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natural disaster · natural disaster

After their frantic display against DR Congo, England head coach needs his side to remain composed in the Azteca cauldron It was somehow in keeping with the bedlam that has gripped Mexico since Tuesday night when the their team beat Ecuador to set up a World Cup last-16 showdown with England on Sunday. There was talk of an incoming storm , which is forecast to bring the risk of flooding and affect a game talked up as arguably the biggest in Mexico’s history. There was a figurative one, too. The kick-off would have to be brought forward from 6pm local time (1am Monday BST) to midday, Fifa was told on Friday, and there followed an intense amount of back and forth, so many different people and companies to consider. In the end, it was decided that it would have to remain at 6pm. There was a lot of energy expended for no actual change and on everybody hurtled. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

South Africa 45-21 England Springboks run in seven tries in one-sided contest What a fabulous occasion this was, a thunderous classic to kick off the new-look Nations Championship. Anyone stumbling across the sport for the first time would have been truly staggered by the commitment of both teams, not to mention the spine-tingling pre-match rendition of “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika”. This was top-drawer sporting theatre in the spiritual home of South African rugby. And when the smoke finally cleared on a cool, still Highveld evening it was the world champion Springboks who emerged battered but victorious. From 17-0 down after just 12 minutes England showed huge resolve to battle their way back to 17-14 at half-time but by the end, reduced to 13 men, the upstart visitors had been firmly put back in their place. Continue reading...

social demographic · sports

World No 114 wins 2-6, 7-5, 2-6, 7-6 (3), 7-6 (5) Fery needed treatment three times for nosebleeds This place has always been home for Arthur Fery. He grew up a mile away from the Wimbledon grounds and went to school nearby. His mother, a former tennis player, is a member here. As a child he would spend his summers strolling the grounds: watching and wishing, inhaling this rarefied air, dreaming of the day when everyone here knew his name. On a sun-baked Saturday evening, that moment finally arrived. The queues for seats stretched around the block and barely moved all day. Up in the high-rise flats overlooking court 18, residents leaned over balconies and pressed faces up against windows. This year’s Wimbledon finally has a homegrown hero to exalt, and it came after the longest match of the tournament so far: a five-set comeback that stretched credulity and announced the 23-year-old world No 114 as the next big star of British tennis. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

ICC exploring fixed windows for each format Continental championships among ideas up for debate The International Cricket Council is exploring a radical overhaul of the global calendar with discussions surrounding multilateral series, the creation of continental championships, a World Club Championship for T20 franchises, fixed windows for each format and possible changes to the length of one-day internationals. Talks between the 12 full members will take place at the ICC’s annual general meeting in Edinburgh on Wednesday as part of a strategic review being managed by the consulting firm McKinsey. Continue reading...

social demographic · sports

Argentina’s captain leads the way for veteran strikers at World Cup. They have different styles, but all have shown their worth I would be shocked if the record for the most goals scored by a player in a World Cup – Just Fontaine’s 13 in 1958 – is not broken this summer. That is how elite the world’s top forwards are. They are all pushing each other to keep scoring more. We are so lucky to be watching them at the same time. I also believe, because of the skill set required to be a world-class, modern-day finisher, we are going to see more and more playing into their 40s, so much so that it may be possible that Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo could go to another World Cup. Continue reading...

social demographic · sports

Spain’s manager answers your questions on advice for Lamine Yamal, the hardest thing about being a coach and how the current team compares to the winners of 2010 “You’ve filtered these, right?” Luis de la Fuente asks, looking at the laptop of your questions on the table in front of him, and cracking up. He takes his seat on the third floor of the Cotton Bowl, Dallas, where Spain have just finished training ahead of their last-16 meeting with Portugal. Some of the players are still out there in the sunshine, in the place where Bebeto rocked the baby in 1994. It is the morning after that Cape Verde performance against Argentina. The World Cup is a creator of memories, pictures in the mind that never go. We all have one, or more. “Because of what it means for Spain, it has to be [Andrés] Iniesta’s goal,” De la Fuente says. “It’s not very original but that’s the image of the World Cup for us. I would have been at home watching it. I have always been very into the national team. Whenever the Selección played, it was an event at my parents’ house. My parents would watch, my brothers and sisters, people would come round to watch. That’s in Haro, La Rioja. And then as a professional, wherever the game found me, I would watch it. I would enjoy every World Cup game, but especially the Spain ones. There are other images of the World Cup, but that’s the most powerful.” Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

