Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: Toxic Town and the conscience of the nation

Jack Thorne was an undoubted pioneer of this genre and, in the powerful, emotionally draining Toxic Town, he tackles the Corby poisonous waste scandal in which the borough council was sued for negligence, public nuisance and breach of statutory duty after the birth of a cluster of children with limb differences. Between 1984 and 1999, the Midlands town, formerly a steelmaking hub, had undertaken an aggressive programme of land reclamation and waste disposal. Was this strategy responsible for contaminations that had caused the unusual concentration of babies born with deformities?

Jodie Whittaker is superb as Susan McIntyre, first seen belting out Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive at a karaoke party in 1995. When her younger son Connor is born with a hand deformity, she blames herself and her partner abandons her. But she soon learns that many other mothers have had similar, or worse experiences: especially Tracey Taylor (Aimee Lou wood), whom she first meets on a labour ward, and Maggie Mahon (Claudia Jessie), whose husband Derek (Joe Dempsie) has driven lorries carrying the waste.

On one of the reclamation sites, a young council engineering technician, Ted Jenkins (Stephen McMillan), starts to suspect that corners are being cut and kickbacks received. His fears are shared by councillor Sam Hagen (Robert Carlyle) who urges him to dig deeper.

The moral corrosion that Doyle discloses by stages is embodied by Sam’s senior Labour colleague, Roy Thomas (Brendan Coyle), who insists that compromise is the price of regeneration: “You think any of them give a shit about us? The EU? Blair? We take their handouts, we’re grateful, but it’s us that gets it done”. He is sick of the demands for perfection: “Corby was built on good enough”.

Not good enough for Susan and her fellow mothers, who recruit locally born lawyer Des Collins (Rory Kinnear) to build a case. The clash between natural justice and civic expedience is powerfully rendered, and the persistence over many years of a group of determined women facing a patriarchal machine is the compelling heart of the story. Once again, drama trumps conventional politics as a delivery system for the most uncomfortable of truths.

Leigh Bowery! (Tate Modern, London, until August 31)

Though Leigh Bowery was born in the suburbs of Melbourne, Edith Sitwell, chronicler of English eccentrics, would have loved his art, performance, and provocations. Indeed, Fiontán Moran, co-curator with Jessica Baxter of this terrific show, situates him explicitly in the tradition of Quentin Crisp, Kenneth Williams, Lily Savage and Grayson Perry.

Bowery was both a remorselessly imaginative performer and a cultural convenor: he flourished in post-punk, New Romantic London as a creator of transgressive and often shocking “Looks” and as a clubland host, principally of Taboo at Maximus in Leicester Square. Its warning to those who queued to get in was: “Dress as though your life depends on it, or don’t bother”.

Taboo was a space where London’s avant-garde met the curious art establishment – notably Lucian Freud, who completed 13 portraits of Bowery (several of which are included here). Tall, corpulent and fearless, he was as much at home presenting a segment on the BBC’s The Clothes Show as he was creating (and wearing) audacious costumes. 

Initially inspired by the designs of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, he became omnivorously eclectic, drawing on sci-fi, astrology, South Asian culture and much else. “If you label me, you negate me,” he declared; asserting his humanity by presenting himself as extra-terrestrial, surreal, vaudevillian, and full of mordant wit.

The drama of the body was a constant preoccupation. “Flesh,” he said, “is the most fabulous fabric.” His perennial use of spots was widely interpreted as a reference to the Kaposi Sarcoma cancer lesions that were often an early symptom of HIV.

The exhibition has been mounted in collaboration with Nicola Rainbird, director and owner of the Estate of Leigh Bowery, whom he married shortly before his death in 1994, aged only 33, from an AIDS-related illness. In form and content – not least its recreation of clubland ambience – it captures both an era in British culture and Bowery’s enduring influence. 

