Reviews
Marianka Swain
With counter-terrorism an urgent concern – and specifically how best to find, track and use the data of suspected threats, without sacrificing our privacy and civil liberties – it’s excellent timing for a meaty drama about the surveillance state. And the second half of this debut full-length stage work from Al Blyth, helmed by Hampstead AD Roxanna Silbert, comes excitingly close to being that play for today.However, you do have to wade through an overlong first half which, unfortunately, trips into every genre cliché going. The GCHQ computer whizzes who supply the security services with Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The nation’s public attics – museums – hold a huge jumble of objects collected and used in all sorts of ways to tell us stories of past and present. In this BBC Two film, we went behind the visible face of the Victoria and Albert, with its holdings of more than two million objects, to visit a complementary hidden world staffed by technicians, conservators and curators tending to their charges.The breadth and depth of the collections were truly startling. Bethnal Green’s Museum of Childhood, a branch of the V&A held the biggest collection in Britain of children’s toys. We met the deeply Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's not been three years since Albion premiered at the Almeida Theatre, since which time Brexit has happened and, not without coincidence, Mike Bartlett's time-specific play is beginning to look like one for the ages. Set amongst a community in physical and psychic limbo, Bartlett takes the pulse of a people, and a nation, at odds with themselves. But whereas a lesser writer might opt for a harangue, Bartlett's tone (and the play's four-act structure, too) owes not a little to Chekhov, albeit here inflected with occasional dollops of Arcadia as befits a play set in a vast expanse Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With the Oscars approaching, one film building momentum in the fight for best picture – and whose victory would delight all but the most blinkered – is the Korean Bong Joon Ho’s deliriously dark and entertaining black comedy, Parasite. It remains an outsider, given that no foreign language film has ever won the main prize. But if Bong breaks that barrier, it will be no fluke. Parasite’s theme, the gulf between rich and poor, resonates far and wide; its delivery – mixing social satire, twisty plotting and Hitchcockian tension – a masterclass in serious-minded but accessible mainstream Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In a world where the contentious report of a young English woman gang raped by teenage boys in Cyprus last year continues to make headlines, Asking For It is more than relevant. Such scenarios are by no means new but are once again making news. The play itself is an adaptation by Meadhbh McHugh of Irish writer Louise O’Neill’s young adult novel from 2015, and tackles issues of sexual consent in the social media era head-on, in a way that has no truck with the usual, tired stereotypes that usually frame such tales. That the UK debut of this breath-taking and award-winning piece Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Back in 2016, David Ayer’s infantile Suicide Squad burst upon us in a wash of lurid greens and purples. Ayer’s film had a myriad of problems, not least the hyper-sexualisation of Harley Quinn, played by Margot Robbie. While controversy abounded, Robbie’s performance remained a highlight. A manic mix of Betty Boop and Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest, she stole the film. Now Quinn has her own gleefully anarchic spin-off, Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), directed by Cathy Yan and loosely based on the characters from the 1996 DC comic. It’s Read more ...
Florence Hallett
These days, Bloomsbury rests in a state of elegant somnolence. The ghosts of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell linger on in the shabby gentility of Russell Square and its environs, the bookish institutions that are the bones of the place conferring tranquility, despite the many students and tourists. But so much for appearances – radicalism is the bricks and mortar of Bloomsbury’s university buildings and Georgian terraces, which in the early 20th century were home to countless figures who thrived in society's margins, among them artists and writers, academics and political thinkers.Francesca Read more ...
David Nice
"About as much fun as you can have with your clothes on," promised a member of the two Royal Opera casts teamworking their way through multiple roles and costume changes for what in effect is Alice's Adventures Under Ground and Through the Looking Glass in under an hour. He's not wrong; and I haven't ever cried laughing with my clothes off, as I did, fully dressed, both here and in Gerald Barry's even more counter-intuitive operatic whizz through The Importance of Being Earnest. A 2016 concert performance of what turns out to be the second instalment in an Anglo-Irish classic trilogy from the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” Director Richard Jones has certainly taken Beckett’s words to heart in this vividly comic, star-cast Old Vic double bill, pairing Endgame with a lesser-known short play – which acts as a sort of stylistic and thematic amuse bouche. The result is a richly engaging evening, though one that skirts real profundity.We open with Beckett’s Rough for Theatre II, a half-hour vaudevillian sketch in which two dark-suited, bureaucratic colleagues (Alan Cumming and Daniel Radcliffe, pictured below) discuss whether or not a man will commit suicide; echoes here of both Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The fast-rising young actor Jack Quaid comes naturally by the ease with which he takes to Plus One, a modern-day inheritor of the sorts of romcoms his mum, Meg Ryan, used to do alongside Tom Hanks. Playing a damagingly choosy singleton called Ben who realises that love has been staring him in the face all along, Quaid lends undeniable charm to a movie that often pushes back hard against it. Let's just say that Jeff Chan and Andrew Rhymer, the film's co-directors and writers, have come up with a putative partner for Ben whom audiences may well give up on, even if Ben ultimately doesn't: his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The L Word originally ran for six seasons between 2004 and 2009, and its then-revolutionary depiction of the lives of a group of lesbians in Los Angeles won it both a fanatical audience and acclaim for its game-changing content, exploring such topics as same-sex marriage, gay adoption and female sexuality which weren't being seen elsewhere on TV. But more than a decade later, how will this revamped version (on Sky Atlantic) fare?Whereas the prototype landed in a TV environment where viewers needed extra-sensory perception to detect a lesbian (let alone trans) character, that now feels like Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Visiting conductor Mark Wigglesworth is a good match for the Royal Philharmonic. The orchestra’s repertoire is usually at the popular end of the spectrum, so they know how to make the most of a good tune. Wigglesworth gives the players the space to phrase and shape the music, but his approach is more about drama and discipline. That’s a great musical virtue, but it’s hardly glamorous. Fortunately, pianist Khatia Buniatishvili was on hand to provide charisma and pizzazz in an electric performance of the Liszt Second Piano Concerto.To begin, Walton’s Portsmouth Point Overture. It’s a great Read more ...