Up for discussion this week are the controversial mockumentary from Sacha Baron-Cohen, the award-winning American play Doubt, and the new novel from Joyce Carol Oates.
Film: Borat by Larry Charles (writer of Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm)
As minor Kazakh celebrity TV journalist Borat Sagdiyev, British comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen (aka Ali G) – the film’s co-writer as well as its star – manages to offend most PC sensibilities in the name of satire on his road trip across America. Redefining the benign concept of multi-cultural exchange, Borat and his producer travel from New York to LA, like some kind of latter-day Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, creating comic chaos, making their documentary about life in the US as the TV star pursues his dream woman, Pamela Anderson’s Baywatch babe CJ Parker.
Theatre: Doubt by John Patrick Stanley
With a Tony award and a Pullitzer prize under its belt, this Broadway play makes its debut at the Abbey Theatre, with director Gerard Stembridge at the helm of a strong cast including Bríd Brennan, Aidan Kelly, and Gemma Reeves. Faith is the central theme, the setting a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, where a senior nun – believing a young, well-liked priest guilty of abusing a student – takes matters into her own hands, setting off a whodunit of moral proportions for all involved.
Art: Empty by Willie Doherty
A defunct office building provides the subject for the artist’s new film at the Kerlin Gallery. Filmed over the course of a day, cycles of light and shade, sunshine and showers play over the surface of the decaying walls, creating a sense of drama, of contrast between past activity and usefulness, and present neglect. Accompanied by two photographic collections, Local Solution and Show of Strength, in which Doherty returns to recurrent themes in his work – questions of representation, territoriality, and identity – concerning his native Northern Ireland – examining the ongoing ghetto-isation of the region post-ceasefire.
Book: Black Girl/White Girl by Joyce Carol Oates
Race relations are a regular Oates preoccupation, here interrogated against the backdrop of the end of the Vietnam war and the Watergate era. Black scholarship recipient Minette and self-conscious white liberal Genna are room-mates at a liberal arts college when the former is mysteriously murdered. 15 years on, narrator Genna investigates.
Live in studio Mexican guitarist Morgan Szymaski teams up with English soprano Laura Mitchell in advance of a national Music Network tour