criticism

Hamilton: how Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical rewrote the founding myth of America.

“This is a play all about watching, and van Hove is keen to turn the production’s gaze back on the audience as much as possible.“- reviewing Network at the National...

Blade Runner 2049 is an uneasy feminist parable about controlling the means of reproduction

Love, Labour and loss: a profile of James Graham, author of plays about the Commons in the 1970s, the creation of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun … and now, the Labour party over the last 27...

Why Martin Crane’s hideous chair was the real star of Frasier.

“Icke sees himself not as a provocateur – theatre’s Damien Hirst – but as a radical, in the old sense of “going back to the root”. Goold says that the pair of them are always talking about the “Dyson factor”. “No one thought to put a big ball in the middle of a Hoover and, oh, look, it’s made the Hoover a million times better,” he says. “So what’s the Dyson factor for George Bernard Shaw, or Schiller? What’s the big round ball that makes it better?”OK, so what happens if we do to Robert Icke what he tries to do to his texts: strip away the click-bait? What is it that makes so many people...

What idea of the self makes us happy? (Reviewing Will Storr’s Selfie for the New Statesman)

From White Trash to the whitelash: what do white people want?(I reviewed four books about white/rural/working class/Tea Party politics for the New Statesman.)

“In one simple scene, Logan carries Xavier up the stairs and settles him down to bed. It’s as emotionally effective as anything in those Oscar-bait movies about dementia, preciously because ten minutes later he’s disembowelling a soldier in the front garden.”- New...

Eighty pages in to Age of Anger, I still had no idea what it was about