The Last Showgirl (selected cinemas)

More than 25 years after she left Baywatch, Pamela Anderson is at last given a role that allows her to show what a great actress she can be. And Gia Coppola’s elegiac and gently absorbing movie is the best to be made about Sin City since Mike Figgis’s masterly Leaving Las Vegas (1995).

Anderson is Shelly Gardner, a performer for decades in Le Razzle Dazzle – an old school cabaret show that is closing after 37 years. The tide has turned decisively in favour of Cirque du Soleil-style entertainment and so, the dancers are told by manager Eddie (Dave Bautista, excellent), they will all soon be handed their cards.

Shelly’s fear of redundancy in middle age is compounded by estrangement from her daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), who thinks that the show is “lame trash” and resents her mother for neglecting her while she was growing up. As Le Razzle Dazzle edges towards extinction, the two try fitfully to repair their scarred relationship.

The movie is almost stolen by Jamie Lee Curtis, as Shelly’s best friend Annette, a perma-tanned ex-showgirl who has stayed on as a cocktail waitress, spending what little money she has on booze and gambling. When she dances drunkenly on a table to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart, her sheer abandon gradually acquires a defiant magnificence.

Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography perfectly captures the scuffed nostalgia that is Coppola’s theme: filmed on 16mm in only 18 days, The Last Showgirl is a bold work of emotional candour which never slides into sentimentality. “This is just the beginning of my career,” insists Shelly, and her quiet insistence, echoing Anderson’s own, packs quite a punch.

Much Ado About Nothing (Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London, until April 5)

Hot on the heels of Romeo and Juliet (with Tom Holland) and The Tempest (starring Sigourney Weaver), Jamie Lloyd completes his Shakespearean trilogy in style with this glorious production.

Peter Ackroyd has written aptly of the “reckless melancholy” of Much Ado About Nothing – but Lloyd tilts firmly towards recklessness in his depiction of the “merry war” between Benedick (Tom Hiddleston) and Beatrice (Hayley Atwell). Perhaps he had no option, given the star wattage of the two leads (both excellent); if so, the gamble pays off magnificently.

Lloyd’s Messina is a pulsing nineties club, Soutra Gilmour’s design emphatically ditching the director’s trademark monochrome aesthetic in favour of pink confetti, disco glitter balls and a giant inflatable heart. There are sight gags galore, at which Hiddleston proves especially adept, and a soundtrack of bangers, with Mason Alexander Park as the maid Margaret singing a series of wonderful covers. Lloyd leans into the Marvel movie celebrity of his performers, even including images of Hiddleston as Loki and Atwell as Captain Carter.

“I am loved of all ladies,” declares Benedick – but he loves only one, and there is a yearning tenderness beneath his dancefloor braggadocio that is deftly revealed as the drama unfolds. Splendid, unhinged fun.

The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, by Chris Hayes (Scribe)

“Attention must be paid,” says Linda Loman of her husband Willy in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. But attention to what, exactly, in our hypermodern digital age?

In this intelligent and highly readable book, Chris Hayes, an MSNBC anchor, argues that we are losing cognitive and deliberative agency in the face of “a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us, all part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit”.  

As much as we try to focus upon what we think matters, algorithms drive us away from genuine inquiry and curiosity, and towards aggressive confirmation of what we already think, suspect or subconsciously believe. In this sense, our information environment is “akin to life in a failed state, a society that had some governing regime that has disintegrated and fallen into a kind of attentional warlordism”. As Hayes admits ruefully: “Everyone, including myself, complains they can’t read long books any more.”

His own book’s title refers to Odysseus binding himself to a mast to resist the lure of the Sirens’ call. In a different analogy, he hopes that “attentional farmers’ markets” will emerge: informational counterparts to the organic food movement, natural food stores and gatherings of farmers selling their produce directly to customers. On this basis, the monopoly of the tech giants will be challenged by the demand for a healthier, curated, wisely edited information ecosystem.

“You can feel that this era is ending,” he claims, “that the power of attentional capitalism is so formidable that the state is going to find ways to bring it to heel.” As the Zen master says: we’ll see.