The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Sebastian, Four Mothers, Restless, and The Most Precious of Cargoes
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Hedwig and the Angry Inch
JOHN GREEN explores the argument that psychiatry needs to move away from the idea of just seeing and treating the individual
SYLVIA HIKINS applauds a polemic against “cleanfluencers” and considers radical alternatives to current inequalities of housework
RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
High quality pulp, rollicking online murders, Abnorman Britain, and high skates drama: reviews of The Get Off, Everyone In The Group Chat Dies, Pagans and First To Fall
DENNIS BROE notes what happens to content when the streaming giants incorporate AI and deregulation into their economic models
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Leeds Playhouse & HOME Manchester
IT’S entrance worthy of a megastar. Hedwig (RuPaul’s Drag Race UK contestant Divina De Campo) struts through the audience, whooping up applause, before taking to the stage to sing the Bowie-influenced Tear Me Down; her stars and stripes cape opened to reveal the slogan “gender is a construct.”
It’s not the only thing that’s a construct. In a show that’s described as being a “musical, a cabaret and a stream of consciousness,” it soon transpires that Hedwig is a megastar only in her head. She plays in a scuzzy northern working men’s club while her former mentee Tommy Gnosis, whose hits she co-wrote, performs to a packed Roundhay Park.
The cult show, written by John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask, tells how she arrived at this point in a series of sketchy flashbacks. Born in communist East Berlin before moving to Kansas, she presents herself as the missing link between east and west, and an alternative to binary divisions due to a botched gender reassignment operation.
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