MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
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Theatre and Books with Gordon Parsons
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production that panders – if inadvertently – to Western prejudice against China
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a history that excavates the enormous role played by agricultural workers in recent times
ALEX HALL recommends a book that places empirical evidence at the heart of understanding racism
IT SEEMS strange to realise that live theatre, with its shared audience experience, is so long ago. But two plays early in the year uncannily chimed with the present.
In February, Juliet Gilkes’s new play The Whip at the RSC’s Swan Theatre in Stratford seemed to presage the Black Lives Matter movement.
Uncovering the inevitable political shenanigans behind the 18th-century abolition of the slave trade — fought as passionately as the Brexit conflict — it followed the parliamentary battles over compensation demanded by the slave owners for freeing the 80,000 slaves in Britain’s West Indian colonies. It incurred a debt to the nation only cleared five years ago.
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GORDON PARSONS relishes a fast moving production of Sheridan’s comic masterpiece
GORDON PARSONS relishes a play that reveals how language carries much more than simple communication
