Reviews
aleks.sierz
Posh hotels are good settings for drama. They look cool, feel alien and can rapidly acquire a sense of claustrophobic intensity. Most importantly, in real life they feel like stage sets. Playwrights from Noël Coward (Private Lives) to Sarah Kane (Blasted) have set their work in luxury hotels, so Polly Stenham’s latest play, her first for the National Theatre (and performed in the small studio space), follows in some large footsteps. But she brings her very own in-yer-face style to the party.From the first, there’s a tense atmosphere. An upper-middle-class English family is staying at a luxury Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s been a decade since the television drama Sex Traffic brought writer Abi Morgan into the mainstream. It won an impressive collection of awards, and its tale of international prostitution networks, and their brutality, was as harsh and under-the-skin as they come.In the time since, Morgan has established herself as one of the go-to British writers of her generation, with film work including The Iron Lady (Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, pictured among enemies, below right) and Shame, television drama (for, and about, the BBC, The Hour), and plenty of theatre work. We haven’t heard, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Great idea. Round up a dozen 20-something American girls whose idea of a royal family is the Kardashians, whisk them off to a stately pile somewhere in the south of England, and put them in a beauty contest to see which one can take the fancy of a bloke who might just be Prince Harry.... but a terrible programme. Matt Hicks, the fey posh chap with slightly Harry-esque ginger hair who (oddly) looks like both Wills and Harry after they've been processed through a Photoshop blender, is a personality-vacuum blessed with the chat-up skills of the Speaking Clock ("er... you're a bit brazen"). Also Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Kevin Spacey is seen before he is heard in Clarence Darrow, the solo play that is doing a brief if ferociously bracing run at the Old Vic, but once the actor stops fiddling with his onstage desk and starts to talk, well, watch out. A master ironist who can often stand at an intriguingly cool distance from the parts he plays, Spacey hasn't sounded this impassioned in years, and when the standing ovation arrives nearly two hours later, it is entirely deserved. The audience can feel this performer all but taken over by the assignment at hand, and I would be surprised if this engagement doesn't Read more ...
David Nice
A voluptuous dream in sequined silver, the nearly-27-year-old Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili sat down at the keyboard and instantly transcendentalised her mermaid look as Ravel’s Ondine. Even Brahms took to the life aquatic of her recital’s first half. For the second, though, there should have been a costume change into a clown suit with a tatty tutu pulled over it. Never have I witnessed a crazier trip through the distorting mirror – and if even Stravinsky’s mad puppet Petrushka couldn’t take the relentless onslaught, what about the poor old Chopin Second Scherzo and the Ravel La Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any band’s reunion is bittersweet. They can never be what they were at their peak and know it, and yet fans hope. Recapturing past magic is tough. Hair is lost, weight is gained and aging depletes energy. With Pulp, the band never assumed formula rock personae and their reunion was always going to be more seamless with their own past than most. There was less chance that memories would be sullied. Their reformation was one of the most convincing in recent years, in part also due to quickly bowing out after returning and the favour they brought to the listening public by not writing any new, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The sheer scale of One Direction’s global victory march is something to behold. Last night’s stopover on their Where We Are tour was the biggest concert ever staged by one band on Scottish soil, with 64,000 fans pouring into the national rugby stadium (I didn’t conduct a scientific poll of the gender split, but it had certainly never been easier to use the Gents at Murrayfield.)Everything was bright and brilliant and giddily over-sized, from the piercing screams that greeted every banal utterance (“We love you, Scotland!”), to the price of the merch: £10 for a flimsy plastic lanyard is pretty Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Amber (****) was shown earlier this year in Ireland, the crime series created by Rob Cawley and Paul Duane for state broadcaster RTE caused a kerfuffle as (giving nothing away) it didn't follow the usual narrative of teenager-goes-missing-police-miss-clues-and-family-implodes drama. But that's all yet to pan out, and last night's opening episode of four started traditionally enough as Amber, the 14-year-old daughter of Ben and Sarah Bailey, lied to her parents about visiting her friend and didn't arrive home when expected.The family implosion was already under way as Ben and Sarah ( Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Sometimes a film captures the imagination of the critical establishment for all the wrong reasons, and there's a scramble to see who can file the most entertainingly bitchy copy. And so it is with Grace of Monaco, which emerges from the vipers' nest that is the Cannes Film Festival (and from a very public spat between director Olivier Dahan and the co-chairman of the film's US distributor, Harvey Weinstein) covered in vicious puncture wounds, ridiculously ruffled and resigned to take it all over again on general release. But can it really be that awful?As expected - and as anyone looking Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With the 70th anniversary of D-Day following hard on the heels of the extensive World War One commemorations, battle fatigue is becoming a very real concern for TV-watchers. Breaking the mould of retrospective war documentaries becomes increasingly difficult, as Messrs Enfield and Whitehouse demonstrated with deadly satirical accuracy in Harry and Paul's Story of the 2s, so all kinds of credit are due to National Geographic's frequently devastating record of the D-Day landings and their immediate aftermath.Although this was a multinational collaborative effort, the premise was straightforward Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Two movie-obsessed high-school students Owen and Matt (Owen Williams and Matt Johnson, who also writes and directs) are making a short movie about bullying for their film class. After they show it, to widespread derision from their classmates, the bullying gets worse (by boys they call the "dirties") and so the two teenagers decide to make a new version, incorporating secretly filmed footage of them being harassed and assaulted.As Owen and Matt develop a narrative for the foul-mouthed, Tarantino-esque movie, it becomes increasingly about enacting revenge on the dirties. Matt is the driver of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Once upon a time British Airways was our national carrier. It had a theme tune that made you want to go "aah"/croon along/flood your lugholes with liquid strychnine. You knew where you were with BA. Then along came the uppity Euro-oiks from Ryanair and EasyJet, companies that can’t locate a space bar on a keyboard let alone a landing strip anywhere near a city centre, and yet they filched all BA's cattle-class customers. Meanwhile various nouveau airlines from Asia kreemed off the posherati who turn left on planes. But now the solution to this pincer-movement assault on British Airways' Read more ...