Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
According to Oscar Wilde’s Salome (and faithfully preserved in Hedwig Lachmann’s libretto), the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. That may be so, but neither comes close to equalling the baffling mystery that is still David McVicar’s production. Not trusting the simple reds, moons and veils of Wilde’s stylised original to conjure sufficient horror, McVicar takes his abused heroine to Nazi Germany by way of Pasolini and a backstory of physical and psychological trauma. Then he throws in an abattoir and plenty of blood.To take such abstraction, the allusive possibility Read more ...
aleks.sierz
They say that men, at whatever age, never leave the playground. We are told that boys will be boys. But what is this kind of infantile masculinity really like, and is there anything new to say about it? Ella Hickson’s latest play kicks open the door on a group of students and youngsters living in an overheated Edinburgh flatshare, and catches them at a crucial point in their lives. At the moment, they plan to party. But what will happen after they sober up?Let’s start with their accommodation. It’s not a bad flat: there are five rooms and only four boys. It’s a bit grubby, but you’ve seen Read more ...
emma.simmonds
“The angels' share” refers to the two percent of whisky that evaporates each year during its maturation process - which the romantically or religiously inclined would have us believe is siphoned off by cheeky celestial beings. With two Hollywood monoliths (Prometheus and Snow White and the Huntsman) slugging it out at the box office this week it seems unlikely that Ken Loach’s Glasgow-set latest - a tiny wee film by comparison - will be left with much more than the angels' share of business. However, this comedic and compassionate film – the winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Now here's a surprise. In English, Henry VIII gets dismissed as a Shakespearean dud (well, let's apportion the blame as well to the play's generally acknowledged co-author, John Fletcher), its karma not exactly enhanced by one's awareness that this was the play that was being performed when the original Globe burned down in June, 1613. Happily, the only fire in evidence in the Globe to Globe's contribution from Spain was that communicated by its brio-filled, impassioned cast, for whom a potential theatrical pageant fairly pulsated with life. The revelatory nature of the Madrid-based Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“You aren’t going to get another one of them, are you?” asks Alex Turner, rhetorically, with regard to John Cooper Clarke. He should know. The first explosion into the public eye by his band Arctic Monkeys, with their 2006 album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, owed a direct stylistic debt to the Mancunian poet. But it turns out that Turner’s far from the only one who wishes to announce their fealty to Clarke – from Bill Bailey to Pete Shelley (of Buzzcocks), poet Paul Farley to Steve Coogan, DJ Mark Radcliffe to actor Craig Charles, they all lined up to express admiration.As an Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Although some contemporary plays — notably Posh and 13 — have accurately taken the temperature of the times, what about the timeless classics? Does Sophocles’s Antigone (dated about 441BC) have anything to say to us today? How can it be of our time too? As the National Theatre wheels out this play, with a cast led by Christopher Eccleston and Jodie Whittaker, onto its main stage, such questions hang in the air like the smoke from an ancient funeral pyre.The third of the Theban plays, Antigone is a perfect tragedy: everyone behaves in the right way, but with fatal results. It's a true tragedy Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s no particular reason, beyond the herd instinct of producers, why films should enter the multiplex two by two. But such is the case with twin reimaginings of Snow White within a couple of months. First Mirror Mirror went all out for post-modern irony with Julia Roberts camping it up as the Wicked Queen. Now Snow White and the Huntsman imparts a heavy dose of post-feminist top spin with Charlize Theron vamping it up as the etc etc. The reboot is on the other foot.In both cases you have to ask who the films are aimed at, because it’s certainly not the same audience snared by the 1937 Read more ...
fisun.guner
As soon as the two leads entered you were left in no doubt that you were in the presence of stars, at least in their native Turkey: thunderous applause, cheers and whistles greeted Haluk Bilginer as Antony and Zerrin Tekindor as Cleopatra, as they stepped nimbly onto the stage to perform a coquettish little game of chase, thus setting the playful tone of this most seductive of Shakespearean tragedies.Bilginer, husky-voiced and grizzly-bearded, has many major stage and film roles under his belt in Turkey (in Hollywood, too, since he also starred alongside Clive Owen and Naomi Watts in the 2009 Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Co-directors Rupert Goold and Michael Fentiman have not taken an easy option here. Given the wintry setting and the cameo from Father Christmas, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe would have made a great posh panto in December. Instead this ambitious attempt at event theatre has opened in May, with London gently grilling in a heatwave. Luckily Threesixty Theatre's state-of-the-art circus-style tent stayed airily cool, although the production was a little tepid at times.Every well-read fantasy fan must surely know the CS Lewis tale of the four frightfully English Pevensie siblings, (pictured Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The last time racial stereotyping (or at least, its cross-species equivalent) could be passed off as shorthand for a certain kind of slapstick humour was probably back in 1962 - coincidentally, the year that the last of Hanna-Barbera’s 30 episodes of the original Top Cat cartoon ran. And yet you don’t have to be eight years old to laugh out loud at the spectacle of a red-eyed gorilla beating its chest and screaming for bananas. Bananas which, in a ridiculous subplot I won’t waste time going into, are strung around the waist of a chubby blue cat in the style of a Hawaiian skirt.Don’t even get Read more ...
josh.spero
There's a good deal of irony in the most controversial production of the Globe to Globe season turning out to be one of the least interesting. The Merchant of Venice was performed by Israel's Habima National Theatre, a company which has incurred the wrath of some for performing in the Occupied Territories, and there were protestors tonight, mainly of the flag-waving variety. The drama in the yard and the galleries was not matched on stage, I can unhappily report.Played as a straight period piece, with velvet and doublets and ruffles for miles, this Merchant gave us a rather listless Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The battle of the sexes took on a bright and breezy tone in Pakistan's contribution to the Globe's ongoing Bardathon, the Theatre Wallay-Kashf's rumbustious production of The Taming of the Shrew. It's been more customary of late to treat this most vexatious of comedies as sustainedly ironic or as a far-from-funny exercise in domestic degradation. But the director Hassaim Hussain and his agile company were having none of that. If anything their production in its tone often suggested a dry run for The Comedy of Errors, which the Globe will host later this week.Ed Hall and his all-male Propeller Read more ...