When Jason and Tracey were trying for a baby, the worst happened. Tracey was diagnosed with breast cancer, and although she eventually recovered, was unable to carry a child. For Jason, the answer was clear - as a trans man, he would become pregnant instead.
Apparently in Denmark they pronounce screenwriter Adam Price’s surname as “Preece”, but its English-looking spelling stems from the fact that his ancestors moved from London to Denmark in the 18th century.
When Shirley Collins appears at The Roundhouse next week, it will be 50 years since she last played there. On 30 May 1969, she and her sister Dolly were on a bill promoting their then label Harvest Records. When she plays there on 31 January, she is the main event. After her comeback album Lodestar was issued in November 2016, the knowledge that Shirley is the most important voice of traditional English music has been reinforced.
Nadia Murad caught the world’s attention when she spoke at the United Nations Security Council. She spoke of living under ISIS, daily assaults, escaping, and the current plight of the Yazidi people, in refugee camps and still under ISIS control. It was a heart-breaking plea for support to the world’s silent nations. But in a rapidly changing news landscape, it’s easy to stay silent and wait for the next story come to come along.
Writer and director David Nicholas Wilkinson felt moved to make his reflective, rather melancholy documentary on the 48% who voted to remain in the EU, he says, because nobody else was making one. When it came to funding the project, not a single Brit would invest (though he has German and Irish backers) – potential supporters were apparently too nervous of their names getting out.
Have the values of Remain already become so ignored and so – well, unacceptable? Possibly. Which, of course, makes it all the more crucial that Wilkinson has provided Remainers with this platform to present their arguments and fears, their fury at the lies peddled by Brexiters, and their frustration that, as one pro-Remain demonstrator puts it, we’re abandoning our best option in favour of something unavoidably far worse.
Everyone involved in Postcards from the 48% – director, interviewees, and everyone behind the scenes – is a Remainer. Wilkinson has taken a bold, unashamedly partisan stance, but he maintains a calm, objective, vicarly presence throughout his film, travelling Britain to discuss our predicament. He’s got a strong cohort of contributors, too – from Vince Cable and Nick Clegg through to Lush’s Mark Constantine, Ian McEwan, Bob Geldof and Joan Bakewell – who convey their bewilderment and sometimes despair.
A more worrying omission is Labour: Wilkinson lets Corbyn’s party almost entirely off the hook
Miriam Margolyes (pictured below, with director David Nicholas Wilkinson) makes a brief appearance from what’s apparently the nearest house in mainland Britain to France, arguing that we were fed untruths in the referendum campaign, and that she doesn’t think most Brits are racist (it’s slightly worrying that she even feels she needs to). Clegg is predictably eloquent and convincing, asserting that under Teresa May’s hardline interpretation of the referendum result, it’s as if anyone with internationalist, pro-European views no longer has any right to hold them. And though Wilkinson covers plenty of ground – geographically and thematically – in his 115-minute offering (which, it has to be said, feels its length), there’s a smooth, organic flow to his argument.
There are some fresh insights here. Former SDLP leader Mark Durkan is passionate in explaining the complexities of Brexit playing out against the Good Friday Agreement, though Scotland gets short shrift with comments from just a single voice, the admittedly persuasive Lesley Riddoch. Young demonstrators express their anger that with Brexit occupying almost all of the present government’s attention, much-needed changes in environmental policy, health, housing, social justice and more are simply being ignored. "We don’t have time for this shit," as marcher Daniel bluntly puts it.
But by the end of the film, do we know anything new? Does Wilkinson provide fresh insights into why the vote was lost, or what we can do about it now? Not really. To anyone who glances at the New European, many figures here – Bonnie Greer, Alasdair Campbell, AC Grayling among them – will seem very familiar, and he relies too heavily on the paper’s front-page cartoons.
A more worrying omission is Labour: Wilkinson lets Corbyn’s party almost entirely off the hook, even going so far as to argue Labour’s gains in 2017 could be put down to discontent with pro-hard-Brexit Tories, without questioning the party’s deliberately ambiguous stance on the issue. He focuses in on Ruth Cadbury, pro-Remain Labour MP for Brentford and Isleworth, who increased her majority by 11,000 in the 2017 general election. But can she really be held up as representative of her party’s wider Brexit policies?
