Race

The ethnicity pay gap just doesn’t add up

20 July 2019 9:00 am

I suppose it was a bit naive to wander on to Newsnight having been booked to talk about Brexit and…

Jonathan Dimbleby is right: we need to rise up and defend the BBC

6 July 2019 9:00 am

There’s been a Dimbleby on air since before I was born but last Friday saw the end of that era…

Eerily accurate: Will Barton as Boris Johnson in The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson. Image: Pamela Raith

This Boris play only gets it half-right

25 May 2019 9:00 am

The opening of Jonathan Maitland’s new play about Boris purports to be based on real events. Just before the referendum,…

Sharon D. Clarke and Wendell Pierce in Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic Credit: © Brinkhoff Mogenburg

Willy Loman would have been fine if he’d worked in a laundry: Death of a Salesman reviewed

18 May 2019 9:00 am

Colour-blind casting is a denial of history. The Young Vic’s all-black version of Death of a Salesman asks us to…

Leah Harvey as Hortense and C.J. Beckford as Michael Roberts in Small Island at the National Theatre Credit: Brinkhoff-Moegenburg

A magnificent work of art (but don’t worry if you miss the first half-hour): Small Island reviewed

11 May 2019 9:00 am

Small Island, based on Andrea Levy’s novel about Jamaican migrants in Britain, feels like the world’s longest book review. We…

Zahra Elham, the first women to win the show Afghan Star in its 14-year history. Credit: WAKIL KOHSAR / Contributor

Female contestants in Afghanistan’s X Factor are dicing with death

11 May 2019 9:00 am

The cheering fans, the dramatic Hollywood-style drum rolls, the excitable host all sound just like The X Factor or The…

Is the increasing secularisation of funerals a good thing?

23 March 2019 9:00 am

‘You’re thinking these girls all wrong,’ Miss Mai tells Enid in Winsome Pinnock’s play Leave Taking, adapted from the recent…

Spell-binding: Lupita Nyong’o as Adelaide in Us

Nyong’o is spellbinding but the plot is ultimately baffling: Us reviewed

23 March 2019 9:00 am

Us is a second feature from Jordan Peele after his marvellous debut Get Out, which was more brilliantly satirical than…

Will racial blending undermine identity politics? Let’s hope so

8 December 2018 9:00 am

Behold, the most incendiary statistic in America: the Census Bureau’s projection of when whites will become a minority in what…

Why I’ve changed my name

10 November 2018 9:00 am

As someone who has recently discovered he is black, I have watched with incredulity the treatment doled out by the…

Fear and loathing in New York

Why truth gets you nowhere

20 October 2018 9:00 am

New York   There is fear and loathing in this city, with men looking over their shoulders for the thought…

Arinzé Kene is a performer of great charm and charisma led astray by bad advice and public money

Blacktivist rhetoric and impenetrable symbols: Misty reviewed

22 September 2018 9:00 am

Arinzé Kene’s play Misty is a collection of rap numbers and skits about a fare dodger, Lucas, from Hackney. Lucas…

Why is a BBC executive calling for the removal of middle-aged white men from television?

1 September 2018 9:00 am

Cassian Harrison, the editor of BBC Four, told the Edinburgh International Television Festival last week that no one wants to…

50 years after Bobby Kennedy’s murder, the ‘deep state’ still reigns supreme

9 June 2018 9:00 am

New York   This week 50 years ago saw the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a man I met a couple…

On giving and taking offence

5 May 2018 9:00 am

‘Slight prick,’ she said. The nurses all say that before they slide the needle in the upstanding vein in the…

When did fiction become so dangerous?

4 November 2017 9:00 am

The assignment of books for review has always been haphazard. Fellow fiction writers can be tempted either to undermine the…

Perishable goods

14 October 2017 9:00 am

  Labour of Love is the new play by James Graham, the poet laureate of politics. We’re in a derelict…

Playing it safe

5 October 2017 2:00 pm

BBC1’s latest Sunday-night drama The Last Post, about a British military base in Aden in 1965, feels like a programme…

Worse for wear: Kevin McNally as Lear and Burt Caesar as Gloucester in King Lear

Keeping it in the family

9 September 2017 9:00 am

A new orthodoxy governs the casting process in Hollywood. An actor’s ethnicity must match the character’s. If you extend this…

Too Indian to adopt

2 September 2017 9:00 am

I am not surprised that the mother of a white Christian girl should be upset that her daughter was placed…

High life

26 August 2017 9:00 am

When the Germans smuggled arguably the world’s most evil man into Russia 100 years ago, they did not imagine the…

Ladies first: Nicole Kidman as Miss Martha in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled

This charming man

15 July 2017 9:00 am

Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled is set during the American Civil War and is about a wounded Union solider, Corporal John…

In praise of braindead filth

8 July 2017 9:00 am

Melvyn Bragg on TV: The Box That Changed The World (BBC2, Saturday) was just what you would have expected of…

A new dance piece in which race definitely matters: Ballet Black’s Triple Bill reviewed

2 April 2016 9:00 am

Ballet’s romantic mantra could be summed up by John Keats’s ballad ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, in which a young…

Sister act: Zawe Ashton and Uzo Aduba in Jean Genet’s ‘The Maids’

Jean Genet’s fascinating play, The Maids, is botched at Trafalgar Studios

19 March 2016 9:00 am

The Maids is a fascinating document. Written in 1947, Jean Genet’s drama portrays a pair of serving girls who enact…