Interviews
David Benedict
Fingers on buzzers… Question: What’s the connection between Days of Wine and Roses, Small Change, Making Noise Quietly and Versailles? Answer: They’re all past Donmar productions directed by Peter Gill.But it’s not just his directing skill – no one in British theatre has a finer ear for the rhythm, pitch and placement of dialogue – that makes Gill a primary figure in the Donmar’s past and present. Not only did he direct the sons-and-mothers struggle Small Change and the post-Edwardian drama of family secrets and lies Versailles, he also wrote them. Robert Hastie’s revival of his 2001 play The Read more ...
Dylan Moore
There is a simple explanation to why Cardiff-born Peter Gill has never directed in his home city, despite the fact that many of his own plays are set in the Catholic, working-class Cardiff of his youth. “I’d never been asked,” states Gill matter-of-factly; “it’s just a trade; it’s not a magical world. You have to ask me to do things.”There is something bracing about the lack of sentimentality with which Gill addresses the question of homecoming. It fits with the setting of our conversation too: a big, airy rehearsal room at the newly-rebuilt Sherman Theatre in the heart of Cardiff’s student- Read more ...
theartsdesk Q&A: actor Damien Molony on 'Bergerac', 'Two Weeks in August' and returning to the stage
Pamela Jahn
Everyone knows Bergerac, or so you'd think. "I didn't", says Damien Molony. "I knew of the series, but it was only after I got the job that it dawned on me how big it was. I was at a wedding and people said to me, 'Damien, the car, the leather jacket, Jersey.'" Not least, John Nettles who, over the course of ten years, made the original archetypal "maverick cop" so iconic. The series ran successfully from 1981 until the early 1990s.Since Toby Whithouse's reboot of Bergerac in 2025, Molony has made the character of Jim Bergerac his very own. Season two launched in April this year, and although Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
In Rose of Nevada, written and directed by Mark Jenkin, George MacKay plays Nick, a family man living in an impoverished present-day Cornish fishing village. He joins a trip on a once-lost trawler because he needs money to repair his roof. When the boat returns with a big catch, Nick and his colleague Liam (Callum Turner) are calmly greeted by the villagers as members of the crew that had disappeared a few years before Nick's birth. Stuck in the vanished but more plentiful world of 1993, Nick and the morally laxer Liam respond in different ways. With typical understatement, MacKay Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Lindsay Duncan might be British acting royalty, yet her gangster matriarch Ollie in Charlotte Regan’s BBC drama series Mint is not what you'd call stately or regal. Flamboyant, fiery, and unapologetic in her seventies, Ollie certainly isn't a typical granny - as her granddaughter Shannon (Emma Laird) has come to realise a long time ago. Mint centres on Shannon, whose dad Dylan (Sam Riley) - Ollie's son - is the new Godfather of Grangemouth . He now runs the dark and dirty family business that his ruthless father Andy (Clive Russell) built. As a romance blossoms between Shannon and Arran Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sky Atlantic’s new thriller, Prisoner, is a tense and twisty story involving a sinister crime syndicate called Pegasus, whose boss is a sneery tycoon called Harrison Dempsey. This bunch are planning to cause mayhem and chaos across Europe.However, there is one man who might be able to throw a spanner in Pegasus’s works. He is Tibor Stone, a professional hitman who worked for Pegasus, and is said to have killed at least 47 victims. Now, assisted by dogged prison guard Amber Todd (Izuka Hoyle), he’s prepared to give evidence in court which could bring down Dempsey and scupper the Pegasus Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Mille Petrozza was born in 1967 to a Calabrian father, and a mother who was a refugee from Communist East Germany. He grew up in the Altenessen district of Essen, in Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley, where his father worked in the coal mines. As a young teenager, inspired by a KISS concert, he and school friends Jürgen "Ventor" Reil (drums) and Rob Fioretti (bass) started a band.By 1984, after going by various names, the band was called Kreator, with Petrozza the frontman and rhythm guitarist. Their raw 1985 debut album Endless Pain was followed by 1986’s seismic Pleasure to Kill. The latter Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
The main female characters in Christian Petzold’s films are kindred spirits – sisters in subversiveness. Petzold and Nina Hoss collaborated on six movies together, from the made-for-TV thriller Something to Remind Me (2001) to Phoenix (2014), the harrowing story of an Auschwitz survivor. Both those films drew on Alfred Hitchock's Vertigo (1958). So does his new one, Miroirs No. 3, in which a troubled Berlin piano student walks out of her unhappy ordinary life into a kind of fairy tale. Played by Paula Beer – previously Petzold's muse in Transit (2018), Undine (2020), and Afire (2023) – Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Cate Blanchett is not a diva, but a star. Thanks to her boundless versatility and yen for risk-taking, she's at home in arthouse films as she is in Hollywood blockbusters. The greatest secret of her appeal is her elusiveness: she's always fully present and yet strangely ethereal at the same time – whether she's playing a character like Lydia Tár (in Tár) or Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings movies.Her portrayal of Timothea in Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother feels somewhat different, however. Blanchett has specialized in playing extroverted or strong women, but Timothea is Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
François Ozon has typically filtered his version of Albert Camus's existential novella The Stranger through his cool, ironic sensibility, the film's fluidity recalling at times the raw poetry of Fellini's and Pasolini's early work. Set in the French Algeria of the 1930s, it follows Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) as he visits his mother’s funeral, meets his old lover Marie (Rebecca Marder) on a beach, and gets drawn into the domestic melodrama of his violent neighbour Raymond (Pierre Lottin). Meursault's sudden ruthless murder of an Arab turns the stark drama into an absurd judicial farce. Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Sergei Loznitsa's historical drama Two Prosecutors, which he adapted from the novella written by the onetime Gulag prisoner Georgy Demidov (1908-87), confronts the horrors inflicted by Stalinism. A Kafkaesque parable, it asks the rhetorical question what can an idealist achieve in a system marked by arbitrariness and terror, where laws are either ignored or reinterpreted? Needless to say, the film invokes the Russia of today.Loznitsa describes it as a "typical Russian fairy tale", one that evolved as the bureaucratic nightmarishness evoked by Gogol, as well as Kafka, kept creeping into his Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
In director Paolo Sorrentino’s new film La Grazia, Tony Servillo portrays a fictitious Italian president, the ageing Mariano De Santis, who – in the last six months of his successful seven-year term – must grapples with two moral dilemmas. De Santis must decide whether to sign into law a bill legalizing euthanasia, certain to end his friendship with the Pope, and whether to pardon two prisoners who killed their partners. He is meanwhile haunted by the knowledge that his late wife, for whom he grieves, was unfaithful.Grazia (the word means "grace" and "pardon" in Italian) is the seventh Read more ...