ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
Latest editorial
Shook, Southwark Playhouse London
Timely indictment of how young offenders are failed by prison system
‘Shit parenting’: Andrea Hall (Grace) with Ivan Oyik (Riyad)
[The Other Richard]
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, and John Luther Adams
GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
THE PAPATANGO New Writing Prize never fails to deliver a stimulating work and this year’s winner is no exception.
Samuel Bailey’s timely debut play takes us behind the peeling walls of a young offender institute where three 16 to 17-year-olds — Cain (Josh Finan), Riyad (Ivan Oyik) and Jonjo (Josef Davies) — are taking “shit parenting classes” to escape the menacing monotony of prison life.
New prison instructor Grace (Andrea Hall) is tasked with trying to teach nappy changing and CPR, but keeping the boys’ focus proves to be her greatest challenge. All three are facing long sentences and although they have dreams of making lives for themselves outside, their hope is being drained by a system only concerned with short-term discipline rather than lasting reform.
Similar stories
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about a two-handed theatrical homage to jazz’s most mercurial musician
MAYER WAKEFIELD is gripped by a production dives rapidly from champagne-quaffing slick to fraying motormouth
MAYER WAKEFIELD recommends a musical ‘love letter’ to black power activists of the 1970s
MANJEET RIDON relishes a novel that explores the guilty repressions – and sexual awakenings – of a post-war Dutch bourgeois family