mental health
Markie Robson-Scott
“Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” is the menacing motto (sounds more scary with an Australian accent) of the tanned, muscular denizens of Luna Bay beach. But the unnamed hero known as The Surfer, played by Nicolas Cage, isn’t listening.The Surfer is directed by Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium, 2019; Nocebo, 2022) and written by Thomas Martin (both are Irish). They were inspired, says Finnegan, by John Cheever’s The Swimmer as well as Australian New Wave movies of the 70s. This film is, however, not big on subtlety and has a limited scope. It’s shot in Yallingup, Western Australia on a beach and a Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Given that Prioritise Pleasure was Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s (RLT) Back to Black, and that there’s been a lengthy wait for this new release, it’s no wonder that there’s so much anticipation around A Complicated Woman. Add to the mix her frankly jaw-dropping performance alongside Jake Shears in Cabaret in the West End, and you might be forgiven for expecting big changes. But Self Esteem knows a winning formula when she’s on to one. The reprise of perhaps her most popular piece, “I Do This All the Time” in the form of “I Do and I Don’t Care” begins with that same Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A single sofa is all we have on stage to attract our eye - the signifier of intimate family evenings, chummy breakfast TV and, more recently, Graham Norton’s bonhomie. Until you catch proper sight of the room’s walls that is, which are not, as you first thought, Duluxed in a bland magnolia shade, nor even panelled with upmarket modernist abstract paintings, befitting of the whiff of wealth that suffuses the space. It’s a man’s head, repeating and repeating and repeating, turned away, bull-necked, present but not present, intimidating from beyond the grave. I was in the stalls and I felt it! Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It seems a bizarre idea. Take a pivotal film in American culture that reset the perception of The Great American Dream at this, obviously, pivotal moment in American culture in which The Great American Dream, for millions, is being literally swiped away at gunpoint, And… make it into a musical? Stranger ideas have worked - try Evita and Assassins for starters, but there’s plenty more cut from unpromising cloth and don’t forget that the first words on the programme say ‘BASED ON THE NOVEL WRITTEN BY JAMES LEO HERLIHY’. For all that assertion, the key question persists: can the stage show Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In Italy, they did it differently. Their pulp fiction tales of suburban transgression appeared between yellow covers on new stands and spawned the influential Giallo movies of the Sixties and Seventies, gory exercises in an offbeat, highly stylised film language – cult movies indeed.The USA took its transgressive tales of domestic non-bliss and drew upon the language of Hollywood film noir to make short television plays, often lacing the arsenic in the tea with a soupçon of black comedy. They branded it with the master of suspense, the man who could delve into psychologies that other Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The date, projected behind the stage before a word is spoken, is a clue - 14th April 1912. “Why so specific?” was my first thought. My second was, “Ah, yes”.Sure enough, Akhila Krishnan’s video and Adam Cork’s sound floats us on a sea of troubles, as Denmark’s ship of state is battered by storms, literal and metaphorical, in a roiling Atlantic. After a fortnight in which that ocean has never looked wider nor choppier, a three hour examination of how a psychologically unstable man could eviscerate a polity seemed both timely and scarily portentous. But that, 425 years on, is why the play Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Russia.It’s impossible to be ambivalent towards that word, that country, indeed that idea, one so very similar to our own, yet so very different. You feel it in Moscow, where I spent a week exactly 40 years ago. Like London, it is a vast city, imperial in ambition, a true believer in its past and present, but then, as now, uncertain of its future. It is also not like London at all, crowded with strange buildings, cold beyond description, peopled by frightened men and women. There’s an irony in the fact that I learned more about my own home in seven days spent 1800 miles away than I did in Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Your response to Barney Norris’s one-man play, based on David Foenkinos’s bestselling novel as translated by Megan Jones, probably depends on which of the Gens is yours. The Gen Zs might turn a nose up, Joanne Rowling something of a discredited figure in their eyes. Millennials will identify straight away with Martin, the protagonist, whose life is "stalked" by Harry Potter. Gen Xs will catch the peculiar and unexpected impact of parenthood on a complicated, if hitherto stable, middle-class life. And, Okay Boomers, what about us? I was reminded of Kenneth Williams, Bernard Cribbins and, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The phenomenal global success of Six began when two young writers decided to give voices to the wives of a powerful man, bringing them out of their silent tombs and energising them and, by extension, doing the same for the women of today. Its extraordinary popularity is a siren call to find forgotten women and reclaim their personalities, to give a theatrical second life to those to whom the historical record has denied a first. Indeed, Oh! Mary, also about President Lincoln's wife, is proving that point in New York now. Something of that desire lies behind painter, writer, playwright, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As something of an immigrant to the capital myself in the long hot summer of 1984, I gobbled up Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes’s novel of an outsider embracing the temptations and dangers of London.Written a couple of years earlier and set a couple of miles east, Sam Selvon’s seminal book, The Lonely Londoners, focuses more specifically on Caribbean immigrants’ experience of a metropolis emerging from post-war austerity, of the cold, of the racism, of the possibilities always just out of reach.Roy Williams’ adaptation of Selvon’s dazzling narrative was a big hit at the intimate Jermyn Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are two main reasons to revive classics. The first is that they are really good; the second is that they have something to say about how the world is changing, perhaps more accurately, how our perception of it is changing. Both are true of Annie Kershaw’s slick, sexy, shocking production of Martin Crimp's translation, up close and personal, at the Jermyn Street Theatre.Even if you haven’t seen the play (and, with productions as frequent as they have been, many buying tickets for this sold out run will have) the set-up is familiar. Two maids, resentful of their unpredictable and needy Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kemah Bob is a regular on television and radio panel shows and well established on the comedy circuit, but Miss Fortunate is her full-length debut. And what a debut; a personal story – ostensibly about the holiday from hell – that manages to riff on mental health, sexual adventure and cultural assumptions. And be funny.Bob, a Texan transplanted to London for the past eight years – “Because I hate sunshine and love abortion” – is a great storyteller, dropping a detail here, an interesting fact there (asides on weird animal genitalia pepper the show) as she recounts a tale about a Thai holiday Read more ...