions, according to the media regulator Ofcom. While the media workforce had become more representative of the wider country in recent years – owing to substantially increased recruitment of people of colour and disabled staff for junior jobs – this had yet to replicated at executive level, it said. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Y4czCk

PlayStation 5; Kojima Productions/Sony The superstar developer’s latest is still a post-apocalyptic folly – but is now available in photorealistic splendour with quirky haptic feedback features It was always inevitable, considering game designer Hideo Kojima’s cinephile tendencies, that Death Stranding would get a director’s cut. What’s surprising about this revised PlayStation 5 version of the game is that it doesn’t involve hours of extra cinematic sequences that were cut from the original. Thank goodness. Instead, it’s a thoughtful, thorough and visually arresting enhancement of the game, with interesting and sometimes amusing new features. It still remains the mystical, artful and gloriously pretentious delivery sim it always was: you play apocalyptic postman, Sam, attempting to revive an America torn apart by a supernatural explosion that annihilated the barrier between life and the afterlife. Working for a sort of idealistic version of DHL, he must deliver packages to cities ac

Marisa moves into a seemingly perfect house with a seemingly perfect man – but a surprise is in store Infertility, surrogacy, sexual assault, mental illness and a lot of desirable housing stock might seem too much for one book, but with her new novel, Magpie, Elizabeth Day pulls off a polished and creepy thriller which probes at the heart of what it means to be able to conceive a child – or not. Marisa has found the man of her dreams online: Jake. At their first physical meeting, “she felt a crackle of energy, a fusion of some sort, as if two molecules had collided and meshed and sparked a new thing”. This romantic cliche has a double-edged meaning, and warning signs flash as the twists and turns of Day’s plot unfold. Within three months, Marisa has left her small rented north London flat and moved into Jake’s spacious place in Battersea. A children’s illustrator, she even has room there to have her own studio. Jake wants a family, and so does Marisa – acutely so, as her own mother l

Pearce, chasing after a sinister tech billionaire’s lost daughter, gives undeserved credibility to a feeble sci-fi bereft of real ideas Blimey, for a second at the start of Zone 414, I mistook Guy Pearce for Mark Wahlberg, as he stands there scowling in a tough-guy black leather jacket and pointing a gun with purpose. This film is a hollow Blade Runner copycat, set in a grungy, neon-lit futuristic world where artificial intelligence convincingly passes for human, yet people drink coffee out of polystyrene cups and use landline telephones. The script feels completely devoid of ideas about what the future of AI might look like. But what it does prove is that Pearce adds a basic layer of credibility to any film simply by showing up. He plays former cop David Carmichael, a private investigator. You’ll know the type: ex-drinker; seen action in the army; a man of few words; harbours a dark secret. He’s been summoned by tech billionaire with a monstrous ego Marlon Veidt (played by Vikings

David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters delve into the detail behind the data and explore the true human cost of the pandemic Along with successive waves of infection, the coronavirus pandemic has provided us with a tsunami of data and graphs. Thanks to the Public Health England dashboard and websites such as Our World in Data , every internet user can access accurate and timely information on Covid cases, deaths, hospitalisations and vaccines, broken down by age, gender and location. However, while this wealth of information can be immensely valuable, it can also cause problems. Taken out of context and spun in a misleading way, raw coronavirus numbers can be a source of disinformation, which through social media can spread as efficiently as the virus itself. A simple fact, such as the median age of coronavirus victims (83) actually exceeding UK life expectancy at birth (81) can lead to governments and the public not taking Covid as seriously as they should. (Having lived to 83, on

This thriller about the nightmarish disappearance of a child in suburbia gets off to a suitably gripping start – and Maxwell Martin is a perfect glum mum I am noticing a small but definite improvement in one thing (and one thing only – have you seen the world lately?). That is the depiction in TV drama of female – usually marital, for reasons we’ll gloss over here but send me an SAE if you want my full monograph – rage. It’s getting better and better. First, in terms of being present at all, and second in terms of precision. Examples include Annie Murphy as Allison in Kevin Can F*ck Himself , a show that deliberately subverts the sitcom wife role and allows Murphy to give a tremendous portrait of a woman on the edge. The pandemic-set two-hander Together , starring Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy, gave absolutely equal weight and specificity to the unravelling couple’s furious miseries. And the recent series of I Am … gave us, in Suranne Jones’s Victoria and Lesley Manville’s Maria, pi

A mostly impressive gothic chiller tells the story of an undocumented Mexican woman facing down sinister forces in Ohio Buried in the middle of a drab and unremarkable glut of factory-made Netflix genre product, gothic chiller No One Gets Out Alive elevates itself from the pack almost immediately. It’s a film made with a lick of style and a grasp of location, a distinctive personality where there often isn’t even the vaguest whiff of one. There are imperfections here, especially near the end, but it’s the work of someone striving to stand out, to do something that will linger in the memory rather than fade into the over-populated homepage background. Related: Intrusion review – Netflix home invasion thriller passes muster Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2XZAylU

Barbican, London Beautifully spaced and tasteful, Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s work would look great in a high-end kitchen. But as art, it’s a total bore If you like hanging out in high-end lighting shops, the Barbican art gallery is the place for you right now. Paper lampshades are everywhere, from tall wavy ones on the floor to deluxe versions of the spherical lantern shades you can buy anywhere. Beautifully spaced, warm with glowing light, artfully ornamented with objects in stone, ceramics and bronze, this survey of the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi is a must for design buffs – and a total bore for anyone in search of true art. There is no punch to it, no emotional or psychic energy, just a gentle progress of clever but harmless creations. There couldn’t be a sharper contrast with the Barbican’s eye-opening recent show of the great iconoclast Jean Dubuffet , in which every ugly quirk of art brut gripped you. Noguchi’s smooth creations in the same spaces

Susanna Reid speaks to the investigators who caught the serial rapist. Plus: tackling Britain’s exclusion problem. Here’s what to watch this evening Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3AVxPbQ

