The terrorist attacks on Paris and Brussels have forced us to once again confront issues of identity and national security. Given the wealth of propaganda IS spread online no one can be under any illusions about the group’s intent to violently instil a caliphate. But then why are British Muslims volunteering to fight for them? […]
Harold Pinter is after Beckett surely the most imitated of the post war British playwrights, perhaps because many of his most successful plays take that most familiar and cherished of institutions, the home, and transform it into a territory where only the fittest survive.Pinter’s plays speak strongly to our collective anxiety over our power to […]
Death isn’t the worst thing they can do to you…Can take away your life but not give you death instead Rod The university-cum-concentration camp Kane describes in the text of Cleansed is one of the most politically resonant settings in modern drama. A place of learning renovated into a laboratory of death has more than […]
In 1969 the American photographer Lauren McIntyre set off on a mission to the Amazon basin. His goal: to photograph the legendary Mayoruna tribal community (the “cat people”) for the National Geographic. But soon after he landed McIntyre became hopelessly lost after he chased a group of Mayoruna deep into the jungle. Forced to live […]
He’s still playing on my mind: Bowie. The one, perhaps only, time an artist can guarantee unanimous adoration is after their death. This is especially true for an artist as seminal as the Thin White Duke, or Ziggy Stardust, or Aladdin Sane; choose to remember him as you like. Perhaps Bowie’s greatest gift to us, […]
Jim Callaghan was a bad prophet. His (to borrow a certain kingmaker’s phrase) intensely relaxed reply to a journalist’s question concerning the UK’s so called Winter of Discontent in 1979 cemented the image of a dangerously complacent and unrepresentative Prime Minister. The episode led to Callaghan’s downfall whilst the 1970s have since been caricatured as […]
This is the age of marketing, not the age of criticism. To give an example, I’ll start with a small incident that has a wider symbolic value. In November 2013, a new show called Gastronauts opened at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs which was an immersive theatre experience during which the audience “dined” in a […]