You have to wonder, too, about Wilkinson’s partisan approach. In restricting his team to die-hard Remainers, he’s almost certainly also guaranteeing his audience comes from the same group, serving only to create an echo chamber in which we hear repeatedly the anti-Brexit arguments we know already. There’s just one short section – a brief whizz around Stoke-on-Trent – in which he attempts to engage with the frustrations that drove Brexiters to vote the way they did, though young activist Femi Oluwole comments on the tragic irony of the Brexit vote being motivated by systemic failures that the government can now do nothing about, because it’s spending all its time on – you guessed it, Brexit.
Rather than galvanising his audience into righteous fury, however, Wilkinson instead offers up a sad, wistful tribute to the values and the future we once seemed to take for granted. Ian McEwan’s knowing quip about Remainers being "hobbled by a fatal attraction to rational argument" holds equally true for Wilkinson’s thoughtful, respectful, polite film. This is a valuable memorial for future generations, undoubtedly, but it offers little to get us out of our present predicament.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Postcards from the 48%
Masculinity, whether toxic or in crisis (but never ever problem-free), is a hardy perennial subject for British new writing, and this new piece from playwright Simon Stephens, Frantic Assembly director Scott Graham and Underworld musician Karl Hyde is a verbatim drama made up of interviews with men, which the trio conducted in their
As the Brighton Festival 2018 draws towards its closing weekend, its Guest Director, the artist David Shrigley, has committed to an illustrated talk about his work that “will contain numerous rambling anecdotes but not be in the slightest bit boring”. In the programme, he claims to have promised this signed in his own blood. Such drastic assurance proves unnecessary.
Director, playwright and novelist Neil Bartlett has been making theatre and causing trouble since the 1980s. He made his name with a series of controversial stark naked performances staged in clubs and warehouses, then went on to become the groundbreaking Artistic Director of the Lyric Hammersmith in London in 1994. Since leaving the Lyric in 2005, he’s worked with collaborators as different as the National, Duckie, the Bristol Old Vic, Artangel, and the Edinburgh International Festival.
Four of his previous Brighton Festival shows have been at the Theatre Royal: his Oscar Wilde homage For Alfonso in 2011; his one-man show What Can You Do in 2012; The Britten Canticles with Ian Bostridge in 2013; and his play Stella in 2016. This year he is collaborating with performer Francois Testory and electronic sound-artist Phil Von to present Medea, Written In Rage (26th May), a tour-de-force solo reimagining of the classical legend .
“The Theatre Royal is one of my favourite venues in the country," he says “It's a real sleeping beauty of a building, and somewhere you can create a real rapport between the performer and the crowd. Medea is a pretty spectacular piece - big frock, big sound, big performance - but it's also very personal, very intense, and I think the stage of the Royal is going to be ideal"
A Brighton Festival regular, then, Neil's picks of this year are as follows (all dates are in May).
The Myth of Sisyphus (11th, Grand Central): “Camus is a writer we could all use to pay attention to right now - he's all about how to live in impossible times. And what a great idea this is. Simon is a terrific performer - so go for the day and really get stuck in.”
Yomi Sode’s Coat (10th-11th, Brighthelm Centre): “I cut my teeth making solo out of stories that nobody was hearing at the time, and I'm fascinated to see how a whole new generation is right now using solo performance to tell a whole new set of stories. Plus he's dishing up stew!”
Britten’s War Requiem (12th, Dome): “I love the way the festival is unafraid to let the great voices of the past ring out for new audiences. The Requiem is a masterpiece of political rage and yearning, in lots of unexpected ways. It’s going to make an amazing companion piece to Hofesh Schecter's Grand Finale. And I have to say that with those three soloists – blimey! - you're never going it hear it sung more beautifully or with more personal commitment.”
Joan (13th -14th, The Basement): “This was one of my favourite shows of last year when it toured - punchy, funny, in your face. Drag King Heaven.”
Ursula Martinez (14th, Old Market, FREE ADMISSION): “Takes solo lady-performance and really weaponises it. There are a lot of great queer voices in the festival this year, and I think Ursula might be the one who's going to be showing us all how it's done.”