Why has the artist painted scenes of bloodletting, decapitation and a woman with 10,000 breasts? He’s scared to talk about it – but he can explain his fascination with vaginas and the world’s blackest black At 67, Anish Kapoor, with a knighthood, a Turner prize and a retrospective due at the Venice Biennale next year, appears determined to strip away his own artistic skin. Like Marsyas – the satyr flayed alive by Apollo, whose gory fate Kapoor once commemorated in a 150m-long, 10-storey-high sculpture – the artist is exposing his innards. That’s the only way to describe his latest works. One of the world’s most renowned sculptors is about to go public as, well, a painter. Yet it is the content of the works he’s about to unveil that may disconcert. “They’re very, very violent,” he confesses. “And I just wonder what the hell that has to do with what’s in me. I can’t sit here and psychoanalyse them. I don’t know how to. But I recognise that it’s there.” The works, about to go on display

Southwark Playhouse, London Iva Toguri’s trial for treason, accused of broadcasting Japanese propaganda to American troops, forms the backbone of this production This real-life story of Iva Toguri tells of an innocent young woman caught in the tangle of historical and wartime bigotries. Toguri, who came to be known as “Tokyo Rose”, was an American citizen who visited Japan in the 1940s and became a radio DJ. Her return to the US sparked public uproar among those who – wrongly – accused her of broadcasting Japanese propaganda to American troops. Charged with treason, she was imprisoned for more than six years with a presidential pardon only coming decades later in 1977. This musical brings her appalling story of injustice to the stage. Directed by Hannah Benson, it has a book and lyrics by Mayhee Yoon and Cara Baldwin (with additional book by Benson, Jonathan Mann and William Patrick Harrison, who is also its composer). Delivered as a courtroom trial in San Francisco with flashbacks t

Royal Opera House, London Claus Guth’s symbolism-heavy production is at its best when simplest. Asmik Grigorian and Karita Mattila are a strong pairing and conductor Henrik Nánási has the measure of the score Postponed only days before it was due to open because of last year’s lockdown, Claus Guth’s Royal Opera production of Janáček ’s Jenůfa has finally reached the stage some 18 months after originally planned – albeit with a number of cast changes and a different conductor (Henrik Nánási in place of Vladimir Jurowski). The crucial central pairing of Asmik Grigorian in the title role and Karita Mattila as Kostelnička remains, though. The company’s first new Jenůfa in 20 years, this is also the first time that Guth has directed one of Janáček’s operas. His approach, pitching the work into territory somewhere between Strindberg and German expressionism, is likely to polarise opinion. Gesine Völlm’s costumes suggest the late 19th century, though rural Moravia is replaced by urban anon

Crucible, Sheffield A group of female prisoners come together for a concert in Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s energetic and joyful play You wait three years for a new Morgan Lloyd Malcolm play and two come along at once. This is the first, at Sheffield’s Crucible, ahead of Mum , which starts previews at Theatre Royal Plymouth this week. The actors have clearly been straining at the leash to bring this show to the stage, an energy which contributes to the sense of a piece that is unruly but full of joy. While this works for the punk element of a show that is “part gig, part play”, it means the story, painted in broad brushstrokes, loses subtlety along the way. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Y9W4Vx

Loosely connected characters from a drug dealer to a morgue attendant converge, in ever ickier circles This unapologetically juvenile, but not unentertaining, anthology film parcels together a bunch of vaguely intersecting horror stories, presented as if they were being told by a small town DJ (66.6 on the dial) named Chilly Billy (Corey Taylor). As Billy and his producer/sidekick take calls from listeners on Halloween, the regale their audience with seasonal stories of sick and twisted monsters that come dressed like nightmarish clowns. It’s Tales of the Mayhem You Damn Well Expect, Nay Insist Upon, Given It Has an 18 Certificate. In the first, Kyra (Riley Sutton), a nice little girl dressed like a witch, is deprived of her rightful share of several pounds of sweets when her abusive redneck stepdad (Kevin Wayne) insists she has to stay at home. Fortunately, Kyra has occult graphic skills and can draw monsters and then conjure them to life to protect her. In later segments, the stand

The Australian dancer allows himself to be dominated on his own terms in a duet bursting with pride – and he’s never felt more free ‘I grew up being told my body was wrong,” says Dan Daw. “And being told by medical professionals that my body had to be fixed. I was told I wouldn’t be able to be a dancer.” But that wasn’t true at all. Born disabled – he identifies as “crip”, reclaiming the word, and prefers not to detail his condition – Daw, 38, grew up in an outback town in South Australia and showed a talent for performing from a young age (his grandmother was a dance teacher). During a drama degree in Adelaide, Daw discovered that working with his body was what made him buzz, which led him to dance, to the UK, to Candoco dance company and then to making his own honest and autobiographical performances, the latest of which is The Dan Daw Show . Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3zShD9K

Authors from Carl Jung to Aldous Huxley and Susan Blackmore explore the deep mysteries of what it means to be a person Do you know what sort of animal you are? It’s rather important to know. If you call yourself a humanist, for instance, don’t you need some idea of what a human is so that you can make sure your behaviour accords with your ethics? If you think that humans are just a little lower than the angels, as the Judaeo-Christian tradition says, shouldn’t you know how much lower, so you can be appropriately aspirational but not frustrated or cocky? Related: Being a Human review – two go mad in the stone age Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3CX3qus

‘Discriminatory’ banning of I Am Samuel, about a gay man’s struggles with his sexuality, criticised by activists and producers Activists and film producers have criticised a decision by the Kenya Film Classification Board to ban a documentary that tells the story of a Kenyan man struggling with his sexuality. They said banning the 52-minute film, I Am Samuel , amounted to “discrimination and persecution” of LGBTQ+ people. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3uqA847

Simon Barrett directs with lurid video lighting and comically bad gore effects to deliver what looks like a cheap Italian horror film At Edelvine, an exclusive boarding school for wealthy, willowy young ladies who all look 10 years too old to be in school, a clique of students gather in a dorm bathroom to summon the fabled Edelvine ghost. The exercise turns out to be a prank the school’s final year mean girls are playing on bullied, speccy, but still willowy Kerrie (Megan Best). But after Kerrie falls out of a window minutes later, the students wonder if their seance actually summoned a malign spirit from beyond the grave. At least poor Kerrie’s death opens up a place at the school for Camille (Suki Waterhouse, from Assassination Nation), a young British woman who refuses to be bullied by senior queen bee Alice (Inanna Sarkis) and her coevals. A scuffle in the common room leads to all of them doing detention, and before you can say “Candyman” they’re all clustering round a homemade p

