England
Sarah Kent
If you need an excuse to spend a day in the charming seaside town of Whitstable, the Biennale is it. After a four-year hiatus, the festival is back with a somewhat edgy, apocalyptic feel.For instance, Webb/Ellis’ film This Place is a Message (St John’s Methodist Chapel, pictured below) features a group of teenagers hanging out in a disused chalk quarry in a part of the country long listed for the burial of nuclear waste. What symbol would they choose to warn future generations of the presence of this hazardous residue?It’s a bit like a philosophy class that includes communicating with beings Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
According to the programme, La bohème is (probably) the most performed opera, by the most performed operatic composer. Ever. So, what is it about this piece that continues to enthral, inspire and intrigue artists and audiences alike?Perhaps it’s that the characters – a group of young Parisians in the mid 19th century – are so relatable to so many, regardless of age, class or nationality. Or perhaps it’s the nostalgic pining for youth that seems to echo throughout the piece (Puccini was nearly 40 by the time he finished composing the work). A more pertinent question, however, may be “how does Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Handel’s operas have long posed, and still pose, severe problems for the modern theatre, and especially the modern director – all those endless streams of wonderful but emotionally more or less generalised arias hitched to interchangeable characters in fabricated love stories about crusaders or Roman emperors or oriental potentates.But they can suddenly explode into true music drama where the cardboard dramatis personae suddenly become real and human and acquire minds and feelings. Tamerlano, sandwiched in 1724 between two of Handel’s greatest operas, Giulio Cesare and Rodelinda, is a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A birthday weekend in Devon goes rather badly wrong in All My Friends Hate Me, the new film co-written by its leading man, Tom Stourton, that looks guaranteed to make shut-ins of us all.The antithesis of the warm-and-fuzzy gatherings proffered onscreen over the years by the likes of Kenneth Branagh and Richard Curtis, Andrew Gaynord's film directing debut is compulsively watchable, in an increasingly grim way. But I'm sure I wasn't the only one wondering somewhere past the midway point why the likeable-enough Pete (Stourton) doesn't just cut his losses and drive away.The character's name can' Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Terence Davies’s Benediction is a haunting but uneven biopic of the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon and a drama about the burden of incalculable loss. If sorrow and futility enshroud it, Davies leavens the bitterness with his tartest dialogue yet; the second act, much of it depicting Sassoon’s romantic disappointments in the no man’s land of the 1920s and 1930s, is a sustained comedy of exquisite bad manners – of which he is always the loverlorn, masochistic victim.The very English middle son of a wealthy Jewish merchant and his Anglo-Catholic wife, Captain Sassoon (played by Jack Lowden Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Anne-Marie Duff blazes across the stage like a meteorite in Beth Steel’s excoriating drama about the changes sweeping through a Northern mining town over the course of five decades. As Constance Webster, a frustrated miner’s wife, her angry energy simultaneously lights up every room she appears in and sets it on fire; the more strongly she tries to escape her world, the closer she comes to destroying it.Steel has made her name with great state-of-the-nation dramas. In Wonderland she excavated the emotional traumas left behind by the miners’ strike, while in Labyrinth she created a riveting Read more ...
Tim Cumming
In a little over two week’s time, the three remaining ones will kick-start their 60th year as The Rolling Stones by taking to the stage at a stadium on the edge of Madrid on June 1, around the same time that Elizabeth Windsor marks her own @70 jubilee across the UK.The Stones will stop by in Munich’s old Olympic Stadium, which dates, like quite a chunk of their set list, from the early Seventies, before SIXTY’s opening UK date in Liverpool, the band’s first gig there since 1971. That was the year they bade farewell to Britain before decamping to the south of France to make Exile on Main Read more ...
Mert Dilek
At long last, the giant has come back. Over a decade after its critical apotheosis on both sides of the Atlantic, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem returns to London in an astonishing revival starring Mark Rylance as the high priest of its proceedings. With the renewed intensity of its vision of an England in crisis, Butterworth’s infinitely rich play is proof that legends age well. First staged at the Royal Court Theatre in 2009, Ian Rickson’s superbly calibrated production once again lures us into a world marked by its anarchic flair and supernatural rhythm. At its centre is Johnny “Rooster Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If we could keep living our life over and over again, would we get better at it? This is the premise underpinning Life After Life, the BBC’s four-part adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s novel.The story centres around Ursula Todd, as she grows up with parents Hugh and Sylvie (James McArdle and Sian Clifford) and assorted siblings in their home, Fox Corner. It’s an Edwardian rural idyll of lush gardens, the murmur of bees and teas on the lawn.But Ursula’s progress through the 20th century and through multiple versions of her life will not be plain sailing. Indeed, her first attempt at being born Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The title of James Fritz’s play is allusive, oblique even. I assume it refers to how, in the aftermath of a catastrophe such as an erupting volcano, it’s the lava that spreads outwards, changing the form of the surrounding landscape. It’s not the epicentre of the disaster, but its adjoining regions, where the impact of what has happened can begin to be assessed.Indeed “Time since impact” is almost the first phrase projected onto the back wall of Amy Jane Cook’s set, where new texts appear beneath the five chapter-like headings that divide the action, following the stages of grief – denial, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This two-part documentary about how the Eighties were partly shaped by the British Prime Minister and the US President was obviously planned long before the Russians invaded Ukraine, but it’s a powerful illustration of how history doesn’t stop, but keeps coming around again in a slightly reformatted guise. It’s also a timely reminder of what “statesmanship” means, at a time when this elusive commodity has never been in shorter supply.The story is told by Margaret Thatcher’s biographer and former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore, and bundling Moore, Thatcher and Ronald Reagan together Read more ...
Chinonyerem Odimba
People often ask how long a play takes to make its way out of you. And it’s always a valid question because no matter how beautiful, soft, joyful, or short a play is, there is a wrestling match that takes place between the idea lodging itself somewhere in you, and it turning into words that actors can have fun getting to know. With Black Love, opening this week at the Kiln Theatre, that journey from the story embedding itself to a rehearsal script took almost seven years.When I was first commissioned in 2019 to write a play for Paines Plough, I had no idea what it was I wanted to write. Or Read more ...