Jonathan Kemp

  • 100 BOYFRIENDS by BRONTEZ PURNELL reviewed by Jonathan Kemp

    100 BOYFRIENDS by BRONTEZ PURNELL reviewed by Jonathan Kemp

    Brontez Purnell is a flaming powerhouse of creativity: writer, dancer, singer, filmmaker. Impressively restless and productive. His latest outing is this bold, sassy, sexy roulette wheel of a book in which he celebrates the marginal, the promiscuous, the lovelorn, the endlessly horny, hookers and hook-ups, fuck buddies and fuck-ups. I read it first in a…

  • Oscar Wilde’s THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY gets a star studded production

    Oscar Wilde’s THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY gets a star studded production

    I was always taught, and always teach, that drama occurs in the present tense – that theatre’s most valuable asset as a mode of storytelling lay in its presentation of the here and now, a story unfolding before you. This production/adaptation of Wilde’s classic novel makes the bold decision to deliver a retrospective narration: Dorian…

  • Jonathan Kemp raves about  Jeremy Atherton Lin’s ‘pitch-perfect”  GAY BAR

    Jonathan Kemp raves about Jeremy Atherton Lin’s ‘pitch-perfect” GAY BAR

        “Does gay still have a place?” asks the back cover blurb, and whilst Atherton-Lin’s riveting and joyous book may not provide anything approaching a definitive answer, it’ll make you want to find a place, even make you nostalgic for a place whether real or imagined. Appearing at the tail-end of a year-long lockdown,…

  • Diary of a Film : Niven Govinden reviewed by Jonathan Kemp

    Diary of a Film : Niven Govinden reviewed by Jonathan Kemp

    At the heart of Niven Govinden’s short novel is the romantic off-screen love affair between two actors, the leading men in the narrator’s latest film. The narrator, known only as Maestro, originally from some East European country and now in his mid-fifties, is a successful film director attending a film festival in Italy for the…