In Maya Cueva’s film “Ale Libre,” the community organizer Alejandra Pablos fights both her deportation case and a broader idea that only some immigrants are deserving of legal status. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2Zx4lTK

The fewer clues you need, the more points you receive. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3ojytwi

Sauce often served with crab cakes: five letters. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/39KPs1V

This isn’t about the forty thousand fans currently watching us, in mounting anticipation. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3ihk7ZH

“Ale Libre,” directed by Maya Cueva, tells the story of Alejandra Pablos, a courageous immigrant organizing against her own deportation case. From the streets of Arizona to the halls of Congress, the film follows her ongoing fight, as she pleads her case to the public and her asylum court hearing approaches. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3zQujOK

A teenager shrugs at vampires while grandma gives hell to hipsters in the horror studio’s latest Amazon collaborations The fast-growing gentrification horror subgenre that we can lay at the door of the first Candyman is picked up by the latest batch of Welcome to the Blumhouse films, the mini-studio’s collaboration with Amazon. Black As Night (★★★☆☆) crams as much of the subject as it can into a school backpack; its history assignment comes out pretty jumbled but this breezy YA vampire flick shrugs “whatever” and gets back to nailing the undead. “That was the summer I got breasts and fought vampires,” reminisces Shawna (Asjha Cooper), a New Orleans high-schooler who straddles both sides of the tracks. One side is middle-class Affluenceville, where she lives with her dad, hangs out with gay BFF Pedro (Fabrizio Guido) and swoons over perfectly coiffed hunk Chris (Mason Beauchamp). The other is Ombreaux Heights, the local housing project where her crackhead mum lives and where, one nigh

Set in 17th-century Brazil, this wild and winding epic about a community of Africans who have escaped slavery is a revelation Gayl Jones is a literary legend. In novels and poetry, she has reimagined the lives of Black women across North, South and Central America, living in different centuries, in a way no other writer has done. Jones made her name with her first novel, Corregidora, published in 1975; through an intimate, fragmentary narrative, it follows the life of Ursa, a blues singer in 1940s Kentucky. The title is the surname of the man who raped and enslaved Ursa’s grandmother a century earlier in Brazil, a surname Ursa still bears. Toni Morrison, who published it, said: “No book about any Black woman will ever be the same after this.” James Baldwin called it “the most brutally honest and painful revelation of what has occurred, and is occurring, in the souls of Black men and women”. Although Corregidora was followed in 1976 by a second novel, Eva’s Man, her third and fourth,

Whitechapel Gallery, White Cube and V&A, London This sprawling trio of exhibitions collects objects from many sources, marked by sometimes traumatic history, alongside Gates’s own, magnificent work Beautiful things and broken things, horrible racist figurines and gorgeous pottery slathered in tar. Bricks and pots and a west African female ancestor figure fired at such a high temperature it cracked and warped and the head fell off. A rickshaw laden with bowls and plates, an old brick-press from Ohio, piles of glazed bricks and a pallet of bricks waiting to build a wall or a house. Theaster Gates ’s A Clay Sermon at the Whitechapel is filled with objects and histories, stories and encounters. It is part of a sprawling trio of exhibitions that also includes an intervention in the ceramics galleries at the V&A and a concurrent show at White Cube Mason’s Yard . Next year Gates takes on the annual Serpentine pavilion commission, where the project will culminate. Gates recounts be

Comedy and music have always co-existed – but with artists from Dry Cleaning to Bo Burnham cleverly blurring the two, it’s hard to tell where the jokes begin and end Some of my favourite music of this year was made by a comedian, and some of my favourite comedy by musicians. The comedian is Bo Burnham, whose Netflix standup special Inside was built around a series of songs satirising online life that were nuanced and sophisticated enough to completely transcend their comedy context. The accompanying album reached No 5 in the UK charts. The musicians are Dry Cleaning, a London post-punk outfit fronted by Florence Shaw, whose droll sprechgesang resembles left-field standup, her monologues filled with surrealism, sarcasm, offbeat observations and dialogue that brings to mind Victoria Wood or Alan Bennett. “I’m just sad about the collapse of heavy industry / I’ll be alright in a bit,” goes recent single Tony Speaks! . These two examples are not outliers: it’s becoming increasingly diffi

The controversial comic’s new book is a surprising mix of memoir and self-help. Has having a baby softened his edges? He talks about depression, anxiety, punching down and his friend Sean Lock Before I have time to ask the Covid-era question “Are we doing handshakes?”, Jimmy Carr has thrust out his arm and grasped my hand. Then, suddenly, he lets go and screams: “Oh God, no! My hand’s covered in Covid!” Comedians aren’t supposed to be walking versions of their act – Carr says that he’s not. But my first impression is of a man bursting with one-liners. As we walk through his PR’s art-filled offices he gives me a breathless guided tour full of trivia – “I think that’s the actual drum from the sleeve of Sgt Pepper” – and more gags. “People think that one’s good value,” he says as we pass a Damien Hirst sheep in formaldehyde, before glancing back at the other side, which has spent some time decomposing, “but you’re only getting half of it.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guard

This simmering 70s-set domestic drama is warm, expansive and funny – a pure pleasure to read The times are a-changing in solid, respectable New Prospect, Illinois, where Christmas 1971 arrives in a whirl of sex, drugs and folk music, while the Vietnam war grinds on off stage. Inside the First Reformed church, the worshippers are attempting to ride out the storm, casting about for something rock solid and true. This might be God or family or a fresh myth to believe in, a 20th-century pursuit-of-happiness tale, self-authored if need be. New Prospect is in a state of flux but Jonathan Franzen remains reliably, defiantly Franzen-esque, tending to his faltering flock in fair weather or foul, and whatever the ructions in the country at large. Crossroads, his splendid sixth novel, comes billed as the first part of a proposed trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, named after Edward Casaubon’s absurd, unfinished tract in Middlemarch. But, in the best possible way, it feels less like a beginning

