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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A brilliantly tense play
A compelling story of how cruelty begets cruelty, and of how the child becomes the parent, writes PETER MASON
Orla Fitzgerald as Maureen and Adam Best as Pato
[Helen Maybanks]
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
Beauty Queen of Leenane
Lyric Hammersmith, London
SET in the west of Ireland and first staged in 1996, Martin McDonagh’s Beauty Queen of Leenane centres around 40-year-old Maureen, angry and depressed at having to look after her manipulative, ailing mother as the rain falls ceaselessly outside their run-down home in Connemara.
Momentarily Maureen’s drab isolation is relieved as she stumbles into a night of awkward romance with neighbour Pato, who has returned briefly from a labouring job in England.
But when her selfish mother contrives to put the kybosh on their putative relationship, there are bitter consequences all round.
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