It’s a fairly safe bet that when director Beeban Kidron made her first film, the documentary Carry Greenham Home (1983), she never envisaged that 20 years later she’d be directing a whopping great blockbuster about a Chardonnay-swigging young woman’s desperate quest to get a ring on her finger - Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). But then Kidron’s career trajectory has never been predictable.Her CV ricochets from the classic television series Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1990) to a documentary about the sculptor Antony Gormley to the film Wong Foo! Thanks for Everything! Julie Read more ...

Keen to boost its credentials as “the home of intelligent and ambitious drama”, BBC Two has announced details of its dramatisation of Michel Faber’s bestselling novel, The Crimson Petal and the White. Adapted into four 60 minute episodes by playwright and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon and directed by Marc Munden (of The Devil’s Whore and The Mark of Cain fame), The Crimson Petal stars Romola Garai, Gillian Anderson, Richard E. Grant, Chris O’Dowd and Mark Gatiss.Faber’s book is a psychological thriller which probes into the murky underworld of Victorian sexual politics and prostitution. The Read more ...

Of course she isn't now the watchful, learning 29-year-old who premiered Covent Garden’s opulent, sensually loaded production in 1995, but Gheorghiu’s varicoloured voice - a rainbow of tears, sobs, scoops, warbling runs and top notes that seem to rack her body with pain - has if anything added more colours since then (including a less fetching jeune-fille timbre in the middle that sounds as if it’s hiding a problem). When in the overture the front-cloth loads its antique photograph of a plain, dumpy little girl with despairing eyes, and then fades to show Gheorghiu pensively sitting alone Read more ...

The world is turned literally upside down in Revanche's long, eerie opening shot. We see trees reflected in a dark forest lake, hear animal and bird sounds - discordant, wild, somehow unsettling - and the faint boom of distant thunder. Then something (we can't see what) plummets into the water. This superlative psychodrama sends out ripples too, that last way beyond the tight parameters of its plot.A word about the title. The film, from Austria, is partly about revenge, but the common translation for that is Rache. Revanche, according to Götz Spielmann, its writer-director, involves much more Read more ...

Five Daughters is “based on the personal testimony of those most closely involved”: family, friends, the last people to see the women alive. What we are watching - the story of the murder of five sex workers in Ipswich - has the stamp of truth. When one girl missed her appointment at the methadone clinic, her mother tried to collect her prescription for her. The mother, played by Sarah Lancashire with the washed-out complexion of the terminally worried parent, would in effect have been a script consultant. The same went for the episode’s climactic scene, in which Anneli Alderton (Jaime Read more ...

George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play was deemed too scandalous for public performance in Britain and was banned by the Lord Chamberlain until 1925, and its New York premiere in 1905 caused such outrage that the cast were arrested. Its offence was that Shaw was writing about the world’s oldest profession, prostitution, and alluded to a possible incestuous coupling. His greatest crime, though, was the play’s attack on Victorian hypocrisy.For prostitution, of course, could not exist with what we now would call a solid customer base, and it was a profession allowed to flourish with the collusion of Read more ...