This essential documentary catalogues everything black footballers have done for the beautiful game – and the disgraceful abuse they have suffered in return When Hope Powell became the first black coach of the England women’s team in 1998, she grew her dreadlocks. It was a statement of pride in who she is. “I was quite militant,” she tells this film’s presenter, poet Benjamin Zephaniah . At 31, Powell confounded the idea that you can’t be what you can’t see. Growing up, the south London girl of Caribbean ancestry never saw any football role models who looked like her. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3ogodVz

Dark drama Hollington Drive kicks off on ITV. Plus: David Mitchell is back with a new show, Outsiders. Here’s what to watch this evening Suburbia is rendered as a genteel, soft-focus hell in this new drama from Sophie Petzal. Theresa (Anna Maxwell Martin) and Fraser (Rhashan Stone) are hosting a barbecue. It’s a tense, awkward affair, full of clumsy interventions from Fraser’s brother Eddie (Ken Nwosu) and passive-aggressive provocations from Theresa’s sister Helen (Rachael Stirling). No wonder the kids want to go to the park. But when another of the drive’s children goes missing, Theresa starts to wonder what her offspring have been up to. It’s horribly claustrophobic, seething with grim detail and, as ever, Maxwell Martin does suppressed trauma and glacial unease superbly. Phil Harrison Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3igv8KE

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils

The long-awaited 25th outing for Ian Fleming’s superspy is a weird and self-aware epic with audacious surprises up its sleeve The standard bearer of British soft power is back, in a film yanked from cinemas back in the time of the toilet roll shortage, based on a literary character conceived when sugar and meat rationing was still in force, and now emerging in cinemas as Britons are fighting for petrol in the forecourts. Bond, like Norma Desmond, is once again ready for his closeup – and Daniel Craig once again shows us his handsome-Shrek face and the lovable bat ears, flecked with the scars of yesterday’s punch-up, the lips as ever pursed in determination or disgust. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ZzC6DT

Almost two years after its original release date, the 25th James Bond film – and final outing for star Daniel Craig – has had its first screening at the Royal Albert Hall Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3CZRmZr

Activists want the site of a former correctional facility to honor history and provide social services. A real-estate developer wants to build apartments. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3zIHVLD

The fewer clues you need, the more points you receive. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/39IbceO

With a more normal awards season on the way, it’s time to sift through what’s been loved and hated and look forward to what performances could make an impact As we all edge slowly closer to something vaguely sorta kinda resembling a loose idea of normality, so too does Hollywood, its relatively fixed annual schedule going from blurry to a bit less blurry. After an almost normal summer, the fall festivals followed and while they weren’t quite back up to snuff (some had a semi-virtual element, some big films were notably missing), there was a dramatic improvement from 2020 and, importantly, they were pulled off with very few infections. Related: ‘We want people to freak out’: inside Hollywood’s Museum of Motion Pictures Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3F7bSJx

Comic says doctors are monitoring his vestibular schwannoma, a non-cancerous brain tumour The comedian Vic Reeves has spoken for the first time about being diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour that has left him deaf in one ear. The 62-year-old, best known for his double act with Bob Mortimer as Vic and Bob, has a vestibular schwannoma, also known as acoustic neuroma, which is a type of non-cancerous brain tumour. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3EZ8bVR

Rijksmuseum says change in focus prompted by renewed interest in wake of Black Lives Matter The two earliest portraits of men of African descent in the history of European art are being exhibited together for the first time in their 500-year history, reflecting a change of focus championed by the Black Lives Matter movement, curators at the Rijksmuseum have said. Among more than 100 portraits by Renaissance artists being showcased by the museum in Amsterdam from Tuesday are Albrecht Dürer’s 1508 sketch, discovered in the German painter’s workshop at the time of his death, and Jan Jansz Mostaert’s portrait, dating from about 1525. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3CUjm0e

Algeciras honours Paco de Lucía by using music from Entre dos agua to mark the hour twice a day Seven years after his sudden death, the birthplace of the pioneering flamenco guitarist and songwriter Paco de Lucía is honouring one of its most famous and beloved sons by using his music to mark the hour twice a day on the townhall clock. On Monday, the southern Spanish city of Algeciras began using De Lucía’s best-known song, Entre dos aguas, to ring in midday and 6pm. A computer system has been connected to the clock and, in a move that may trouble fans of flamenco’s loud and passionate strains, the sound level checked to ensure it doesn’t exceed permitted limits. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3zShH9v

Gaia Weiss’s soulful heroine seeks a way out of a labyrinth in Mathieu Turi’s tense but formulaic thriller full of fiendish traps Ventilation industry professionals, claustrophiliacs and anyone who appreciated the obligatory crawling-through-service-ducts scene in 80s action films such as Aliens and Die Hard will be well chuffed by this confined sci-fi puzzle thriller, presumably released to sanction the return of the word “fiendish” in reviews. That word made more than the odd appearance in writeups of Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 film Cube – to which Meander, set almost entirely inside a series of shoulder-width vents filled with fiendish traps, bears more than a faint resemblance. There’s the briefest of preambles as woolly hatted Lisa (Gaia Weiss), lying on a wintry track with suicidal intentions, is picked up by gravel-voiced driver Adam (Peter Franzén). Their chat is turning existential when she realises, by the tattoo on his hand, that he is the escaped murderer the radio is talking

A new play touring England uses beds to reflect on experiences of former unaccompanied minors For most people, bed is a place of comfort, somewhere to recline and switch off. For others, it is a scene of displacement, a symbol of the precariousness of life. For eight months, Syed Haleem Najibi moved from bed to bed. The now 23-year-old fled Afghanistan as an unaccompanied minor in 2012, making his way through Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy and France, before finally arriving in the UK. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3CXF0kx

