The Revd John Chilembwe – whose statue now adorns Trafalgar Square – is notorious for the church service he conducted beneath the severed head of William Jervis Livingstone, a Scottish plantation manager with a reputation for mistreating his workers. The night before, Chilembwe’s followers had broken into his house and chased him from room to
‘Trans people are sacred. We are divine.’ The first line of I, Joan at the Globe establishes the tone of the play as a public rally for non-binary folk. The writer, Charlie Josephine, seems wary of bringing divinity into the story too much, and he gives Joan a get-out clause to appease the agnostics. ‘Setting
Amazon’s much-heralded Tolkien prequel The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power began by answering a question that has puzzled humankind – and possibly elves – these many millennia. Why is it that a ship floats and a stone doesn’t? The reason apparently is because ‘a stone sees only downward’, whereas a ship has
When Maurice Broomfield left school at the age of 15, he took a job at the Rolls-Royce factory, bending copper pipes on a turret lathe. That was what you did in Derby in 1931: Rolls-Royce was the town’s biggest employer, and entire generations expected to pass the best part of their lives behind the walls
You always have to brace yourself for the latest David Cronenberg film, but with Crimes of the Future it’s not the scalpels slicing into flesh or the mutant dancer with sewn-up eyes (and mouth) or even the filicide (oh, boy) you have to brace yourself for. In this instance, the most shocking thing is that
The competition between news-led podcasts is nearing boiling point. If you tuned in to The Media Show on Radio 4 last Wednesday, you’d have felt the tension between the podcasters leading the guard: Alastair Campbell of The Rest Is Politics, Jon Sopel of The News Agents, plus his executive producer, Dino Sofos, Nosheen Iqbal of
I was never Rudolf Nureyev’s greatest fan. I must have seen him dance 30 or 40 times, starting with a Bayadère in the mid-1960s, and while his sheer presence remained so potent that he was always exciting to witness, I became increasingly aware of how fiercely willed his dancing was – a struggle with or
Let me introduce you to the two poles in pop and rock. One is marked by authenticity, musicianship, a certain traditionalism. This is the pole that in critics’ discourse is called ‘rockism’ – the assumption that rock (or, at least, real people playing real instruments) is the normative state of music. The other is artificiality,
One swallow might not make a summer, but it certainly helps rounds the season off. ‘Perhaps, like the swallow, you will migrate towards a bright land, towards love,’ sings the poet Prunier to Magda, the heroine of La Rondine, but love itself is the real bird of passage in Puccini’s gorgeous Viennese operetta-manqué. Magda trades