⚽ All the latest news and reaction from the World Cup ⚽ Player guide | Bracketology | Knockout draw | Email us Our reporters are in Mexico City for the big one and between running 5ks to show the effects of altitude, they’ve also written some words. Let’s start with Nick Ames, who has quotes from both managers: England’s Thomas Tuchel and Mexico’s Javier Aguirre. Jonathan Wilson was at Houston Stadium to witness 2022 semi-finalists Morocco beat Canada. Three second-half goals settled this one as Mohamed Ouahbi’s side became the first African nation to reach the World Cup quarter-finals twice. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

Nicky Woolf’s investigation into a rightwing YouTuber reveals much more than state interference in social media. Plus, why did a kid pretend to be Steven Spielberg’s nephew? Lauren Southern tells journalist Nicky Woolf she feels as though she’s in a spy movie, “but the dumbest ever made, because I’m just a YouTuber”. Along with other members of the right-wing commentariat, the Canadian found herself linked with the Kremlin when a company she had worked for was revealed as a front for the Russian state. Her candour is striking, as Woolf’s investigation unfolds across six uneasy chapters. Hannah J Davies Audible, all episodes out now Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

Aviva Studios, Manchester The artist’s latest show is a staggering takedown of colonial history, warfare and the migrant crisis, featuring buttons by the tonne and richly perfumed tea History has repeated itself all over Ai Weiwei’s vast exhibition of monumental sculpture in Manchester. The flags of long-lost nations hang from the ceiling, bronzes looted by dead empires have been recast and reclaimed, dilapidated ancient ruins have been rebuilt. Everywhere you look here, you will find death, exploitation, greed and suffering from across human history, brought back to life and put morbidly on display. The first thing you see is a black glass chandelier made of skeletons – The Human Comedy – and a wall covered in images of the most powerful bombs ever invented. Like a head on a stake, this is art as warning. This massive, ambitious exhibition is the Chinese artist at his most monumental, and as a result at his most effective. His subject matter works best at enormous scale, blown up, expanded, shoved in your face. Lining the back wall of this warehouse is a giant inflatable dinghy, 100 metres long, filled with figures in lifejackets. Think you can ignore the migrant crisis? Not here you can’t, because Ai has taken everyday, normalised tragedy and made it into a monument. He spent years interviewing hundreds of refugees, meeting people desperate for safety and a new life and produced a huge amount of work about it. This is the culmination of that project. Is it a good-looking work of art? Not really, but it makes a point, and makes it loudly. Continue reading...

social demographic · sports

‘I took this in 2017, when Didiller was nine. A few years ago, I returned to the area and asked about him, but couldn’t find him. Someone told me he had been killed’ I fell in love with photography when I was 19, while studying Spanish and doing voluntary work in Venezuela. Having grown up in the quite boring countryside of Denmark, I was curious about the rest of the world and had become socially and politically engaged. Walking down a street in Mérida with an old camera in my hand, I realised this was the perfect medium to push for the values I believed in, to try to make a change in the world. This was when I also became fascinated by the neighbouring country of Colombia, where civil war was causing great instability. I would later travel there for a project about the Amazon rainforest, and in 2016 I was commissioned by the Nobel Peace Center to cover the final stages of the peace process. I also focused on the millions of people who had been displaced within the country due to the conflict, but it felt like I couldn’t talk about turmoil and inequality in Columbia without looking at how its problems were influenced by the country’s production of cocaine. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

Lydia Wood began drawing the capital’s pubs after losing her job. Now, after her sketches went viral, she is on a mission to illustrate all the city’s watering holes – before some are closed On the pavement outside a London pub, 32-year-old Lydia Wood is sitting in the sunshine at her easel, peering up at the building and sketching with a pencil. Passersby pause to catch glimpses of her work, but what they might not know is that for the artist, this isn’t just a nice day out, but part of years-long project with no apparent end in sight. Wood began what she calls “the pub project” in 2021. Since then, she has drawn intricately detailed sketches of more than 350 pubs: her goal is to draw all 3,500-or-so of London’s beloved watering holes – a quest that could take her at least 10 years. Continue reading...