The New Zealand trio have gone global thanks to their forthright Māori-language songs, which confront colonial history and ongoing inequality New Zealand was a war zone in the mid-1800s. On one side were the British and the colonial government, craving a stranglehold on more of the country’s land. On the other were the indigenous Māori people, fighting to preserve tino rangatiratanga : their sovereignty and self-determination. On 29 April 1864, the British invaded Pukehinahina, also known as Gate Pā. Despite being grossly outnumbered, the Māori fended off the attackers using concealed trenches and guerrilla tactics. It was a fleeting victory in a war that, ultimately, led to the confiscation of 3m acres of Māori land. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2XWpOF3

She grew up in an artistic dynasty and was once rejected for a part by her dad. Now the director is turning her life into an epic new project. She reflects on Chekhov, Shakespeare and Iggy Pop What are memories? Stories we tell ourselves? Do they occupy neatly filed compartments in the brain? Perhaps – as Cicero and others argued – memory is a sort of palace or theatre: an atmospheric space filled with objects pregnant with meaning, or a realist stage set on which figures are forever materialising and disappearing. Inside a swaggering 18th-century palazzo in Palermo , Irina Brook is trying to find answers to these questions – at least some of them. The project is entitled The House of Us . Three years in the planning and writing, the first piece she has created from scratch, it is a melange of autobiographical installations, photographs, video, music and theatrical performance. The audience will wander through it all, trespassers in Brook’s memory. Continue reading... from Cultur

Produced by Charlie Brooker, this jam-packed sendup of hackneyed film tropes – from The Baguette Rule to The Smurfette Principle – is a perfect hour of fluff and nonsense The last time I saw Rob Lowe – and I did actually have to check this wasn’t the result of some kind of pandemic-induced hallucination – was in ITV’s Wild Bill , in which he played a Miami ex-cop who had relocated to east Lincolnshire to become the chief constable. It was an astonishing expression of the undying trouper spirit that must endure in every actor if they are to survive. We watched Billy Hicks from St Elmo’s Fire drive a Volvo through a field of cabbages, for chrissakes! About Last Night’s Danny Martin faced off with a baddie atop a wind turbine in the Boston countryside! Lowe is game, is what I’m saying. And he is game again as presenter of Attack of the Hollywood Clichés! (Netflix), a piece of fluff and nonsense – these are terms of praise – by Charlie Brooker and other assorted writers. Looking at the

The Washington Post journalists pick apart the transfer of power from Trump to Biden in an F-bomb-peppered account of the corporeal and divine in US government Except for Donald Trump, who believes only in himself, American politicians are inveterate God-botherers, sure that they were elected by their creator, not just by their constituents. While re-traversing the transfer of power between Trump and Joe Biden, Bob Woodward and his Washington Post colleague Robert Costa often pause as the wheelers and dealers they are tracking pray, text scriptural citations or glance sanctimoniously skywards. Biden fingers his rosary beads before debating Trump, and when Mike Pence performs his constitutional duty by ratifying the outcome of the presidential election, an aide congratulates him for fighting the good fight and keeping the faith. Later, Nancy Pelosi summarises her scheme for raising the minimum wage as “the gospel of Matthew”. Yet despite such homages to the soul, what truly matters i

The Dome at America’s Center, St Louis, Missouri The veteran rockers return to the road with an emotional tribute to their longtime drummer and a reinvigorated sense of purpose For many musicians, it has been an emotional return to live music after the coronavirus pandemic put a protracted end to touring. For the Rolling Stones , picking up their No Filter tour in Chuck Berry’s hometown of St Louis, Missouri, the stakes are even higher. Not only have the stalwart performers not played in more than two years; it’s also a commemoration for drummer Charlie Watts, who died last month . It opens with an empty stage and only a drumbeat, with photos of Watts projected on the stage backdrop. The band appear, kicking their way through Street Fighting Man and It’s Only Rock’N’Roll (But I Like It), before Mick Jagger pauses the show to devote the tour to Watts’s memory. He along with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, walk centre stage to thank fans for the outpouring of love and support for Watt

In the new documentary The Gig Is Up, film-maker Shannon Walsh travels around the world to uncover the human cost of the new way many of us work Jason Edwards would find it a struggle to pass a job interview with his prominent gold teeth and criminal record. But he has something more powerful than a suit, shirt, tie, clean shave and polished shoes. He has a laptop and guile. Edwards works from home by filling in online surveys. It is not typically lucrative work, paying just a few cents. But Edwards, who is white, figured out that by posing as an African American Republican, his opinions would be much sought after. He reckons he has earned more than $30,000. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3ufYaim

Jury finds singer guilty of running a criminal enterprise that recruited women and children and subjected them to unwanted sex and mental torment A jury has found the R&B superstar R Kelly guilty of being the ringleader of a decades-long racketeering and sex trafficking scheme that preyed upon Black women and children. The disgraced singer was found guilty on all nine counts on Monday afternoon after decades of avoiding criminal responsibility for numerous allegations of misconduct, in a major #MeToo victory for Black women and girls. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3uoj9PZ

Scientists found dangerous levels of MDMA in nearby River Whitelake after the festival Scientists have found what they called environmentally damaging levels of illegal drugs in the river running through Glastonbury festival owing to public urination on the site. Researchers measured levels of illegal drugs in the river before, during and after the last Glastonbury festival, in 2019, comparing levels upstream and downstream of the event. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3idUQPU

The Australian writer has won the prestigious science fiction prize for her debut novel The Animals in That Country Twenty years before Margaret Atwood won the inaugural Arthur C Clarke award for her seminal novel The Handmaid’s Tale, she published a poem entitled The animals in that country . Now Laura Jean McKay, who borrowed the title of Atwood’s poem for her debut novel , has gone on to win the prestigious prize, with judges praising her story of a pandemic that enables humans to understand the language of animals for “reposition[ing] the boundaries of science fiction once again”. The Arthur C Clarke award was originally established through a grant from Clarke, and goes to the best science fiction novel of the year. Previous winners include some of the biggest names in the genre, from China Miéville to Christopher Priest, but this year, six debut writers were shortlisted . Australian novelist McKay won for The Animals in That Country, a depiction of a world where a “zooflu” epid

