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Iron Maidens: Iron Fantasy at Soho Theatre

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Two women chase the elusive six-pack in Iron Fantasy, only to embark on an unexpected journey exploring what it truly means to be strong in today’s world. In a culture that demands visible strength and power, they subject themselves to lifting, protein powder-guzzling, and raw-egg drinking. Interestingly, consuming raw eggs elicited many squeamish reactions from members of the audience. None has obviously been to Cabaret to see Sally Bowles guzzle prairie oysters. But in the search for the attributes that make someone strong, a little more is revealed about being a young woman in the modern world. And that strength comes from a number of ways. It’s currently playing at the Soho Theatre .  It’s part performance, part musical, and part interviews, as writer-performers Shamira Turner and Eugénie Pastor, who make up the theatre performance duo She Goat, don a variety of silly costumes and play a range of musical instruments on their journey researching strength, fighting, and pumping i...

Film: Brokeback Mountain

I caught Brokeback Mountain this evening. Like so many others I had been referring to the film as Bareback Mountain and I was quite surprised that within the first hour of the film it lived up to its name…

By this point the film seemed to be more about that category of men that exists who identify as straight but just have sex with men – MSNs on the Wyoming mountains is probably not the best place to have safe sex outreach workers – particularly given all the bears that exist there. Anyway over the next two hours the story does get a little more involved, but it is more about what is not spoken that really starts making you wonder about the characters…

The film has been doing well here in London, and it is probably more to do more with how well the story is told rather than its subject matter. But surely it should also serve as a cautionary tale to wives who let their husbands go to Wyoming to fish on long weekends?

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Play ball: Damn Yankees @LandorTheatre

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