Reviews
aleks.sierz
Since 2000, Esther Baker's Synergy Theatre Project has worked with prisoners, ex-offenders and young people at risk of offending to produce powerful dramas about some of the most fraught social situations you can imagine. The latest show, written by playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak and researched in collaboration with Prisoners Abroad, is a verbatim piece about the subject of transatlantic deportation. In the current climate of Brexit trade talks, can this show – an ideal fit for this venue – cast any light on the much-vaunted special relationship between the UK and the USA?In the American Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan have been taking their bickering TV trips for a decade, beginning in the north of England in 2010 before working their way around Italy, Spain and now Greece (on Sky 1). They say this will be the last time, but believe that at your peril.Coogan has estimated that the characters they play in The Trip are about 30 per cent real and 70 per cent fictionalised, and part of the show’s allure is trying to spot the join between the two. No doubt this was the plan when director Michael Winterbottom (who has helmed all four series) originally sold it to them, perhaps not Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of Liar, one of many thrillers from the fertile keyboards of Jack and Harry Williams, was on ITV back in 2017, so you may have forgotten the somewhat labyrinthine details. In a nutshell, smarmy surgeon and serial rapist Andrew Earlham (Ioan Gruffudd) had been unmasked by the dogged (and sometimes illegal) methods of one of his 19 victims, schoolteacher Laura Nielson (Joanne Froggatt). However, before the police could arrest him, his dead body was found in the marshes on the Kent coast, with its throat cut. End of series one.An early revelation in this new season was that DI Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It’s not so much that Pretty Woman: The Musical isn’t much good, which it isn’t. More to the point is that this West End replica of the recent Broadway musical of the 1990 film feels utterly superfluous: a gloss on a popular romcom that doesn’t improve upon or deepen our appreciation of the original in any way. Indeed, at the press preview attended, one could feel the audience all but marking time until the iconic Roy Orbison song of the title gets trotted out in order to bring an expectant crowd to their feet. Nothing else in the preceding two and a half hours comes close to Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Bill Brandt’s photographs and Henry Moore’s studies of people sheltering underground during the Blitz (September 1940 to May 1941) offer glimpses of a world that is, thankfully, lost to us. A year and a half after the end of the bombing campaign, the work of the two artists was published side-by-side in the December 1942 edition of the pioneering illustrated magazine, Lilliput. As a caption beneath a sleeping woman reads, “It is interesting to note how often Brandt and Moore, working quite independently of each other, chose very similar subjects for their work.” The magazine’s full-page Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Les Enfants Terribles is the theatre company behind several interesting immersive projects, including Alice's Adventures Underground and Inside Pussy Riot. Now it has joined forces with Historic Royal Palaces to tell the story of two women integral to the Georgian crown – George II's wife, Queen Caroline, and his mistress Henrietta Howard.The scene is set for the King's birthday party in 1734, and a lowly servant (Christina Ngoyi) leads the audience – guests of the King for the evening – into Kensington Palace, where we will be immersed in the court's business, its behind-the-scenes intrigues Read more ...
David Nice
Emblazoned on a drop-curtain in front of a mirror-image of the auditorium, the three great tenets of the French revolution seem to be mocking us right at the start, above all the second of them: equality, really, given the make-up of the Royal Opera stalls? But the last, more bitter laugh is on both the audience and the director, Tobias Kratzer, who cheats Beethoven's admittedly lopsided liberation opera of its significant events and, ultimately, some fine singers, above all the eagerly-awaited Lise Davidsen and Jonas Kaufmann, along with their conductor, Antonio Pappano, of what has to be Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Nothing you’re about to see is true,” this adaptation of Peter Carey’s novel about Australia’s iron-clad Victorian outlaw Ned Kelly declares. Justin Kurzel’s wild investigation of the Kelly myth, Australian manhood and nationhood carves out its own truths anyway.Kelly grows up in an impoverished, outback Irish family led by necessarily feral mother Ellen (The Babadook’s Essie Davis, pictured below left). This maternal Lady Macbeth is glamorous, cunning, hopelessly defiant and fearsomely vicious. First recalled by Ned pragmatically giving a blowjob to the local policeman, she later violently Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Cosi fan tutte is, as the opera’s subtitle clearly tells us, “A School for Lovers”. But too often these days it can feel like a school for the audience. Joyless productions lecture us sternly on the battle of the sexes – on chauvinism, feminism, cynicism and sex – until we’re battered into fashionable discomfort. A happy ending? For Mozart’s most complicated comedy? Don’t be naïve.Director Laura Attridge has bucked the trend in her new staging for English Touring Opera, and it’s bliss. Against the odds we find ourselves in a colourful screwball-comedy – a sunny, funny musical game of kiss- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Scouting and Girlguiding may seem awfully old-fashioned to some, yet many youngsters are still keen to join the Scout movement. Be Prepared (the Scout motto) was inspired by Lucy Porter's two children joining the Beavers, its youngest iteration.Beavers lends itself to any number of filthy jokes – and, yes, Porter goes there, with a couple of good'uns – but her offspring take it very seriously, as she once did, when she was a Brownie. She remembers her Brown Owl fondly, the times they spent camping and trying to gain badges. Everyone got a Hostess badge – “basically making an old person a cup Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
To Christos Tsiolkas fans expecting something in the vein of his riveting bestsellers The Slap and Barracuda, the sixth novel by this Australian writer may come as a shock. We're not in Melbourne any more. Damascus is a serious historical enterprise, a biblical and rather heavy-handed one, exploring the story of Saul of Tarsus, later St Paul.There’s a lot of raw, visceral squalor in this brutal Roman world 35 years after Christ’s death, and the testament according to Tsiolkas is full of stonings, castrations and other ghastly punishments. Damascus addresses questions of class, shame and doubt Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Great writing about – or set in – London has one thing in common: voice. It’s tuned into the city’s multiple frequencies, its sometimes marvellous, sometimes maddening mix of different registers and rhythms. It adopts and adapts the capital’s various insider and outsider codes, and recognises and reproduces their translation across neighbourhood and postcode, political and class lines in a process of osmosis which proves London to be more of a melting pot than New York ever was.In this sense, academic and three-time novelist Michael Nath’s latest book, The Treatment, is a great piece of Read more ...