JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
The Coolidge Effect
Citizens Theatre
Glasgow
“YOU watch porn,” announces co-writer and performer Robbie Gordon to a predominantly young audience, some of them shifting uncomfortably in their seats at the opening of The Coolidge Effect. “You don’t have to tell us,” he says, “that’s not what this is about.”
And this show by Glasgow-based theatre company Wonder Fools certainly isn’t about the valid presumption that most people watch porn. It isn’t a condemnation or an exposé but a detailed and thorough dissection of our day-to-day relationship with a habit that’s still regarded as a dirty secret.
This despite the fact that the PornHub site gets 75 million visitors daily, over a third of all internet downloads are of pornography and a recent study revealed that more than half of 11-16 year olds have seen explicit content online.
MARY CONWAY becomes impatient with the intellectual self-indulgence of Tom Stoppard in a production that is, nevertheless, total class
A US air strike in north-west Nigeria, publicly framed as a Christmas act of counterterrorism, reveals a deeper shift in how power is exercised in Africa, argues RAIS NEZA BONEZA
AMANDA J QUICK warns about the ever-expanding influence of the sex industry – and the harm it unleashes on both the women involved and society collectively, especially the young
TOM STONE checks the political coordinates of a festival where the pleasures of nostalgia were (sometimes) harnessed to a new message


