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| | | Midwives review – a Muslim and a Buddhist grapple with childbirth in strife-torn Myanmar | | by Peter Bradshaw Sep 28, 2022 | | Sombre documentary shot over five years follows two healthcare workers as they deliver babies in a brutally divided society Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing’s documentary is about two midwives – one Buddhist, one Muslim – in Rakhine state in western Myanmar, on the border with Bangladesh; it is home to thousands of Rohingya Muslims who for decades have suffered paranoid bigotry from the country’s Buddhist theocracy. And like Barbet Schroeder’s film The Venerable W, this film is a reminder that, in this part of the world, being of the Buddhist persuasion doesn’t necessarily make you a kind and gentle saint. Hla is the Buddhist midwife, notably imperious and sharp-tongued, who at one stage tries getting some medicine into a baby girl and hilariously snaps: “Take it, you little bitch!” Nyo Nyo is the Muslim who is intensely aware of the prejudice all around her and uneasily watches news reports of demonstrations against Muslims and “Muslim supporters”, which means her employers. She finally attempts to set up her own clinic, with the help of a savings-and-loan collective of Muslim women; this is all to the distinct scepticism of her Buddhist colleague, although their essential friendship asserts itself. Continue reading... | | | | | A Midsummer Night's Dream review – gleefully anarchic opening show | | by Mark Fisher Sep 28, 2022 | | Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot
New playhouse kicks off with a boisterous, boundary-pushing production that is inventive enough to find fresh laughs in the mechanicals You can see how it must have happened. They put all their effort into preparing the gorgeous new playhouse, with its eight-sided auditorium, twin-level galleries and exposed wood still pungent, then they clean forgot about putting on the Shakespeare for which the whole thing was designed. The pre-show announcements range from the incompetent to the panicked, half the actors have gone awol and it is touch and go whether the performance will happen. They have to think on their feet. The head of security gets drafted in to play Bottom, the waiter who has just cleared my plates in the cafe volunteers as Hippolyta and somehow I end up playing the bongos (sorry, people). Continue reading... | | | | | 'Irish people have faced centuries of discrimination': why are Lord of the Rings' accents so offensively bad? | | by Andy Welch Sep 28, 2022 | | The harfoots’ accents in The Rings of Power aren’t just deeply inappropriate – they’re awful. But Amazon’s drama isn’t the first fantasy show to struggle with dialect … ‘What is this, famine cosplay?” asked Ed Power in the Irish Times after glimpsing the harfoots wandering around Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. In the weeks since then, he has been far from the only person to object to these “simpleton proto-hobbits”, who, Power wrote, were “rosy of cheek, slathered in muck, wearing twigs in their hair and speaking in stage-Irish accents that make the cast of Wild Mountain Thyme sound like Daniel Day-Lewis”. Indeed, Amazon’s multimillion-dollar series has upset just about everybody since it debuted on the streaming platform. You have the Tolkien scholars who say it’s not Tolkien; the anti-Amazon folk who object to the company as a whole and the vast money spent on the series; and those who see the harfoots’ accents as, at worst, clumsy, tone-deaf cultural appropriation and a reinforcement of negative stereotypes. Far less legitimately and more malevolently, you have the uproar about actors of colour being cast in the series. But, considering Amazon’s commitment to that welcome diversification of Middle-earth, the fact that no one in production stopped to consider that Irish people might be upset by the harfoots is especially baffling. Continue reading... | | | | | Where to start with: Langston Hughes | | by Malik Al Nasir Sep 28, 2022 | | The leader of the Harlem Renaissance wrote poems and plays, short stories and children’s books. If you’re new to Hughes’ work, here are some good places to begin Poet, writer and activist Langston Hughes is best known for popularising jazz poetry and leading the Harlem Renaissance, the African American cultural movement in New York City in the 1920s. A century on, what can we learn from the great writer’s rich catalogue of work? Performance poet, author and film-maker Malik Al Nasir explains how he fell in love with Hughes’s writing as a young man – and how you can too. *** A nigger night, A nigger joy. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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