Reviews
Saskia Baron
Nanny is being marketed as a horror movie, and arachnophobes should certainly beware, but it’s also a stylish exploration of race and class by African-American writer-director Nikyatu Jusu.Its heroine is Aisha (Anna Diop) a Senegalese graduate teacher who is fluent in several languages. Without official papers, however, she can only work as a nanny in New York. Amy (Michelle Monaghan) is pursuing her own career and pays Aisha cash in hand to teach French to her five-year-old daughter Rose. Amy also wants Aisha to stay overnight in her slick Lower Manhattan apartment whenever Read more ...
India Lewis
Arriving to the second night of two shows in the same venue, you would expect it to be a little quieter. But Wet Leg’s second outing at the O2 in Kentish Town was anything but – their burgeoning reputation (they are supporting Harry Styles next year) ensuring an excellent and enthusiastic turnout. The crowd was mixed, but with more than a smattering of the bald(ing) 6 Music dads that are now standard fare for any emergent alternative pop acts. There were two warm-up bands, described by one of the two frontwomen of Wet Leg with glee as the chance to organise their own mini festival Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Just about the three toughest tricks to pull off in the theatre are making a musical, making a family show and making characters so charming that even the most cynical in the house are pulling for the little guy (or not so little in this case). So if it takes the armature of a blockbuster Hollywood movie to buttress the production, who cares?Back at the Dominion Theatre seven years on from its successful run, Elf spreads the feelgood from stalls to circle with enough warmth to chase any wintry chills away. As with all the best seasonal shows, you know your emotions are being manipulated Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It begins in darkness. All that can be heard is the sound of a human struggling painfully for breath so that even before the lights go up we have the sense of a life coming to an end. It’s a stark contrast to the triumphalism of the play’s original opening “Oh for a Muse of fire”. Here instead there’s guilt and confusion as Henry realises, in anguish, that far from ceremonially lifting the crown from a corpse, he’s taken it from his father’s head before he’s died.In their final, bitter, conversation – taken from Henry IV part II – the old king delivers a warning about the grim realpolitik Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The set at the Arcola for Frank McGuinness’s Dinner with Groucho naturally features a table with two place settings and a backdrop of clouds in a blue sky. Overhead are pendant globe lights that will transform into stars. But the floor is a key feature too, covered in sawdust.For those who can’t see it from their seats, the playwright has usefully included a line about this being a “sawdust restaurant”. If you happen to notice that there are oyster shells scattered over it too, and nod in recognition, you will probably feel less adrift given that the oyster shells and sawdust reference comes Read more ...
Robert Beale
If there was a certain doom-laden dimension to Clemens Schuldt’s Bridgewater Hall programme with the Hallé ( … Requiem … Mozart in D minor … Strauss describing Death and …), it was easily lightened by the conductor’s own approach and personality.Schuldt has a very clear beat and makes his gestures economically, but every one of them works, and he gets precise and telling results. He’s appeared in this hall before, with the BBC Philharmonic in 2018, and with the same Strauss work, Tod und Verklärung, and we realised then that his command of an orchestra in a complicated score and the richness Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sara Pascoe comes on stage to tell us there has been a small wardrobe malfunction. She's made an effort and is wearing something glitzy, but it restricts her movement in one direction and gives too much in another. Should she go and change into something comfortable but a bit grungy?This confidence is typical of Pascoe's approach – it makes her sound like one of us and we're just having a chat – with the comic doing all the talking obviously. Much of the first half of Success Story is taken up with Pascoe, as she says, "Just me talking about myself" – about achieving a modest amount of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The chorus to Working Men’s Club’s song “Money is Mine” usually runs, “Endless depression, it’s time/Suicide is yours when the money is mine.” Presented as the penultimate song of their set, frontman Syd Minksy-Sargeant distils this. Grim-faced, his hand twisting about under his tee-shirt as if suffering from an untenable itch, he spits “endless depression” and “suicide” into the mic on a jarring loop, backed up every inch by harsh, dark, techno-adjacent battering. It’s a moment that sums the night up.Appearing a couple of years ago from rural Yorkshire, Working Men’s Club are a contradiction Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Five years have elapsed since New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey revealed that dozens of women had accused the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual abuse and harassment over three decades. Based on Kantor and Twohey’s book about their investigation, which sparked the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, She Said is an urgent if belated film.In February 2020, former Miramar chief Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years imprisonment, a term that might increase depending on the outcome of the trial currently proceeding in Los Angeles. She Said, which stars Zoe Kazan as Kantor and Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s been five years since I saw the Old Vic’s first Christmas Carol, adapted by Jack Thorne and directed by Matthew Warchus, with Rhys Ifans in the lead. It’s since become an annual affair, with a different actor in the lead each year, even beaming – without an audience – from this stage during the pandemic. I’m chuffed, and not a bit surprised to see that it’s lost none of its power and delight. In fact, the serious intent of the piece feels more relevant and necessary than ever. In 1843, Dickens wrote his story as a challenge to readers to exercise genuine charity to those Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese won delirious acclaim for their previous Netflix series Dark, a labyrinthine and fantastical account of children vanishing from a small German town. Anyone familiar with its baffling events and leaps across different timelines will probably feel at home with 1899, the duo’s similarly mind-bending follow-up.The story this time pivots around the disappearance of an ocean liner, the Prometheus, which has been missing at sea for four months. When a strange, constantly-repeating telegraph message is received, apparently coming from the vanished vessel, it prompts Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Utama won the World Dramatic Prize at Sundance this year and is tipped for an Oscar nomination, too. The film is set in a remote region in Bolivia’s arid highlands. Its gentle pace and non-professional actors give it a documentary feel but there is real narrative skill deployed. Director Alejandro Loyza Grisi started off his career as a stills photographer before moving into film and it shows in the stunningly beautiful images he’s captured with cinematographer Babara Álvarez. Virginio (José Calcina) and Sisa (Luisa Quispe) are an elderly Quechua couple who have always Read more ...