Reviews
Jasper Rees
It is a cliché that never grows old. From Fawlty Towers via The Office all the way through to (so we are told) Fleabag, a great half-hour comedy that bows out after two series cements its place in the pantheon by ensuring posterity wants more. Twelve episodes seems to be the platonic ideal of the perfectly proportioned sitcom. When Stefan Golaszewski’s Mum (BBC Two) ended last time round there was thus a case for stopping there. It finished on a moment of such exquisitely subtle optimism. Parting from Cathy (Lesley Manville) and her daft coterie would have been a sweet sorrow that made Read more ...
Heather Neill and David Nice
Henry IV Part One (***)Women as Hal, Hotspur and Falstaff? It's been done before, and superlatively well, in Phyllida Lloyd's Shakespeare-in-prison trilogy (Henry IV Part One, with several crucial scenes from Part Two, between Julius Caesar and The Tempest). Loyalties need some shifting from lock-in with an all-female-cast to Wooden O with men in the picture too. The different values of Shakespeare's Globe - which is all about communication, too, but of an even more direct sort - as well as the knowledge that the best woman standing, the supremely charismatic Sarah Amankwah, will make it as Read more ...
Tom Baily
The Virtues (Channel 4) sees director Shane Meadows (Dead Man’s Shoes, This Is England) reunite with actor Stephen Graham in what is certainly their most raw and emotionally bruising project to date. Meadows returns to familiar territory, with themes of disaffection and familial separation mapped over a small cast of characters who are grappling with emotional turmoil. Graham, in a career standout performance, has never seemed so bare – or so dramatically powerful – as he is here. It is a supremely controlled display of a man in chaos, grasping for redemption.He plays Joseph, a middle-aged Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Achingly nostalgic for rave culture, Beats will likely appeal to anyone whose formative experience of ardent friendships and communal joy peaked in a transcendent musical setting with or without the help of Ecstasy.Director Brian Welsh’s Scottish film, larky though it is in places, packs a greater social punch than such previous rave movies as Human Traffic (1999), Groove (2000), and Eden (2014). It was expanded by Welsh and Kieron Hurley from the latter’s 2012 play. Johnno (Cristian Ortega) and his best mate Spanner (Lorn MacDonald), techno-obsessed 15-year-olds living in a dying industrial Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As the double-edged Chinese proverb has it, “may you live in interesting times.” Screenwriter Russell T Davies evidently thanks that’s exactly where we’re at, and his new six-part drama Years and Years (BBC One) is a bold, sprawling but – as far as episode one is concerned at least – amorphous attempt to assess the state of play.From Queer as Folk to Doctor Who and Cucumber, Davies’s favourite themes have included LGBT issues, science fiction, left-ish politics and a fondness for soaps. All of them reappear here (although sadly, the caustic humour and searing dramatic focus he brought to A Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Here they come again – the band most adept at capturing the mood of an era in catchy, critical three-minute songs. Just at the very point we need them most, the original ska-punk popsters surface and their message is as deeply relevant as it was four decades ago. But is this a 40th anniversary or a number one album tour? Or both?In these unprecedented times, receiving political commentary from near-pensioners seems strangely apt (remaining original members frontman Terry Hall, guitarist Lynval Golding and bass player Horace Panter are 60, 67 and 65, respectively). It’s a turn of events Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
We are living in a time when gang culture rips and roars its way down London streets, and through newspaper headlines, at increasingly alarming levels. Recent news reports revealed how a surge in knife and gun crime is leading to more young black men being murdered in the capital than anywhere else in the country, with problems increasingly amplified by social media and drugs money.The return to the stage, then, of Roy Williams’ hugely successful South London gang drama The Firm feels timely – though as the play itself demonstrates, the Big Smoke’s gang culture, with all its shifts and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the past, Bear Grylls has taken President Obama up an Alaskan glacier and trekked through the Swiss Alps with Roger Federer. This jaunt with David Walliams (ITV) was on a more modest scale, merely requiring the Britain’s Got Talent judge to be dragged across rivers and down rock faces in wildest Devon.Grylls believes that everybody has a little bit of Bear in them, if they can just screw up their courage and face their worst fears. By the end of this, Bear and Walliams also had a little bit of rat in them, after Bear had barbecued a dead one for lunch. Walliams, togged up in comically Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What could have been merely a cheap and cheesy piss-take registers as considerably more robust in The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson, journo-turned-playwright Jonathan Maitland's latest venture for his de facto home at north London's Park Theatre. While one foot is surely planted in Spitting Image, a top-rank alumnus from which can be found amongst the cast in Steve Nallon, Maitland's vision of Brexit-era Britain now and to come owes at least as much to something like King Charles III (minus the verse). The result is as funny as one might expect and chilling, too, in its portrait of a Read more ...
Katherine Waters
There’s a barely disguised sense of threat running through the 2019 Venice Biennale. Of the 79 participating artists and groups, all are living and there’s a sharp sense that the purpose of the exhibition is to diagnose the ills afflicting the contemporary world. Colonial history, protest, ecological havoc, enslavement (of people, of machines), borders, murder, incarceration, poverty – all the fears of the day feature. Curator Ralph Rugoff's vision this year is clear, yet the show is not pessimistic and many of the works are graced by great dignity – though that is not to say the experience Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Taking place at the Theatre Royal, Andy Hamilton’s show is entitled An Evening with… rather than a straight stand-up and mainly consists of the comedy writer/performer and gameshow regular answering audience questions. During the first half this is done via raising a hand and shouting out questions; during the second half by leaving pieces of paper on the stage front during the interval. This isn’t, then, a riotous evening of laughs but more a gentle one of easy Sunday night chuckles, with Hamilton as much a raconteur as a comedian.The stage-set is simple, a mic, a table and a chair. Hamilton Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There can be no questioning trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger’s extraordinary mastery: his big, unforced sound, mellifluous legato, athletic virtuosity and utterly controlled high notes. But his well-attested commitment to the avant-garde led the Wigmore audience to stay away in droves from his recital last night, leaving the hall insultingly empty for such a star performer.But the programme didn’t just look intimidating on paper, it turned out to be somewhat hard work in practice, not only for those Wigmore patrons who prefer Beethoven and Schubert, but even for those of us with an enthusiasm for Read more ...