Tahliah Barnett has been having a rough old time of it. There was that doomed celebrity romance (Robert Pattinson) and some health issues (I’m not entirely sure if we need to know about her operation to have fibroids removed) but suffering, as we are all aware, is the fuel of creativity.
Elf Lyons’ new show, Love Songs To Guinea Pigs, has moved away from her usual slapstick and absurdist mimicry into new realms of traditional stand up. She cites the reason as being unable to do mime on the radio, but there’s a more serious reason for the switch.
After ChifChaff, her Edinburgh show last year, and a string of shows involving ballet, hula hooping and ice skating, the comic found herself in bed, paralysed from the waist down. What came next was corrective spinal surgery, adoption of two guinea pigs, a bout of depression, a break up, and a return to the stage.
October 5th in the United States is a day for righteous rage. In 2016 it marked the release of the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape in which Donald Trump made his now-infamous “grab them by the pussy” comment. In 2017, it was the date the New York Times published their first story on Hollywood king-pin producer Harvey Weinstein. In 2018 it was the date on which the Senate saw fit to advance Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
Newly arrived from a much-lauded stint at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, Rachel O'Riordan has undertaken to make "work of scale by women" during her time as artistic director of the Lyric. What better place to start than with Ibsen's once-shocking heroine, her story reimagined by prolific playwright Tanika Gupta?
You will doubtless have seen the protestors who dress as Gilean handmaids to protest anti-abortion legislation from Texas to Missouri. They model their costumes on those of the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale: tight white bonnets and red smocks. They appear at courthouses and state capitols as a warning from the near-future or a fiction which feels ever more like the present – and the truth.
“Thank you for making us so fucking special!” It’s the end the set and both adjectives are appropriate. “Yes I had to say fucking special,” Peaches yells, combative and loved. The audience howls back. The Royal Festival Hall is hardly a natural environment for anarchic art-punk scuzz but Peaches knows how to work her crowd. She’s played here before and saw Grace Jones perform live, after all.
In the late 1950s, a photo technician from Salford suddenly became “the most famous teenager in Britain”. Shelagh Delaney was 19 when she sent the script of A Taste of Honey to the radical director Joan Littlewood. Within a matter of weeks, in May 1958, Theatre Royal Stratford East had staged it – sensationally, to a welcome that mixed bouquets and brickbats. The fearless youngster from the cosmopolitan slum neighbourhood of Ordsall had already begun “to change the way working-class women are treated and represented in Britain”.
What’s the next level above national treasure? We’ll need a name for it by the end of All Woman, Kathy Burke’s new Channel 4 documentary.
Frank Turner’s compendium of extraordinary female lives, from the “impudence” of a Byzantine princess to his mum via Mata Hari, is admirably ambitious and historically intriguing. The arena-playing folk-punk digs deeper into factual byways than he has any career need to, insisting on his own wayward course.
Many of the women in this pioneering collection of essays have faced unimaginable hardship in their pursuit of truth – persecution by extremist groups as well as the loss of family members and friends. The tone of this collection is, however, best captured by Amira Al Sharif’s photograph of laundry hanging out to dry across a grocer's family home which has been damaged in a coalition bombing in Yemen.