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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Female gaze with a sharp focus
ANGUS REID sees some perceptive productions of work by women writers and directors in Edinburgh and Glasgow
Inspired: Suzanne Magonan and Ali Craig in Fibres
[Jassy Earl Photography]
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
IT’S the outright identification with working women that makes Francis Poet’s outstanding play Fibres (Citizens Theatre, Glasgow/Touring, ★★★★★) so effective.
Maureen Carr, as the central character Beanie, has been poisoned with asbestos from washing her husband’s clothes. “No-one wanted my brain,” she says after a lifetime of working with her hands but it is through her autodidact’s brain that we understand not just what asbestos does to the body but how the whole syndrome fits into capitalist oppression.
Her dying husband may be fatalistic but she remains rational, even as a remembered voice after her own death, in the dreams of her grieving daughter. “Just you make our deaths cost them,” she insists softly.
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KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book
SIMON PARSONS is beguiled by a dream-like exploration of the memories of a childhood in Hong Kong
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
GORDON PARSONS is disappointed by an unsubtle production of this comedy of upper middle class infidelity