Reviews
aleks.sierz
Before seeing this play, I decided to eat a steak. It seemed the right culinary equivalent to David Mamet, one of America’s most provocative and, at times, especially past times, red-blooded writers. This play, whose British premiere was at the Royal Court in 1993 – when it starred David Suchet and Lia Williams – now arrives in the West End from Bath’s Theatre Royal. Oleanna was one of the most controversial dramas of the 1990s, and its ending – when audiences routinely cheered an older man’s violent assault on a younger woman – showed the power of theatre and its ability Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Most Beautiful Boy in the World is the most harrowing film you are ever likely to watch, but don’t let that put you off. This was a documentary waiting to be made. It tells the story of a young beauty propelled into international stardom before gradually descending into alcoholism and abject despair.The opening shot is of a man walking down the corridor of a derelict building – the remains of the Grand Hotel des Bains at Venice’s Lido. Björn Andresén is revisiting the place where, 50 years earlier, he appeared in Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice as Tadzio, the exquisite boy Read more ...
David Nice
Now that the summer opera-house companies have pulled off staged triumphs under the most difficult of circumstances, it’s time to celebrate semi-al-fresco concerts. Not so many have cropped up as I’d hoped after the success of the Battersea Park Bandstand Chamber Music series last year. The Wigmore Hall made a start in nearby Portman Square and we have a host of impressive August events planned by Bold Tendencies in Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park, building on the successes of 2020. Opera Holland Park's dazzling mini-festival of song, dreamed up by enterprising baritone Julien Van Mellaerts Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s the trivia question no one ever thought to ask: where was the only Tennessee Williams play premiered outside America first performed? The unlikely answer (so unlikely that even artistic director Roxana Silbert apparently didn’t know it until now) is the Hampstead Theatre where, in 1967, Williams’ The Two Character Play was first staged to slightly baffled critical response.Now, as part of the theatre’s “Originals” series, the play Williams himself described a “my most beautiful since Streetcar, the very heart of my life” returns in a new production by Sam Yates. It’s a gift of a quote Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
ITV’s new detective mystery, Professor T, is an adaptation of a Belgian series of the same name, and was filmed in Belgium and Cambridge. Which is a bit weird since all the action supposedly happens in Cambridge.Anyway, the title role of Professor of Criminology Jasper Tempest is ably filled by Ben Miller, who underplays it so drily that at times he threatens to vanish altogether, and he gets excellent support from a squad of flavourful character actors. Sarah Woodward shines waspishly as the Prof’s much put-upon assistant Ingrid Snares (pictured below), who somehow keeps his life functioning Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The book included with this splendid box set dedicated to British jazz innovator Chris Barber includes a series of quotes paying tribute to his standing. Billy Bragg says "Chris Barber's influence on British popular music, be it through playing jazz, creating skiffle or promoting R&B, has been immense. His role in inspiring the world-beating British groups of the 1960s cannot be overestimated."Van Morrison declares “It is very apparent to the critical observer that all roads lead to Chris, from the skiffle with Donegan period, through Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny and Brownie and the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Mamma Mia! hovers unhelpfully over every frame of Off the Rails, a road movie of sorts in which three women make a music-fueled pilgrimage to Mallorca to honour the wishes of a fourth friend, who has died before time of cancer.The difference here is that the scenery keeps changing and the music of choice isn't ABBA but Blondie. And while no one would cite Mamma Mia! as a paragon of writing for our time, it at least makes sense within the particular world it describes. That's more than one can say for this collaboration between Jordan Waller (screenwriter) and Jules Williamson (director), Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“My worst fear? What am I scared of?” Amy Winehouse ponders. She pauses thoughtfully: “Myself.”Ten years to the day since she died, Reclaiming Amy, Marina Parker’s documentary, remembers and celebrates the singer, revealing the truth as her parents see it of her short life and tragic death. The world has heard a lot from Mitch, her father (pictured below), but nothing really from her mother, Janis, speaking now because she knows MS will ultimately deprive her of her memories.“Truth” is subjective of course, and we all inevitably forget the inconvenient truths. But there was a real sense that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You can rely on M Night Shyamalan to deliver supernatural shocks and freakish events, but the alternative-reality nature of his projects demands suspension of disbelief. It’s great when it works (The Sixth Sense or Split), but a bit of a bummer when it doesn’t.Old is not MNS’s finest hour, though he does have a knack for making box-office hits that critics don’t like. It’s based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Frederik Peeters and Pierre Oscar Levy, and tells the story of how a group of tourists on a lush tropical island (it was shot in the Dominican Republic) find themselves on a secluded Read more ...
David Nice
Play it straight and you’ll get more laughs: that’s the standard advice on great operatic comedies like the masterpieces of the Gilbert & Sullivan canon, Britten’s Albert Herring, Verdi’s Falstaff, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. In comparison, for all its musical sparkle, Rossini’s Le Comte Ory may have amusing situations, but zero psychological insight into the characters, and plods along for the first half of Act One with very little intrinsic humour. So only the pious should have an issue with Cal “One Man, Two Guvnors” Crystal for camping and vamping it up; and what a gift he has in a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
What’s in a name? In Benedict Lombe’s incendiary debut play at the Bush Theatre, the answer to this question encompasses a whole continent, an entire existential experience - the Black experience, to be exact - though not in the way that "roots" stories often proceed. The lost first name that the lead character of Lava needs for her British passport application is indeed her African one, long banned by her original home country, but not for the reason you’d expect. And home for this character, billed simply as Her (Ronke Adekoluejo), isn’t a straightforward proposition either. To Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
All events are products of a series of preceding events. Or is life just a chain of coincidences? And if so, what’s the point in anything? Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen’s brilliantly inventive, genre-busting black comedy starts with a bicycle theft, which leads to a train crash, which leads to a wildly over-the-top bloodbath and revenge scenario.This is led by the PTSD-hardened military man Markus (Mads Mikkelsen, a Jensen stalwart), recalled from a tour of duty in the desert because his wife, Emma, was killed in the train crash. His teenage daughter, Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), Read more ...