All posts tagged: Legacies

The Authenticator review – echoes of Sherlock Holmes as thriller takes on toxic legacies with lightness of touch | Theatre

The Authenticator review – echoes of Sherlock Holmes as thriller takes on toxic legacies with lightness of touch | Theatre

You don’t imagine many laughs in a story about enslavement legacies and erased Black histories. But comedy infuses Winsome Pinnock’s ebullient drama about two Black academics who are given the job of authenticating a cache of 18th-century diaries written by an enslaver. Fen (short for Fenella, played by Sylvestra Le Touzel), is a direct descendant of Henry Harford, now managing his illustrious country estate, and it is she who finds the diaries that catalogued life on his Jamaican farm run by enslaved people. She gives Abi (Rakie Ayola) and Marva (Cherrelle Skeete) full rein of the diaries, so that they can authenticate them for posterity. Harford showed every sign of having been an abolitionist, she says in mitigation, although Abi and Marva’s investigations turn up disturbing evidence of his brutality in Jamaica. Those two women have a tutor-pupil relationship that seems like a twist on Holmes and Watson, and through whom Pinnock deftly captures the intersections of class and race: Abi is from a privileged, Oxford-educated background, of Nigerian descent, whose family history has its …

For Winter Olympic Favorites, the Pursuit of Gold Brings Risk for Their Legacies, Unfair or Not

For Winter Olympic Favorites, the Pursuit of Gold Brings Risk for Their Legacies, Unfair or Not

Nobody is forced to come to the Olympics. The athletes in Milan and Cortina dreamed about these two weeks long before the flames were lit in northern Italy. They have poured their lives into the pursuit of this moment. This chance. For some — for most really — merely getting here is the goal. It is enough. More than enough. For others who arrived here as the bold-faced names in their sport and heavy medal favorites, the business of the Olympics is more complicated. Shiffrin knows there is a danger to all this. Yes, there is nothing like the platform the Olympics provide. The winningest ski racer of all time likened the opportunity for Olympians to showcase their respective sports to those who only tune in once every four years to a “beautiful gift.” Yet the price of that gift can come at a considerable cost. The spotlight can shine so intensely that it threatens to render everything else on your resume an afterthought, no matter how accomplished it might be. Shiffrin acknowledged as much …