geopolitical · geopolitical

P21 Gallery, London Resonant black and white photographs show Palestinian refugees and the sites today of the homes they were forced to leave during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war These places were once filled with conversation, smells of cooking, laughter, comfort. Now I’m staring into a silent, rubble-strewn abyss. Eyewitness accounts that accompany documentary photographer Alan Gignoux’s black and white portraits of Palestinian refugees and the homes they were forced to leave refer repeatedly to the abundance that once came from these razed fields – olives, grains, figs, carob and grapes. Where there was life, now there is nothing. The vast losses seem etched into the faces of Gignoux’s subjects, even as they look back at his camera with defiance. All Gignoux’s subjects have either been exiled by the Nakba – the mass displacement of Palestinians in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war – or are their descendants. They now live in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank or Gaza. Gignoux promised each of his subjects that he would to return to their homes on their behalf, and photograph them. The series gives a detailed view of what happened in different villages in 1948, the circumstances under which people left and the repercussions across generations. Continue reading...

geopolitical · geopolitical

Artangel at the Maughan Library, London Drawing a line from the battle of Quebec to Trump v Carney, the Canadian artist’s takedown of rapacious US thuggery is strangely lacking drama Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before. The United States of America wants to annexe Canada. It starts by inviting Canadians to join the Greatest Nation on Earth but soon becomes more aggressive and strident. Canada, uninterested and baffled, stands up for itself. War looms. But this is not about Donald Trump and the bullying threats to Canada he has been making since the start of his second term. Except, of course, that it is, even though he isn’t mentioned by name in Canadian artist Terence Gower’s Artangel commission Enemies and Rascals – monstrous rascal though Trump is. Gower has created a sound installation deep inside a neogothic Victorian library to revisit the first time the US made proprietorial moves towards Canada – in 1775-76 during the American war of independence. George Washington – introduced simply as a “Virginia plantation owner” and Benjamin Franklin (“printer”) are among the US founders whose quoted words make them sound like rapacious thugs desperate to get their hands on Canadian land, particularly that belonging to Indigenous peoples. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate With snogging snails, conjoined lovers and her own pug Telly as Jesus, the ceramicist sculpts a mangled mythology of her own relationships If you’re worried that romance may be dead, just one look at Lindsey Mendick’s new exhibition will reassure you that it’s very much alive. It’s just a bit damaged and mangled. Well, mangled is an understatement. The English ceramicist paints a portrait of romantic love that’s mutated and twisted, gory and gross. This is love as body horror, romance as drug, co-dependency as living nightmare. The whole show is inspired by her love for her partner, the artist Guy Oliver, and her little black pug, Telly. Grainy, gritty Polaroids in the opening room find Lindsey and Guy embracing and canoodling, arms wrapped around each other, toes in one another’s mouths, naked bodies writhing together, tongues licking nipples, feet pressed against bare bollocks. It’s an incredibly intimate insight into their relationship, so full-frontal that you feel like a voyeur for looking. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

Barbican, London Clay Hilley was a blistering Tristan and Sara Jakubiak – in her role debut – a persuasive Isolde with Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra detailed and minutely balanced The London Symphony Orchestra’s regular concert performances of complete operas have become something of an institution. Janáček’s The Makropulos Affair and Strauss’s Salome had critics raving about high-definition orchestral textures and brutally streamlined drama. But few operas are more obviously made for the concert hall than Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde . The composer designated it a Handlung (act or plot), yet Tristan stands out even among his narration-heavy works for its sheer absence of onstage action. No other more closely encapsulates his notion that operas should be “deeds of music made visible”. Tristan’s ultimate drama is rooted in the orchestra. Using the soft gestures with which you might stroke a cat (no baton here), Antonio Pappano teased the opening into being – unhurried, impossibly delicate, exquisitely in tune. Over the next almost-four hours of music, numerous details came to the fore that are more often muddied or lost when the orchestra is sunk beneath a staging. There were harsh twangs of double bass and an oboe trill that cut straight through the thick symphonic texture. There was a horn lick I’d never previously heard and a troubled, circling bassline allowed more prominence than usual. The strings were instantly responsive, their articulation immediately hard-edged or cashmere-soft, their sound effortfully excavated or as light as silk in the breeze. Drake Gritton’s cor anglais solos from the back of the balcony and the front of the stage were beautifully shaped, his tone beguiling. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

