Published in The Observer January 4, 2021
In a letter to the reader at the start of Robert Jones Jr’s debut novel, he says he was compelled to write the book after hearing voices insisting he ask the question “Did Black queer people exist in the distant past?” and then share the answer: of course they did.
Continue reading “Review: The Prophets, Robert Jones Jr”Pantomime is a cornerstone of Christmas for families up and down Britain – but few cities are quite as committed to it as York. The annual show at York Theatre Royal is a proper local institution.
The grant is great in principle, but in practice it is a headache for homeowners and business owners. The £2 billion of investment seems unlikely to reach the kinds of small local businesses it would ideally support, with many finding it too expensive or complicated to sign up.
“No day but today, no day but today.” The last lines of Jonathan Larson’s 1993 musical Rent have surely never felt quite so applicable: opening night here is also closing night.
Kae Tempest has added one more string to an already crowded bow: On Connection is the first nonfiction work by this Mercury prize-winning musician, Ted Hughes award-winning poet, acclaimed playwright, novelist, and chief creative chronicler of the last decade.
“I had this anxiety that I would just be extremely rusty,” says Tinuke Craig, with an apologetic smile, when I ask how it feels to be back in a rehearsal room. The director is thrilled to be preparing for a socially distanced production and live stream of Sarah Kane’s stark, poetic play Crave at Chichester Festival Theatre.
Running the NT is always going to be a public-facing role, but the amount of political advocacy in 2020 has been unprecedented. And attempting to steer one the UK’s largest arts organisations through months of turbulence has frequently proved “horrible”.
Last summer, the Observer profiled a group of newly-appointed artistic directors – a fresh surge of talent taking its place at the top of six of our best-loved theatre companies. No one predicted the cataclysmic changes they would all have to reckon with in their first year.
What’s in a pen name? A whole heap of patriarchal oppression, if we’re to believe a recent publishing endeavour.
It’s hard to overstate just how influential Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman was when published in 2011 – and how far we’ve come since. Nine years on and the feminism she had to advocate for has become thoroughly, totally mainstream.