adultery
Marianka Swain
The grand finale of Jamie Lloyd’s remarkable Pinter at the Pinter season is this starry production of one of the writer’s greatest – and certainly most personal – works, inspired by his extramarital affair with Joan Bakewell. The 1978 play is famous for its reverse-chronological structure, however Lloyd’s stylish, expressionistic take emphasises the daring not just of the formal trickery, but of the unsparing scrutiny of humanity.Soutra Gilmour’s stark set resembles a gallery, with the tangled trio as its shades-of-grey exhibits; it’s a reminder, too, that these yarn-spinning schemers Read more ...
David Nice
The touch is not always light here. Swathes of clunking, cliché-ridden English dialogue threaten to make the star-crossed lovers look ridiculous, and one of them (Elliott Gould) can be a wooden actor at times. But Ingmar Bergman's first major film made without the safety net of the Swedish film industry in 1970 has enough serious-minded authenticity to mark it out as more than the total failure he tersely labelled it in his memoirs.Typically, it swerves away from the stereotypical premise: a brisk, chic housewife and hostess in a happy marriage sleepwalks into an affair with a troubled soul, Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Hot on the heels of International Women’s Day come three monologues written, directed and produced by women showing at Hoxton Hall. It’s kind of a treat, and kind of not.The current laser focus on gender risks the unwanted side-effect of alienating rather than including, and when an issue becomes so hot it’s hip, surface buzz easily takes over at the expense of meaningful action. Important voices registering dissent, noting difference, flagging up granularity and raising objections are not heard. But the balance between revolution and evolution is perennial and intractable, and the thing Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Carry on out of London past the Finborough Theatre and you hit the A4. Follow it east as it becomes the M4, take a southern turn at Bristol for the M5 and you’re in the West Country. Bude and Bodmin, Liskeard, St Austell, Padstow, Mousehole, Newquay and Newlyn. Out here are fishing villages, tin mines, granite churches, wide seas, surfers, pixies, low mental health indicators, and a great deal of unemployment.Henry Darke’s Booby’s Bay takes on the half-twee half-spavined world of the Cornish fishing village in its oddball glory while bringing up the salty issue of regional deprivation. The Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
From his debut Metroland, right up to the Man Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending, the prospect of a road not taken has haunted the mild and mediocre narrators of Julian Barnes’s novels. Like Tony Webster in The Sense of an Ending, “average at life; average at truth; morally average”, they tend to prefer, or at least settle for, a comfy seat in the stalls as life’s high dramas unfold in front of them. True, the novels often shatter this detachment and, with gentle ruthlessness, wreck their hard-won equipoise. Yet The Only Story, although it initially slips into the well-woven tweed of the Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Only the final 60 seconds of this first episode of Apple Tree Yard could have been described as a psychological thriller. We know Dr Yvonne Carmichael is in the dock – the genetic scientist was shown handcuffed in a prison van right at the start – but we don’t know what she is supposed to have done. The remaining 55 minutes comprised a familiar tale of middle-class adultery and low-lit longing. Seen from the viewpoint of the female protagonist (who provides the voiceover) this is very much “one for the ladies”.Dr Carmichael (Emily Watson) has just finished addressing a Select Committee at the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Was Tennessee Williams breaking rules, or breaking apart when he wrote this 1969 play? A bit of both, probably, and the two main characters of the rarely performed In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel face the same choices.It emerged from what the writer would himself admit was a low period of his life – when grief, alcohol and drugs were major players – and was coldly received. “More deserving of a coroner’s report than a review” was a particularly lethal critical line for a piece that does occasionally seem to stare into non-existence. Sometimes painful to experience, the struggle here is to find Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
A good triple bill should have something for everyone, so Rambert have all bases covered with their latest: rare must be the person who likes neither love, nor art, nor rock 'n' roll. In fact, it's a safe bet that most people like all of them, and so last night's programme at Sadler's Wells was something of a crowd-pleaser – no mean feat for an evening with two new works, created for this season and here receiving their London première.If you want to count in whole numbers, as it were, then Didy Veldman's new The 3 Dancers is probably Art, inspired as it is by Picasso's 1925 painting Les Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
What exactly do we expect when a drama opens with the declaration, “This is a true story”? The Scandalous Lady W, based on Hallie Rubenhold’s biography Lady Worsley’s Whim, brought us some unusual 18th century marriage shenanigans that ended in one of the most scandalous court cases of the era. But, despite its central legal scenes, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” wasn’t the order of the day.David Eldridge’s screenplay instead adjusted details to strengthen what would have anyway been a very acute commentary on the status of women in society, and particularly within Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The original idea for the subtitle of this show, first made in 2000 and last seen at Sadler's Wells in 2007, was apparently "An Auto-Erotic Thriller". Yes, groan. But "erotic thriller" is a much straighter description of The Car Man than its actual, rather coy, subtitle, "Bizet's Carmen Reimagined". This is a nail-biting ride, and certainly not suitable for kids.The plot is based loosely on The Postman Always Rings Twice - wife and lover murder husband somewhat inefficiently, there is a wrongful conviction but eventually (twisted) poetic justice. Bourne adds a tragic misfit and a bisexual Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If Peter Bogdanovich – remember him? – weren't there in the credits, Woody Allen would seem the unmistakable director of She's Funny That Way, the way too intermittently funny trifle that calls to mind such far superior Allen paeans to the New York stage as Bullets Over Broadway and finds leading man Owen Wilson adopting Allen's mannerisms throughout (as well Wilson might, having led the cast of Midnight in Paris). Playing a Broadway director who can't keep his trouser belts buckled, a stammering Wilson is the supposed comic pivot of a slow-aborning film from the once-great Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Calcutta director Satyajit Ray was a colossus of cinema whose work often bridged the gap between his native Indian – specifically, Bengali – culture and that of Europe. He wrote that his 1964 film Charulata (alternatively titled in English “The Lonely Wife”) was his favourite, saying “it was the one film I would make the same way if I had to do it again”. Ray’s script is based on a novella, “The Broken Nest”, by one of the most profound cultural influences on the director, Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore.Charulata is a film of intimate concentration, as well as an immaculate recreation of Read more ...