Fresh from a bust-up with ‘Jurassic FM’ over playing Hendrix, the violinist talks about musical snobbery, going on strike and his lifelong regret at turning Duke Ellington down Throughout his career, Nigel Kennedy has had run-ins with what he calls the “self-appointed wielders of power”. The latest came last week, when he pulled out of a gig at the Royal Albert Hall two days before showtime, accusing organisers Classic FM of preventing him performing a Jimi Hendrix tribute, which they deemed “unsuitable for our audience”. “This is musical segregation,” he said as the news broke. “If it was applied to people, it would be illegal. If that type of mentality is rampant in the arts, then we still haven’t fixed the problem of prejudice. This is much more serious than my feathers being a bit ruffled. Prejudice in music is completely dreadful. They’re effectively saying that Hendrix is all right in the Marquee Club, but not in the Albert Hall.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guar

Benjamin Zephaniah profiles black players who rose the abuse they endured. Plus: the history of a house in Leeds. Here’s what to watch this evening Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3kKrVVe

The verdict leaves several questions unanswered, including how the many people Kelly victimized will begin to heal. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2XSZV8W

Pickled cows and unmade beds: the art award has always challenged convention. But in 2021 it is going further, by abolishing individual artists altogether The Turner prize has given us some great characters. Grayson Perry was a little-known alternative potter before this annual competition for avant garde British art launched him as a commentator and media personality. Tracey Emin became a national sensation when she showed her unmade bed in 1999, though she lost out to Steve McQueen – yet another talent for whom it was the beginning of great things. But it’s a fair bet that no individual will become rich or famous as a result of this year’s Turner exhibition at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery. This is no slight on the 80 or so people I count behind the five collectives on this year’s shortlist. It’s just that you have to scan the small print to even find these folks’ names. The Turner has turned on itself. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3m4IxGC

Fiction by Vladimir Sorokin: “There was no expression on the man’s large, mealy-white, pear-shaped face. No expression at all.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3CNG3Dp

The fewer clues you need, the more points you receive. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3ETfdeR

In the author’s work, colonization and racial hatred turn mother against child, Black against white, man against woman. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2Zpe3Yf

The author’s diaries and notebooks chart her early work and love life. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3ANaj0r

Shouts & Murmurs by Teddy Wayne: Most of the people of the kingdom were advised to stay in their dwellings, and they banged their chamber pots at sundown to thank the brave chirurgeons who were attending to the bitten. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3CM4voE

The UK/Australia Season is the largest ever cultural exchange between the two nations, including shell-covered slippers, a 19th-century Indigenous cricket team and uprising anthems linking Brixton to Palm Island Margo Neale is feeling proud. “Here we are,” she says, “250 years after the British set out to colonise and civilise us, taking our culture to the British – to teach them how to survive in this fragmenting world.” Neale, an Indigenous Australian from the Gumbaynggirr and Kulin nations, is just warming up. “It is our civilisation,” she continues defiantly, “that had the resilience to survive over millennia: the ice age, sea rises, drought, invasion, violence, all sorts of oppression and pandemics. So, this is us showing Britain we have the knowledge to survive – knowledge held in the songlines.” Neale, who is also of Irish descent, is talking about the plan to bring the National Museum of Australia’s extraordinary 2017 exhibition Songlines , which she co-curated, to Britain.

At 78, with three Baftas and a Palme d’Or under his belt, the director still sees himself as an outsider. He talks about Hollywood’s obsession with big names, his determination to portray ‘real people’ – and being accused of pretension Interviewing Mike Leigh is a daunting prospect, not because of his intimidatingly central plinth in the pantheon of British cinema – well, maybe a bit of that – but because he is extremely exacting. You just couldn’t work the way he does – his scripts are improvised, not written, resting on collaboration, trust, instinct, bravery – without weighing every word, cross-examining every sentence. Otherwise it would just be baggy. He takes this perfectionism into every interview, every conversation: Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh , a close textual and visual reading of his life’s work by Amy Raphael, reissued next month, bristles with this energy. Then there’s the incredible range of his output: since 1971, he has not just been making films and TV dramas, but brea

Covid has put academics like Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance at the heart of policymaking, but electing better politicians could be the answer How many lives would have been saved in the pandemic if the UK government had truly “ followed the science ”? The question is unanswerable but hardly academic. We cannot accurately quantify how many lives were lost by the politically driven delays to lockdown in the first and second waves, but the number is not small. So would we have done better simply to put scientists in charge of pandemic policy ? Might we hand over climate change policy to them, too? In fact, would their evidence-based methods make them better leaders all round? Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Y6Vk3k

It’s got a fine lineup of film stars and critics, but this tedious tour of movie tricks feels like an opportunity missed. What were they all thinking? I have long made peace with the fact that I will never figure Netflix out. Maybe that is the point: Netflix, like the shining face of God, is not ever meant to be fully understood, just watched in awe from afar. But where once Netflix made sense – the first series of Orange is the New Black! The first three series of House of Cards! The mega-success of the Queer Eye reboot! – now some of the commissioning decisions seem to be made by a pulsing cluster of AI servers. This is why we have Nailed It!, for instance. Why He’s All That with Addison Rae exists. Season 5 of Arrested Development and that nine-movie Adam Sandler deal. These were designed by a robot in a lab to make me wistful for an era when the company sent out DVDs in little square envelopes in the post. Anyway, Attack of the Hollywood Clichés! is up this week, and I do not kno

The Fates and Furies author reconstructs the life of a 12th-century nun, drawing out conflict, drama and queer undercurrents Monasteries and convents make excellent crucibles: closed worlds in which the events of a novel are heightened, their tensions felt more keenly. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a near-forgotten masterpiece set in a medieval nunnery, while Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose had metafictive fun mixing crime and semiotics. More recently, there’s been Christopher Wilson’s Hurdy Gurdy , James Meek’s To Calais, in Ordinary Time and, in a slightly skewed vision, Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep . Now we have Lauren Groff, author of the celebrated Fates and Furies , a sharp novel of New York life that drew comparisons to Gone Girl and was praised by Barack Obama. Groff’s fourth novel, Matrix , is something very different indeed: a strange and poetic piece of historical fiction set in a dreamlike abbey, the fictional biography of a 12th-century

