Reviews
Marjorie Prime, Menier Chocolate Factory review - superbly acted chiller about a contemporary crisis
Helen Hawkins
Artificial intelligence has become an even hotter topic since Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime was first staged in Los Angeles in 2014, so it’s not surprising that the play’s handling of AI is being seen as its unique selling point. (It subsequently played Off Broadway and was made into a film.) The developments Harrison features have become increasingly commonplace, especially the recent rise of the chatbot as a crafter of information; mini-robots are even being developed as “carers”. What Marjorie Prime is probing, though, seems ultimately less literal and much weightier than Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some plays are instantly forgettable, others leave a tender fold in the memory. I well remember seeing Zinnie Harris’s evocatively titled Further Than the Furthest Thing in 2000, and marveling at its strange beauty and linguistic flair. Now revived at the Young Vic, in a beautifully visual, if tonally uncertain, production by Jennifer Tang, one of the venue’s Genesis Fellows, this version confirms my initial impression of a haunting story told in a magical way. And its welcomely diverse cast is led by Jenna Russell and Cyril Nri.Based on events that happened on Tristan da Cunha, an island in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Neil Jordan’s take on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is the first since Bob Rafelson’s Poodle Springs (1998), itself a lone outlier after Michael Winner’s misbegotten The Big Sleep (1978). No one seems to have considered why, or what they might add.Jordan is an Irish magic realist at his best, a gauzy poet around bloody themes. His ambitions here are more modest on an honest job of work. Liam Neeson, his friend and star in Michael Collins and Breakfast On Pluto, wanted to play Marlowe, William Monahan provided a script from John Banville’s Chandler estate-sanctioned novel The Black-Eyed Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s a huge amount to admire in Rye Lane, a new romcom set in south London. It’s the first feature directed by Raine Allen-Miller, who has conjured up a love letter to the neighbourhoods she grew up in. The street markets and much-loved Peckhamplex cinema, Brockwell Park with its walled garden and hilltop views, Brixton’s arcades with their mix of food and fabrics from all over the world, are all captured here in eye-popping colour. It’s refreshing to see this part of the city in all its multi-cultural glory and to escape the well-worn tourist landmarks that usually signify Read more ...
David Nice
This longest, wackiest and most riskily diverse of Third Symphonies became Esa-Pekka Salonen’s personal property during his years as the Philharmonia's Principal Conductor. His successor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, has (in)famously said he’s not interested in Mahler. Two of the orchestra’s most distinguished visitors, Jakub Hrůša and Paavo Järvi, certainly are, so after Hrůša’s blazing Second, hopes were high for Järvi’s Third.It delivered in terms of masterful conducting, effortless in every gear change, and in all those sonorities which must have seemed outrageously novel in 1896; when the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chris Rock knows how to tease. It’s a safe bet that many watching this show are here for one thing – to hear his version of events that took place at last year’s Oscars, when actor and erstwhile rapper Will Smith came on stage and slapped the comic. First, though, he sets it up. Not by talking about the Oscars kerfuffle per se – although he tells us “Anyone who says words hurt has never been punched in the face” – but by cheeky asides that let us know Rock is leading us there. He references Snoop Dog and Jay-Z; he’s not dissing them, he’s at pains to make clear, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Trapped?” hisses 40-year-old Rachel (Virginie Efira) at her boyfriend, Ali (Roschdy Zem), who has a five-year-old daughter and is returning, for the sake of their child, to his ex-wife, Alice (Chiara Mastroianni). “What’s trapped you? Nothing at all. You can have kids or not have them, whenever you like.”This is one of the most vivid scenes in Other People’s Children, Rebecca Zlotowski’s fifth feature. It is an attractive, quintessentially French film, set in Paris and beautifully shot by Georges Lechaptois, but rather cloying and well mannered compared to the wonderfully edgy, subtle An Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It now seems an inevitability that Marisha Wallace will be a frontrunner at next year's theatre awards, not just this year’s. Having barnstormed her way to a 2023 Olivier nomination for playing Ado Annie in the Young Vic’s Oklahoma!, her Miss Adelaide, luckless fiancée of crap-game organiser Nathan Detroit, is the crowning achievement of Nicholas Hytner’s exuberant new production of Guys and Dolls at the Bridge, which itself should be a shoo-in for prizes of its own.Hytner has taken the 1950 Frank Loesser comic musical about gambling low-lifes in New York along a new route. It’s what Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The moral of this story is that if you’re going out to commit a robbery, don’t take your iPhone with you. This was the grave error committed by TJ (Anthony Turpel) and his friend Ross (Chris Lee), whose attempted heist was foiled by an angry shotgun-toting citizen. TJ managed to get away, but Ross – carrying the iPhone containing incriminating evidence of the pair’s guilt – was shot and left for dead.When a distraught TJ confessed all to his sister Chloe (Bailee Madison), he thought his goose was cooked. However, Chloe had other ideas. Unleashing the deductive powers that have made her an apt Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Despite the fact that it’s a cruel depiction of an aging woman, I have always loved Quinten Massys’ The Ugly Duchess (pictured below, left). The Flemish artist invites us to laugh at an old dear who, in the hope of attracting a suitor, has tucked her hair into a horned headdress and decked herself in a décolleté gown that exposes her wrinkled cleavage. Even in 1513, her ridiculous outfit would have been outmoded. In her hand she holds a rosebud, suggestive of amorous intent; the implication is that this misguided soul has donned her youthful finery in an attempt to regain her lost allure and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Childhood fantasies and adult fears – sometimes it’s a fine line between the two. And it’s one that director Liam Steel walks with unerring precision in his ravishing new double-bill for the Royal College of Music: an overflowing toybox of invention and imagination that conceals, right at the bottom, something rather nasty and very real indeed.The production brings together Ravel’s familiar L'enfant et les sortilèges – Colette’s compact fable of a naughty boy who is taught a fantastical lesson in humanity – with a rarity, Respighi’s La bella dormente nel bosco. Premiered in 1922 and reworked Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Endeavour first landed way back in 2012, and suddenly here we are, bidding it a final farewell after the end of its ninth series. Not everybody learned to love Shaun Evans as the pre-John Thaw Inspector Morse, but some of us may even have come to like the new boy better.In this valedictory episode, Exeunt, creator Russell Lewis had crafted a fitting end to the pre-Morse saga, bringing us full circle with closure of sorts for the Blenheim Vale child abuse horror (which dated back to series 2) and dispatching all the main players into various different futures. We were left with Anton Lesser’s Read more ...