von Otter/Komische Oper Berlin/Benzwi (BIS) This enjoyably eclectic recital from the ever consummate Von Otter highlights the aesthetic friction between romantic ballads, saucy burlesque, cinematic dreamscapes and political firecrackers The provocative, politically charged club scene that flourished in 1920s Berlin was not just a flash in the pan to be swept away by the Nazis. As Anne Sofie von Otter’s enjoyably eclectic recital demonstrates, its influence on film, musical theatre and popular song stretched across several decades. While émigrés such as Friedrich Hollaender and Mischa Spoliansky embraced Hollywood escapism, others, including Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, wrapped anti-government rhetoric in satirical songs that pulled few, if any punches. This programme is intentionally diverse, aiming to highlight the aesthetic friction between romantic ballads, saucy burlesque, cinematic dreamscapes and political firecrackers. In this it succeeds, though the stylistic through-line lurches at times. Regardless, the Salon Orchestra of the Komische Oper Berlin delivers thoroughly authentic performances under the strict, idiomatic baton of conductor Adam Benzwi, and the piquant orchestrations and arrangements are a treat. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

Shaham/Virginia Symphony Orchestra/Jacobsen (Canary Classics) The US violinist’s plush tone and laser-focused intonation enriches the solo line in these two violin concertos, with the Virginia Symphony light on its feet Pairing Samuel Coleridge-Taylor with his musical idol Dvořák is a shrewd idea. The British composer, of Sierra Leonean heritage, usually finds his Violin Concerto coupled with a little-known English work. Here, juxtaposed with one of the 19th century’s most popular concertos, it more than holds its own. Coleridge-Taylor’s concerto premiered in Connecticut in 1912 (despite the original parts going down with the Titanic). Although he doesn’t quote actual spirituals, the harmonies and melodic contours are reminiscent of African folk music. Gil Shaham has the measure of the work, his plush tone and laser-focused intonation enriching the solo line in a generally more sumptuous performance than most rival recordings. Eric Jacobsen and the excellent Virginia Symphony Orchestra ensure the accompaniments remain sufficiently light on their feet. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

Spitalfields festival, London New pieces written in response to the novelist’s works by Kate Moore, Alice Yeung, Seung-Won Oh and Sara Zamboni made for ravishing harmonies and interplay in an unusual concert Why write words about music, Hans Keller once asked, when you could just write music about music instead? His mid-century essays in sound were never more than an experimental curiosity, but one that exposed the acts of translation, mediation and re-creation we undertake without thinking every time we describe our favourite symphony or explain why a song makes us cry. Reversing the process, this curious concert by the Netherlands’ New European Ensemble (which travels to the Edinburgh book festival next month) invited music about words, as four composers responded to novels by Ali Smith. Interconnectedness – paths that intersect, patterns that repeat, stories and lives that echo – binds the four books of Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. This project spins that web still wider in new commissions from four female composers: Australia’s Kate Moore, Alice Yeung from Hong Kong, South Korean Seung-Won Oh, and Italy’s Sara Zamboni. Pieces by Peter Maxwell Davies, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Kinan Azmeh completed the sequence of narration and performance taking audiences through a cycle from autumn to summer. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

(Warner) After years spent chasing trends like trap and Latin pop, Madonna settles back​ nicely into​ old-school dance music to tell vivid vignettes of life in 80s New York ‘Ask yourself this – what are you doing it for? / Is it for you? Is it for them?” ponders Madonna during Bring Your Love, a collaboration with Sabrina Carpenter from Confessions II. It’s a question you could ask of her decision to release a follow-up to 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor 21 years on. The official line is, of course, that it’s for her. Confessions II was inspired by Madonna’s 2023 Celebration tour, a rampage through her back catalogue with staging that recreated the videos for old hits including Don’t Tell Me and Human Nature – it apparently set the singer thinking about her past. Certainly, Confessions II is rich with references to Madonna’s history, and not only the album from which it borrows its title and its initial structure, a sequence of house-influenced tracks that segue into each other like a DJ mix. There’s also the trip-hop-inspired Madonna of Bedtime Stories (the album concludes with a suite of slower, more introspective material); the club-hopping, fame-hungry Madonna of her 1982 debut single Everybody, who keeps cropping up in the lyrics; and the maternal, spiritually inclined Madonna of Ray of Light. The Test, a duet with her daughter Lourdes, is an older, wiser sequel to that album’s lullaby-like Little Star, alluded to in its opening lines. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