Albert Potrony’s exhibition turns Gatehead’s Baltic into a giant creche, inspired by a radical Dutch playground architect and the forgotten feminist men’s movement of the early 70s For most parents, the ritual of pushing your child on a swing or kicking a ball with them in the park is the diametric opposite of high culture and radical politics. But artist Albert Potrony doesn’t see it that way. “Play is an amazing vehicle to explore absolutely everything,” he says. “Play is a fundamental tool for self-discovery, for knowing how to be in the world. It’s basically the artists’ process. We play – but it’s serious play.” In his past work (if “work” is the right word), Potrony has given children the freedom to devise their own toys and encouraged students and refugees to make sculptures together. In his latest exhibition, Equal Play at Gateshead’s Baltic, Potrony uses the realm of the children’s playground to smuggle in ideas about urban theory, imagination and masculine roles. A key r

The Star Trek star and occasional singer reveals how un-musical he is – and what he really listens to One of thesongs I’ve performed on television was Fuck You by Cee-Lo Green. It went over well. I’d do that one. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3icn7Xb

New book says many pieces in Barry Joule Archive bear ‘scant resemblance’ to artist’s work, but donor insists they are real The Estate of Francis Bacon has launched an astonishing personal attack on Barry Joule, one of the artist’s friends, and the vast collection he donated to the Tate in 2004 – even implying that he created works himself. In publishing a damning study of the Barry Joule Archive (BJA), it quotes a Tate curator saying that “the hand/s that applied the marks to the material may not have included Bacon to any substantial degree”. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3miVihd

The adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s musical picked up 10 awards in a ceremony that also acted as a comeback for New York theatre Tony awards 2021: Broadway stars hit red carpet and stage – in pictures Moulin Rouge! swept the board at the 2021 Tony awards, picking up 10 trophies during a ceremony that also acted as a celebration of the return of Broadway. The adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 Oscar-winning musical, which reopened on 24 September, became the first Australian-produced show to win a Tony for best musical, beating Jagged Little Pill and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3oaJkIT

Glasgow Theatre Royal Scottish Ballet make a post-pandemic return with a rousing version of Kelly’s ballet about Greek gods in the south of France Sixty years ago, American dancer and choreographer Gene Kelly created Pas de Dieux for the Paris Opera Ballet (the first American to do so). Eighteen months ago, Scottish Ballet leapt off stage while touring in America to race home and lock themselves indoors. They’ve returned with Starstruck , a glitzy revival of Kelly’s ballet that hopes to mark that comeback with a bang – and in this, they succeed. In Pas de Dieux , the gods Zeus and Aphrodite – accompanied by the mischievous Eros – descend from Mount Olympus to the balmy south of France. A few meddling arrows, fistfights and broken hearts later, all ends well with mortal and godly lovers correctly reunited. Artistic director Christopher Hampson worked with Kelly’s widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, to reconstruct the ballet by deciphering Kelly’s scribbled annotations on George Gershwin’s s

A clock-ticking, claustrophobic finale had DCI Silva in a cat-and-mouse game with a shifty Russian asset. If only they’d given her a map • Read the Vigil finale recap and join the discussion here Vigil (BBC One) concluded in nightmarishly claustrophobic style. Not content with sticking half of the cast on a large metal tube under water, it trapped noted hater-of-small-spaces DCI Amy Silva in a tiny metal tube under water, filled the tube with water, drained it of water, only for the larger metal tube to start filling with water, and honestly, after half an hour of tension like that, I needed a lie down, in a very big, wide, airy open space. Vigil has given us six solid weeks of credulity-testing twists and turns, but it has never relented, and buckling up for the hour has been a large part of the fun. It is television from the Bodyguard school, expertly ramping up the stress until it becomes relentless, then adding another shocker into the mix, just because it can. Yes, it is far-

There’s a welcome return for the am-dram spoof in which everything goes wrong, plus one of football’s great rivalries is recalled. Here’s what to watch this evening Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Zq5rk8

Submit your caption. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3zJRJFa

Southwark Playhouse, London Cordelia O’Neill’s romcom about a pair of mismatched Londoners nails the giddy energy of young love, but isn’t as adept at tragedy Alex and Rupert should never have met. They certainly shouldn’t have fallen in love. But thanks to a quirk of fate – a magical aligning of numbers, as financer Rupert would put it – they bump into each other on the tube one morning. They tease and taunt, flirt and fight, fall for each other and eventually fall pregnant. Playwright Cordelia O’Neill keeps us laughing every step of the way, until suddenly the unthinkable happens to Alex and Rupert and then there is only silence. In many ways (most of them good), Small Things Theatre company’s latest production is a good old-fashioned romantic comedy. It involves a classic mismatched couple, destined to either hate each other or fall madly in love. O’Neill absolutely nails the giddy energy of those early dates, when conversation tumbles all over the place and the thirst for knowled

Singer Francis Rossi pays tribute to bandmate, saying he was integral to their sound and success The Status Quo founding member Alan Lancaster has died aged 72, the band’s manager has confirmed. The bassist achieved international success with the group during the 1960s and 70s with hits including Rockin’ All Over the World and Whatever You Want. The Status Quo singer Francis Rossi said Lancaster was an “integral” part of their sound as he paid tribute to him. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3m3Iv1E

Nottingham Theatre Royal Kevin Poeung impresses as the Arthurian sorcerer in an energetic but unsubtle telling for family audiences of his younger years Drew McOnie’s first full-length ballet, Merlin, is a likable stab at a fantasy drama for a family audience, based on the story of the legendary wizard, with warring kingdoms, spear-fighting, stage magic, a smoke-breathing dragon and a mighty, LED-studded Excalibur. The drivers of the plot are quests for power and romantic love – the big stuff – but Merlin’s story is more about family. Born of an encounter between a couple of frisky gods and adopted by a blacksmith single mum, he has a perfect fantasy of who his parents might be, but a more realistic relationship with his mum: of day-to-day exasperations and everyone doing their best but not quite making the other person happy (she wants him to deny his magic and join the army like everyone else) That journey is the real heart of the show. Continue reading... from Culture | The Gu

