Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Days before the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, orphaned baby Li-Da was flown out of the country, and was eventually adopted by Prue Leith and her husband Rayne. Leith’s culinary star was rising rapidly, and her husband was a successful writer and businessman. Their Cotswolds home became a fairytale setting in which their adopted daughter could make a fresh start.In this fascinating film (for Channel 4) about her trip back to Cambodia with her daughter, Leith admitted that she never felt much curiosity about Li-Da’s family and her Cambodian background, and never Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Twelfth Night is rarely long-absent from the British stage and nor is it in our current climate of streaming aplenty. This 2017 production for the RSC from the director Christopher Luscombe will soon be followed online by the National Theatre’s gender-flipped version, with Tamsin Greig as Malvolia, which actually preceded this Stratford production at the time.What kind of Twelfth Night is this? Conceptually busy and ingenious, to be sure, and arguably too much so: one feels on occasion that the inventive Luscombe has thrown every possible idea into the mix while stinting at times on the Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Watching Run, HBO’s newest seven-part series, feels like off-the-rails escapism: it’s a fast-paced thriller about dropping everything, chasing intimacy and courting danger. It’s a vicarious adventure centred on a woman who has spent too long stuck at home. Run has hit our screens at the best possible time.The series starts in a parking lot. Ruby Richardson (Merritt Wever) — the thriller’s presumed heroine — is a yoga-going, 4WD-driving suburban mum. Might not sound thrilling, but the atmosphere is there: from the opening shot the air is thick with tension. Ruby ends a call with her husband Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Reviewing theatre now means reviewing film. Knowing that Emma Rice’s Old Vic 2018 production of Wise Children, her typically rambunctious version of Angela Carter’s last novel, published in 1991, has been recorded by The Space immediately raises expectations of high quality. After all, this company specializes in digitally bringing good art to wider audiences. As you’d expect for a show that is now streaming on BBC iplayer, and will be broadcast on BBC Four in due course, the filming is well directed and edited. But what about the play?The plot tells the story of Brixton-born twins Dora and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Who knew in the early days of his career, when Simon Amstell was taking the mick out of celebrities on Popworld and then Never Mind the Buzzcocks, that he would turn into one of the cleverest comics of his generation, with a special talent for making existential angst funny?And now the latest of his amusing navel-gazing stand-up shows is Set Free (recorded late last year). In it he turns his soul-searching – for which read his search for his father's approval – into a form of group therapy with a barrel of laughs thrown in.The comic sets out by saying: “The problem with humanity at the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This week’s gem from the Hampstead’s vaults is Howard Brenton’s political drama from 2013, telling the extraordinary, stranger-than-fiction story of Cyril Radcliffe and his 1947 mission: to arrange the Partition of India in just five weeks. A tale of battling ideologies, gross colonial arrogance and disregard, and the unlikely significance of an extramarital affair, this history lesson makes for surprisingly gripping theatre – and, to Brenton’s great credit, he manages a lucid account of this complex, seismic undertaking in less than two hours.Lawyer-turned-bureaucrat Cyril Radcliffe (Tom Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Instant spoiler alert: she’s not dead. But do we care? Prepare for the plumbing of new psychological depths from showrunner Suzanne Heathcote, previously story editor, appropriately enough, on Fear the Walking Dead, but that may not be enough to keep series 3 from veering into slightly dull and serviceable territory, judging by the first three episodes. Murderous clowns at a kids’ party, for example, have surely been done to death.At the end of series 2, Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) was, if you remember, shot and apparently killed by Villanelle (Jodie Comer) in a Roman ruin after Eve rejected her Read more ...
Matt Wolf
18 months or so after it opened in Chichester, Flowers for Mrs Harris launches a sequence of streamed productions from the West Sussex venue just in time to allow a new British musical to join the ever-swelling ranks of theatrical offerings online. This stage adaptation of the 1958 novel by Paul Gallico, directed by Daniel Evans, who brought the title along from his previous tenure running the Crucible, Sheffield, may be a show that really benefits from what advantages there are to experiencing theatre in this way.For starters, one can really zoom in on (you’ll forgive the choice of verb) Read more ...
David Nice
Praise be to quarantine days for the chance to savour this, the crowning glory of the Wolf Hall trilogy - if not with the supernatural vigilance and attentiveness of Thomas Cromwell himself, then at least with something of the leisurely diligence it deserves. Before the reading came the very public coronation of The Mirror & the Light, Mantel ubiquitous throughout, but always her unique, authentic and incorruptible self. Never, surely, has a greater novel deserved such a fanfaring blaze of publicity.How, then, to incorporate an element of thriller to an end we already know? It's all in Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Olivia Laing’s non-fiction has become well-known for the way it moves by means of allusive shifts, hybridity, and pooling ideas, making a roaming, discursive inspection of one broad primary subject (rivers, alcoholism, loneliness). Her latest book, which brings together essays, columns, interviews, obituaries styled as “Love Letters”, and other occasional writings from the past decade, is more declarative in approach. Following the tendency of any published collection, it seeks to make a statement about Laing as a writer, explaining and defining the shape of her career. In contrast to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“An exercise in bizarre mixtures, combining the bleak acid hangover of half-hearted Velvet Underground impersonators with muted razzmatazz: a long and rather stylish joke.”The April 1980 New Musical Express review of The Monochrome Set’s debut album wasn’t entirely favourable but it captured the difficulty of getting to grips with the band. A combination of raised-eyebrow archness and dolefulness confirmed the band was setting-out its own path. Further confirmation of their slipperiness came in October 1980 when a second album was released.Strange Boutique, the debut, and its follow-up Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
There’s a sort of enduring mystery about short stories. They rarely have the reassuring arithmetic of poetry or – with apologies to Murakami – novelistic sweep of longer fiction. They don’t respond kindly, either, to theories and formulas – no matter how many writers, critics and, yes, reviewers choose to dabble in that imperfect science – as to exactly what makes them work. More often than not, short stories are content to leave you hanging in open air, with more questions than answers.Many of the fourteen stories in How to Pronounce Knife, the debut collection from Souvankham Thammavongsa, Read more ...