Charlie Josephine: ‘The backlash to I, Joan was painful – but we saw it coming’

Published in The i newspaper on January 26, 2023

Charlie Josephine is done writing plays that just point out a problem – they’ve decided their work needs to at least attempt to offer some solution, however imperfect.

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“I had never hung out with people with wealth like that”: why social class still matters in relationships

Published in Stylist on January 26, 2023

In her new novel What Time is Love?, writer Holly Williams explores how class can divide romantic partnerships. Here, she explains why it’s as big an issue as ever in 2023.

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Travis Alabanza on Sound of the Underground: ‘Who can make a show about money fun? Only drag performers’

Published in Evening Standard on January 18, 2023

Travis Alabanza is taking over: this month, the writer and performer leads a group of London’s underground cabaret legends as they go above ground – all the way to the main stage of the Royal Court theatre.

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Review: WARHOLCAPOTE, Rob Roth

Published in The TLS on January 6, 2023

In 1948 a young Andy Warhol read Truman Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, and became obsessed with the writer. On moving to New York a few years later, he started sending fan letters to Capote, hanging around outside his house until they got talking, and after that phoned him every day. His first show in the city was called Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote.

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Review: Betty!, Manchester Royal Exchange

Published in The Telegraph on December 9, 2022

Consider this a spectacular finale to a trilogy about Yorkshire women, from the pen of Maxine Peake: first she immortalised cyclist Beryl Burton, then Hull fishwife Lillian Bilocca, and now Dewsbury’s Betty Boothroyd, the first female Speaker in the House of Commons.

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Review: The Glass Menagerie, Manchester Royal Exchange

Published in The Independent on September 8, 2022

At last, Atri Banerjee’s production of Tennessee Williams’s play sees the light: it was due to be staged in spring 2020. While the cast and team have re-assembled, Banerjee and designer Rosanna Vize completely reworked their plans, to take into account what we’ve all been through since then.

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Three Theaters, Three Plays, One Cast, All at Once

Published in The New York Times on June 24, 2022

SHEFFIELD, England — Visitors to Tudor Square in the center of this northern English city might spot some unusual figures there this week: a woman sprinting through in a neon boilersuit, or a tutu, or a man running with a box of scissors. And if they look like they’re in a hurry to get somewhere, that’s because they are. These are actors, and they have an entrance to make — on a different stage from the one they just left.

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The great 16th-Century black composer erased from history

Published in BBC Culture on June 16, 2022

The Western classical music canon is notoriously white and male – so you might assume that a black Renaissance composer would be a figure of significant interest, much-performed and studied. In fact, the story of the first known published black composer – Vicente Lusitano – is only now being heard, alongside a revival of interest in his long-neglected choral music.

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Money matters – financial inequality in straight relationships

Published in Cosmopolitan on June 1, 2022

Jasmine’s sitting across from David* in the pub. It’s their first date and he’s living up to his Tinder profile – charming, good-looking, and seemingly the perfect mix of ambitious and kind. He paid for dinner, and she was keen to continue the evening in the pub.

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Why real love stories aren’t about fate or destiny

Published in The Independent on May 26, 2022

Have you ever wondered if you would have fallen in love with the same people if you’d lived in a different time? Would you even have met them, in an era with different social mobility – and if you had, would the relationships have worked out?

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