To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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An edifying play for our time
GEORGE FOGARTY recommends an play that serves as a riposte to right-wing attempts to strip Jewish historical identity of its radical and internationalist traditions
SHOULDER TO SHOULDER: Paul Robeson leads Moore Shipyard [Oakland, CA] workers in singing the Star Spangled Banner, September 1942 - Robeson himself was a shipyard worker in WWI
[Public Domain]
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
Paul Robeson’s Love Song, an audio play
Tayo Aluko and Friends
TAYO ALUKO must by now be one of the world’s foremost experts on Paul Robeson. His first play, Call Mr Robeson, a masterpiece of biographical storytelling, has been touring for almost two decades now, with new Robeson stories emerging from fans at almost every performance.
His new play, written during lockdown, hones in on one particular moment in Robeson’s life — the Peekskill riots — rightly described by one audience member as a “seminal point in American history that people don’t know enough about.” But it is also a tale about our current age.
The play opens with an all-too familiar scene — a news item about a young black man being shot in the back by the police while getting into a car. Watching the news are the two modern-day protagonists of the story, Jacob and Adele, a pair of white Jewish siblings in a wealthy suburb of Kenosha, Wisconsin, there to clear out the house of their recently departed mother.
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GEORGE FOGARTY is dazzled by a breathtakingly skillful puppet version of Shakespeare’s greatest love poem
RON JACOBS recommends a book that charts the disparate circumstances that defined the lives of two prominent black Afro-Americans — one a communist, the other an anti-communist
PETER MASON applauds a stage version of Le Carre’s novel that questions what ordinary people have to gain from high-level governmental spying
GORDON PARSONS is blown away by a superb production of Rostand’s comedy of verbal panache and swordmanship