(Fixed Abode x Unsound) The festival-formed quartet conjures an album of glacial sound design and elegiac grandeur, though it can get too moody for its own good Polish producer 2K88 makes dark, glitching tracks that honour his country’s rap history and UK bass music. So when Poland’s Unsound festival asked him to team up with a group of British musicians, it made sense that he was drawn to Lauren Duffus, Rainy Miller and Bianca Scout, all of whom craft murky, genre-agnostic sounds best suited to after hours. The trio joined 2K88 for a residency in his home city of Gdynia last year ahead of a live performance at the festival in Kraków; the material they conjured up has now been developed into 10 full tracks. As you might expect from their respective solo projects, this record is haunting and vaporous, with glacial sound design, fragments of FX’d voice and stabs of low end. Opening track Everything Always Changes sets the vibe as textural drones merge into Duffus’s gauzy, looped vocals. Miller’s elegiac spoken word adds grandeur to the ambience, an effect intermittently upheld by soaring synths on In Stardust Garden … (Empress Ballroom) and Purple Mauve. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

His church thinks electric guitars are the devil’s work. But Father Tabakis is on a mission to change that – with Paradise Metal, a religious dubstep album that outdid Daft Punk and Aphex Twin ‘The guitar was made by God,” says Father Dionysios Tabakis, sitting in the living room of his flat in Nafplio, a city on Greece’s Peloponnesian coast, surrounded by a huge assortment of musical instruments and religious icons. Dressed in long black robes and sporting a fine grey wispy beard, Tabakis sounds as if he could be speaking from the pulpit when he adds: “The devil cannot create something. God has created all.” His favourite is an adapted Harley Benton R-457. Bought for only €135, it’s a striking electric guitar, yielding chords that are more wobbly and atonal than those of an ordinary guitar, but also warmer. Tabakis likens the sound to the “waves” of the human voice. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

As she tours the UK, we pick the best of an artist who defined the ‘sad banger’ – but also radiates joy and strength from her perfect pop songs Robyn has written and recorded more striking and melodically rich songs than this, but the opening track of Body Talk Part 1 might be this famously unbiddable pop star’s mission statement: an appealingly minimal bit of house music that dismisses a list of eye-rolling complaints aimed at everything from the music industry to uncomfortable shoes by repeating the title over and over again. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

From Miles Davis to Count Basie and Etta James to Prince, Rotterdam’s North Sea jazz festival has hosted the biggest names in music. As the event turns 50, musicians and organisers share their favourite memories from past years – and tell us why jazz isn’t dead For a weekend in July each year, a vast warehouse complex in the port city of Rotterdam becomes home to the biggest names in jazz. Under the banner of the North Sea jazz festival , the labyrinthine, windowless space has played host to performances from the likes of Miles Davis, free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, singer Etta James, saxophonist Wayne Shorter and even Prince. “We’ve had every major figure in jazz play for us over the past five decades,” senior programme manager Sander Grande says. “It’s the place where all the musicians want to hang and where audiences come to see art that is true and beautiful.” Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

With a punkish, antifascist take on the trad jazz sound of Duke Ellington, this noisy outfit are epic in every way. But how on earth do they make a living? Fergus Quill picks me up from Leeds station in his Nissan Micra – 152,000 miles on the clock, double bass expertly slotted between seats – and drives me to meet his band. I’m expecting a handful of people, but for the next half an hour, members of Ferg’s Imaginary Big Band just keep arriving, until the tables outside Headingley’s Hyde Park Book Club overflow with musicians and instrument cases. When it starts to rain, they shuffle indoors, gather in the bar’s snug room and begin playing their noisy, joyful music. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

(Polydor) Continuing the rejuvenated sound of 2023’s Hackney Diamonds, there’s touching vulnerability from Keith Richards while Jagger confronts war and autocracy Mick Jagger recently launched the Rolling Stones’s 25th album declaring, “The thing about this record is, the Stones are a rock band that also has the capacity to do ballads, country music or dance music. So we don’t get stuck in one kind of style.” The same could be said of numerous bands, but what the singer was probably driving at was that the Stones have always been able to do all this while sounding utterly like themselves. Nobody else has been able to assemble their quintessentially just-shaky Jenga tower of sound, which often sounds like it could fall to pieces at any moment but somehow never does. They have certainly also made their share of albums that sounded like they’d been phoned in from the cricket, but Foreign Tongues continues the creative renaissance that began with 2023’s Hackney Diamonds , which at the time was their first album of original songs in 18 years. Once again, producer and occasional musician Andrew Watt captures the rejuvenated band’s joy of playing in a room together – and, as guitarist Keith Richards put it recently, kicks their asses when needed. Perhaps drummer Charlie Watts’ death five years ago has sharpened the founding pair’s awareness that their band may not last much longer, so they may as well go down blazing and have fun while they do so. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