Brownton Abbey (25th, Dome): “With that title, how can we go wrong? This looks like being the party that really brings this year's festival to the boil. Expect fabulousness.”
Ezra Furman (26th, Dome): “A major new voice, perfect for those who like their rock'n'roll really wrecked. And being one myself, I can never resist a man who wears pearls.”
Songs of the Sea (13th, Glyndebourne): “If you know these artists already, then you'll need no persuading; but if you think the classical music programme is maybe not for you, then this might be the show to change your mind. In particular, pianist Julius Drake can make a keyboard speak like nobody else does. In the perfect acoustic at Glyndebourne, his playing is going to be like being given a new pair of ears. Plus those standing seats are only £10.”
Nicola Barker and Nick Harkaway: Future Perfect (13th, Brighton & Hove High School): “When I'm not making theatre, I'm a novelist. My last one, The Disappearance Boy, was set in Brighton in 1953. These two writers are all about trying to find new ways of writing the right now and the just over the horizon. I reckon the conversation will be fascinating for anyone who's thinking ahead about how words actually work these days."
Overleaf: Neil Bartlett and Francois Testory talk about Medea: Written In Rage
In our era of 24/7 news, downloadable from anywhere in the world at the touch of an app, it's hard to remember that not so very long ago the agenda was set by the BBC - the Home Service as Radio 4 was then called, and BBC TV, just the one channel, which broadcast news at a handful of fixed points during the evening. Outside broadcasts, "OBs", were slow, labour-intensive and expensive. Politicians were respected.
In the week that the police announced the final Grenfell Tower fire death toll, this is a timely release. Paul Sng’s 82-minute documentary, narrated by the actress Maxine Peake, is a serious investigation into the state of social housing in the UK, most especially the way it’s being co-opted into the private sector to make as much money as possible for corporate free market ideologues and those trailing in their wake.
Sng, along with his cinematographer Nick Ward and editor Josh Alward, have made a small budget go a long way, utilising striking imagery of urban desolation, intercut with old, black and white photographs of areas such as the Gorbals in Glasgow and Nottingham’s St Ann’s Estate, alongside simple, well-chosen graphics comparing the money being offered to buy people out with the profits on the cards for “management companies”.
Dispossession begins with the huge council housing boom kick-started by Clement Atlee’s post-war Labour government. It tells us that by the beginning of the Eighties 42 percent of the population lived in social housing while today that figure is less than eight percent, with 1.4 million people on waiting lists for council homes. It goes on to point out how Margaret Thatcher’s hugely popular policy of offering the right to buy council properties was really the start of the rot. Very little of that money fed back into building new social housing. The body of the film then utilises the examples of multiple estates and high-rise properties across Britain that have been systematically run down through lack of investment, then bought out by private investors.
Among the notable villains are Tory-“advising” estate agent giants Savills, with their transparently disgraceful plan to remove the tenants of the successful, albeit rundown, Cressingham Gardens Estate near Brixton. The residents have got together and fought, all but proving on paper, with evidence, that demolishing their homes would destroy a 40-year-old community, benefitting no one but rich people trying to make themselves richer. It's a particularly callous and ruthless version of gentrification. An elderly female resident, very definitely someone’s gran, proclaims, near tears, “To the last breath of my body, I will fight them.” It’s difficult to fathom a reason, unless unscrupulous money-suckling wealth accumulation has suddenly become morally viable, how anyone could possibly side against her. Dispossession is rich in such information, riling the viewer up with a sense of righteous fury.
Sng was responsible for the 2015 documentary Invisible Britain, about the career and politics of laptop punk-poets Sleaford Mods. Dispossession could do with some of that film’s fire and energy for, while it’s an important polemic, it would be better suited as a late-evening BBC Four programme rather than a DVD on the commercial market. Nevertheless, Sng succeeds in laying out his shocking information in a clear and erudite fashion, making this an essential watch for those interested in understanding how their country, their very birthright, is being sold out from under them.
The only extra material on the DVD is a couple of trailers.
Overleaf: Watch the trailer for Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle