In Tell It to the Bees, sex is aberrant unless it’s conducted by a straight married couple. Since Annabel Jankel’s low-key drama is set in a grim Scottish mill town in 1952, you can add “white” to that dictum.
Few theatres have done as much to promote new young talent as the Royal Court; few theatres have done as much to stage plays about the pains and pleasures of the digital world; few venues have tackled the themes of race and gender in contemporary society more effectively. Now, once again, it's time for a young writer to make their debut in the upstairs studio space.
Not too long ago it would have been unthinkable for a BBC One Sunday-night period drama series to tell of one woman’s love for another. Whatever anyone thought of it – and not everyone bade it the hearty welcome it merited – Gentleman Jack has shifted the dial.
“You do like to have your cake and eat it, Vity. So many cakes, so many,” laments Harold Nicholson (Rupert Penry-Jones) to his wife Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton) as she embarks on an affair with Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki).
Janelle Monae says her show is all about making memories. She tells the crowd: “I hope that I can become a memory for you that you access when you’re feeling down – a memory that’s rooted in love and freedom.”
According to the Manchester drag collective the Family Gorgeous, “drag should be for everyone.” And on the evidence of Drag SOS (Channel 4) , engagingly voice-overed by Hugh Bonneville, the British public is eager to embrace them in all their spangly, fantastical glory.
Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is written as a letter to his mother, who cannot read. She cannot read because, when she was five, her schoolhouse was burnt to the ground in an American napalm raid. “Our mother tongue, then,” writes Vuong, is the “mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”
Anyone who saw Félix Maritaud playing the angry activist Max in Robin Campillo’s Paris ACT UP drama 120 BPM will certainly remember him (main picture).
"I am amazed to be still alive. Two hours of medieval torment.” Franco Zeffirelli - who has died at the age of 96 - had spent the day having a lumbar injection to treat a sciatic nerve. You could hear the bafflement in his heavily accented English.
Kiss My Genders may not claim to be a survey, yet it seems perverse to mount an exhibition of work by LGBTQ artists who address issues of gender identity without including some of the best known names.