The star delivers a breathtaking performance in Suzie Miller’s play about a judge under pressure, while Paddington gets everyone singing and Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy is back Rosamund Pike rightly won an Olivier award for her restless turn in Prima Facie playwright Suzie Miller’s blistering legal drama – now a judge in court, now with mates at karaoke, now whipping out the ironing board before a party, now facing a family crisis. It’s a breathtaking performance in both senses and Justin Martin , a master at building tension, directs with customary flair. On NT at Home from 7 July. Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

Siobhan Davies Studios, London Watching a group of artists produce new work based on Davies’s 1977 classic Sphinx, which none of them know, makes for a rewarding evening The project: five choreographers create new dances in response to Siobhan Davies’ 1977 solo Sphinx. A potential glitch: they’ve never actually seen Sphinx. The starting point for this year-long project (there will be 20 choreographers by the end) is not a gimmick, but typical of the ever-questioning Davies, now 75, who was one of the pioneers of contemporary dance in the UK. Instead of showing them the dance, Davies talked to the group about her experiences making Sphinx nearly 50 years ago, and what that felt like (Davies was inhabiting her animal self in a very graceful solo, which you can see when the film is shown post-performance). Our attention is drawn to process, something often frustratingly hidden from an audience, who see just an iceberg’s tip of what goes into creating a dance and what a performer might be feeling inside their spine, their muscles, their organs, their imagination. At Siobhan Davies Studios, London , until 3 July. The next chapter will take place in November Continue reading...

social demographic · culture

The first time I saw a show, I felt like I had discovered a new language. It’s since become one of my greatest pleasures When I was a young girl living in suburban London in the early 1960s, I was looking for ways to find excitement. The first time my mother took me to see the London Festival Ballet (now the English National Ballet), I felt a sense of rapture as I realised that the body could say things words could not. I was yearning for more, and that night at the Royal Festival Hall, I saw glimmers of the world out there waiting for me. Watching the dancers, I felt something shift in me. It was like discovering a new language, one that I immediately wanted to speak. Continue reading...

natural disaster · natural disaster

Utopia theatre, Sheffield Mojisola Kareem’s excellent production makes no concessions to this 50-seat space, bringing grand historical scope to a story of Nigeria in transition Utopia is the smallest of theatres, its 50-seat space made all the more intimate by the raffia ceiling and drape-lined walls. Yet this town-centre unit holds the biggest of characters on its stage, a wooden platform designed by Sarah Lewis-Cole that floats above the ground as if to evade the flood waters of the Niger Delta. They are big, in part, because of Wole Soyinka, whose 1958 play, unseen in this country for more than 50 years, has an archetypal ferocity. In a single act, he summons elemental forces: the twin brothers who have abandoned the family home for the big city; the blind stranger who arrives unannounced and is slow to declare his intent; the venal holy man, exploiting his status for personal gain. Continue reading...

social demographic · education

Sadler’s Wells, London Hideki Noda’s spectacular vision of villainous biotech and bone conduction is full of dazzling coups but gets bogged down in its earnest message This wacky futuristic fantasy by Japanese writer-director Hideki Noda aims high. It opens with none other than God observing the Tower of Babel, which creeps up to the heavens in the shape of a skyscraper. Cue an irreverent satirical drama that covers the age of dinosaurs, Cleopatra’s frozen eggs (were they fertilised by Julius Caesar or Mark Antony?) and biotech, all via a plot involving time travel, diseased angels and, well, bone conduction: the present day bones of the protagonist, Help (Sadawo Abe), connect with fossilised ones through vibration. The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Koji Ohkura) turns up, as do Mephisto (Suzu Hirose) and Faust (Isao Hashizume). Noda performs too, as a researcher in the cutthroat world of gene science. The underlying preoccupation is with the ethics of eradicating disease and the creation of the “ultimate” human. The story was partly inspired by the mass killings at a care home in Sagamihara, outside Tokyo, in 2016 , by a former employee who wanted disabled people to “disappear”. Help, who is D/deaf, takes a bumpy Back to the Future-style trip to the past in order to connect with bones that form mankind’s inheritance and further medical discovery. Continue reading...