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Oscar Week Film Review: Victoria and Abdul

Not even Judi Dench can save this irresponsible look at the British colonial legacy, Victoria and Abdul nevertheless takes two Oscar nominations into the ceremony.

“It is imperative that the royal colon receives a little roughage”

AKA The Other V&A. You can see the rationale behind Victoria and Abdul, allowing Dame Judi Dench to reprise her much-loved role from Mrs Brown with another 20 years under her belt. And directed by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Lee Hall, hopes were reasonably high.

What results though, is a film that indulges in an irresponsible kind of historical revisionism, a refusal to engage with and interrogate the reality of British colonial rule. Hall’s version of Victoria is allowed to be coyly ignorant of the looting of Indian treasure, a champion of diversity too in an improbable twist. Continue reading “Oscar Week Film Review: Victoria and Abdul”

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Review: Posh, Pleasance Theatre

“Girls for now, girls for later, yah?”

Laura Wade’s Posh first appeared in 2010 at the Royal Court, again in 2012 in the West End, and then in cinemas as The Riot Club in 2014 – each time piercing something of the privilege around the Cameron/Osbourne chumocracy moving into Downing Street at the time of the original premiere. A portrait of insidious male privilege, based on the infamous Bullingdon Club, its intersection of masculinity and class proved a springboard for many a white, privileged actor (James Norton, Harry Hadden-Paton….) 

The notion of this all-female production, directed by Cressida Carré, is thus one that feels rich with possibility. So to find that the cast is playing the roles as men, legs still spread, names unchanged, genders unbent, feels like a crucial neglect of that potential. For the dissection of misogyny and privilege is a vital part of Wade’s writing and having women play the roles unaltered, without any new insight, lends the piece a fatal sense of play, of pretence, that undermines the seriousness of its intent.  Continue reading “Review: Posh, Pleasance Theatre”