SIMON PARSONS is discomfited by an unflichingly negative portrait of motherhood and its trials
Best of 2024: Jan Woolf
The playwright and artist reflects on the ways in which reviewing can nourish the creative act
PAUL FOLEY recommends an extraordinary double bill that packs a punch and leaves you reeling
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a play about AI that results in a deadening disconnect for its audience
SIMON PARSONS applauds an insightful state-of-the-nation play that explores the growing class divide in South Africa
MATTHEW HAWKINS pays tribute to the performance artist and costumier, Leigh Bowery
SIMON DUFF reviews a new composition by German composer and pianist Florian Weber that blurs the line between where improvisation ends and composition begins
New releases from The Jim Mullen Quartet, Caroline Kraabel/John Edwards, and Matthew Muneses/Riza Printup
TED HUGHES said that deadlines were good for artists and journos as its imminent arrival provokes fear and therefore adrenalin — and we get on with it. And so, herewith my 12 deadlines for 2024.
The partridge in the pear tree, if you like, was The Flea at Hackney’s Yard Theatre, a vivid production about old hypocrisies. “The poor have got their channels in the bedrooms of the rich.” My pieces need a good haiku of a title and editorial provides them.
The delicious and deceptively mysterious painter “Here Comes the Sun King” on Ken Kiff’s Show, then Peter Kennard’s Archive of Dissent at the Whitechapel Gallery London (on till January 19) which made me hail him in print as the “artist of the human conscience.”
More from this author
The phrase “cruel to be kind” comes from Hamlet, but Shakespeare’s Prince didn’t go in for kidnap, explosive punches, and cigarette deprivation. Tam is different.
ANGUS REID deconstructs a popular contemporary novel aimed at a ‘queer’ young adult readership
A landmark work of gay ethnography, an avant-garde fusion of folk and modernity, and a chance comment in a great interview
ANGUS REID applauds the inventive stagecraft with which the Lyceum serve up Stevenson’s classic, but misses the deeper themes
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