thu 19/06/2025

LGBT+

The Battleship Potemkin Comes Out of the Closet

When Sergei Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin was first shown in Moscow in December 1925, just in time to commemorate the 1905 Revolution, the film played to half-empty theatres, because audiences, then as now, preferred the products from...

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Photo Gallery: Figures and Fiction - Contemporary South African Photography, V&A

Jodi Bieber's photographs from her series 'Real Beauty' can feel uncomfortably voyeuristic

It’s been 17 years since apartheid came to an end in South Africa, and the transition to democracy has not been an easy one, for while political systems may change, social attitudes may prove yet more difficult to shift. The Victoria and Albert...

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Thrill Me, Tristan Bates Theatre

Does the perfect murder make for the perfect musical? One doesn't have to make undue claims for the work's chamber-size appeal to warm to Thrill Me, the American two-hander that has arrived at the Tristan Bates Theatre as this season's entry in...

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Little White Lies

The secrets and lies, delusions and foibles of a group of thirty-, forty- and fiftysomething friends are laid bare in French director Guillaume Canet’s third feature, following his breakthrough international hit Tell No One (2006). This alternately...

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Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, Touring

It's all about the ballerinas: Raymonda soloists (from left) Fernando Medina, Paul Ghiselin, Raffaele Morra and Robert Carter

Les Grands Ballets Classiques de Stoke Poges are a company waiting to happen for most of us, but for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo a bitter rivalry must be endured - one of their ballerinas didn’t show up last night in High Wycombe, due...

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Scott Agnew, The Stand, Glasgow

Scott Agnew: The 6ft 5in Glaswegian likes long stories

Scotland certainly loves its comedy. In addition to the month-long bliss that is the Edinburgh Fringe, just along the M8 Glasgow has been providing its own few weeks of fun since 2003. Their comedy festival has a very different feel to it - less of...

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DVD: The Kids Are All Right

Hailed by swarms of critics for its wit, warmth, compassion and daring challenge to conventional notions of gender and matrimony, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right strikes your correspondent as an exhaustingly solipsistic exercise in...

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Christopher and His Kind, BBC Two

Is there a televisual instruction manual for Nazi-era dramas? Cabaret singers with heavily kohled eyes, champagne from unmatched glasses in a shabby-chic apartment, smoke-filled gay bars in cellars with muscled trade, Stormtroopers marching in...

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The Children's Hour, Comedy Theatre

Who needs America for the American theatre? Barely six weeks into this year, and already we've had the bracing and bilious Becky Shaw, the West End transfer of Bruce Norris's perpetually award-scooping Clybourne Park and Woody Guthrie taking up...

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Seduction: An Erotic Black Comedy, Above the Stag Theatre

Show a little tenderness: Simon Boughey as the Movie Producer and Stanley Eldridge as the Rent Boy in the final scene of Seduction

Have you ever found onstage nudity sexy? Unlike a friend of mine, for whom the epiphany of the National Theatre's Bent was the giant member in the first five minutes, I honestly haven't. Sensuous, once, in the Maly Theatre's skinny-dipping Platonov...

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Robert Mapplethorpe, Alison Jacques Gallery

Peter Reed, clenching his buttocks, by Robert Mapplethorpe

The first thing to make clear is that Robert Mapplethorpe, notorious for his photograph of himself with a bullwhip up his arse, is not really a photographer: he is a sculptor who works in the medium of photography. What else can explain the...

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Toast, BBC One

Nigel Slater (Freddie Highmore) displays that Sixties delight, shepherd's pie

All the time I was watching Toast last night, based on Nigel Slater’s memoir of his early years, I was wondering whether it was filmed for the benefit of the audience or of Slater himself. The final scene (no spoiler – we know how this story ends...

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