Stone Nest, London Inna Dulerayn’s hallucinatory and astonishingly costumed fantasia disintegrates into incoherence in the second half Under the arches of an old Welsh chapel, beaked angels sing to a little lost girl. Inspired by ancient folklore and performed through psychedelic multimedia, this Russian-UK collaboration is a wild, radically uneven ride that believes in the power of magic and the strength of imagination. Enormous stretches of gauze fill the gaps of the beautiful, crumbly building. Behind them, our cast are part shrouded in near-constant hallucinatory projections. The first half of this show, created by Inna Dulerayn, has utter clarity in its strangeness. The story moves gently between a young girl (Edyta Budnik) reading from her diary – plain, clear prose about being bullied at school and escaping to the magical land of Mythosphere v and interludes of opera from the angelic birds who live there. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3CJOS1

The Blue Room/40 Beak Street, London Playing at the opening of the London outpost of his label Third Man, the former White Stripes frontman scintillatingly showed rock isn’t dead yet The swan that ‌flew‌ ‌over‌ ‌Jack‌ ‌White’s‌ ‌new‌ ‌blue‌ ‌hair‌ ‌as‌ ‌he‌ ‌brought‌ ‌this ‌two-part‌ ‌secret‌ ‌show‌ ‌to‌ ‌a‌ ‌close‌ ‌was perhaps an omen that reports‌ ‌of‌ ‌the‌ ‌death‌ ‌of‌ ‌rock‌’n‌’roll‌ ‌are ‌premature. Especially as White – playing Seven Nation Army at the time – ‌was stood‌ ‌on‌ ‌a‌ ‌balcony‌ ‌high‌ ‌above‌ ‌an‌ ‌ecstatic‌ ‌bottleneck‌ ‌of‌ ‌people‌ ‌just‌ ‌off‌ ‌Carnaby‌ ‌Street‌ ‌on‌ ‌Saturday‌ ‌night.‌ ‌Naff‌ ‌old‌ ‌Carnaby‌ ‌Street,‌ ‌the‌ ‌place‌ ‌that‌ ‌makes‌ ‌Las‌ ‌Vegas‌ ‌look‌ ‌like‌ ‌Tupelo,‌ ‌may‌ ‌finally‌ ‌have‌ ‌its‌ ‌mojo‌ ‌back.‌ ‌Twenty‌ ‌years‌ ‌since‌ ‌the‌ ‌White‌ ‌Stripes‌ ‌played‌ ‌a famous show at the‌ ‌100‌ ‌Club‌ ‌and‌ ‌reinvigorated‌ ‌the‌ ‌capital’s‌ ‌rock music‌ ‌scene,‌ ‌Jack‌ ‌White’s‌ ‌at‌ ‌it‌ ‌again.‌ ‌ Continue reading... from Culture | The

London Palladium The veteran provocateur, with his usual equal offensiveness policy, is amusing when he isn’t railing at straw men in this revival of his 2019 show Supernature “I’m a white heterosexual millionaire,” says Ricky Gervais, and as such, in a smaller minority than black, Asian or queer people. But do you hear him complain? That’s the level in Supernature, the touring show now revived after a two-year hiatus and Netflix-bound. His high social status is among the reasons some of us find Gervais’s ostentatiously provocative standup less compelling than, say, Jerry Sadowitz ’s. Gervais is choosing (as he keeps telling us) to be obnoxious, whereas with Sadowitz, it feels – hilariously – like he can’t help it. There remains, though, a huge audience for Gervais’s off-colour comedy – for all that he claims (with a running joke about the Netflix edit) that this stuff is verboten. “Louis CK has been cancelled,” he cites in evidence, even as the same Louis CK embarks on a 30-city US

Wallace Collection, London Revered by Manet and Van Gogh, scorned by Kenneth Clark, the great 17th-century portraitist captures each sitter in the moment with astonishing force and freedom The brewer is mighty: a man of outsize prowess looking down on you with all his shrewd vigour, satin doublet straining to contain his huge girth. The hat is so large it has its own planetary halo; the lace collar could cover a table. It is not hard to imagine the awful strength of his grip. He was the owner of the Swan’s Neck brewery, this gentleman of Haarlem. But he was also a lavish collector of Dutch portraits, and none can have exceeded this one. From the affable yet undeceived eyes to the reddening jowls, the shaggy pelt of hair to the elbow jutting out of the frame in a dazzle of creased satin, everything is painted with an apt and equivalent force. The portrait rises to meet the man at every turn. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3CNiXwJ

From council estate in Tottenham to West End stage, the veteran actor and screenwriter tells her life story in a funny and honest new memoir. She was, she says, always determined to shine… Think back, just for a moment, to the first series of The Crown . It is 1952. The king, George VI, is dead and the new queen, Elizabeth, has flown home to Britain from Africa. At Sandringham, where her father’s body rests, everything is the same and yet irredeemably changed: a paradoxical state signified most powerfully by the arrival of the king’s mother, Queen Mary. In a corridor lined with servants, the old queen, in black crepe and a mourning veil, advances slowly towards the new queen. Will these grieving women embrace? No. As Queen Mary has already informed her granddaughter by letter, if the crown is to survive, duty must come before personal indulgence, a credo she will now express in the form of a curtsey so preposterously low, it’s a wonder she doesn’t topple over. At the memory of this s

An often moving memoir examines the comedian’s unlikely journey from Big Nights Out to riverbank ruminations with Paul Whitehouse No one was more surprised than Bob Mortimer at the unexpected success of Gone Fishing , his BBC two-hander with Paul Whitehouse, now on its fourth series, in which the old friends sit on a riverbank ruminating on life and generally arsing about while attempting to land a fish. “In many ways, the show is the culmination of my journey back from sidekick Bob to standalone Robert,” he reflects, towards the end of his first memoir, And Away… , adding: “I could never have got there without my heart nonsense.” The poignancy of the show is the authenticity of its premise; long before they thought of pitching it for television, Whitehouse really did insist that Mortimer accompany him on fishing trips as an aid to recovery after a triple heart bypass in 2015, an act of generosity that Mortimer credits with giving him “the kick up the arse I needed” to get back on his