“I sometimes think the most dangerous words are ‘normal’ and ‘natural’,” Grayson Perry said this week in the first episode of his new Channel 4 series, Who Are You? During the programme, Perry interviewed and created portraits of four people whose lives have much to tell us about subjectivity – how we experience the business of […]
The next five years will be crucial to the long-term fate of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, the iconic south London pub and LGBTQ cabaret venue that is being sold to unidentified new owners. “I’ve got five years to get RVT turned around and made into a viable business, but for that to happen we […]
An interview with the writer, director and performer John Cameron Mitchell, of Shortbus and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, about the London debut of his club night Mattachine and more
At the end of Back to the Future, our hero crashes his time-travelling car into a building. It used to be a cinema but now it’s a church. That seems right. In a way, certain kinds of movie, including Back to the Future, are morphing into religions, offering us opportunities to be together and happy – though […]
A report on the inaugural Not Television festival at Chelsea Theatre, a weekend of shows involving collaboration between performers and audience members and the special atmosphere that resulted
The Not Television Festival is almost upon us! It doesn’t seem long ago that I was chatting to Francis Alexander, the artistic director of Chelsea Theatre, about the spirit of engagement that underpins Come With Me If You Want To Live, the cabaret night we’ve put on at the theatre twice now. Why couldn’t we […]
In a post yesterday, I suggested that the direct political engagement with which we still associate Brecht, Weill and Weimar cabaret in general is harder to find on the current cabaret scene, even though we live in a world of war, division, oppression, inequality and exploitation scarcely less outrageous than that of the interwar period. […]
I didn’t know much about Andrew Logan and his Alternative Miss World pageant – except that the current title-holder was that awesome powerhouse of alt burlesque and more, Fancy Chance – until I saw the documentary The British Guide to Showing Off last year. I was pretty awestruck by the sensibility, scale, longevity and accumulated […]
Well, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an internal organ… It’s been a slightly unusual Fringe. I had a week of great shows, lots of work and a little bit of play (less than I’d have liked thanks to those pesky London deadlines that I always promise myself will be cleared before the Fringe […]
One of the joys of doing a blog is that you get to celebrate the things you like just cos you like them. Since Not Television launched at the end of 2013, I’ve had the chance to do a bit of that in real life too, programming some of the acts I admire at Come […]
