Reviews
Thomas H. Green
My Left Right Foot tiptoes right to the precipice of massive offense. For some, it tumbles right in. During the interval audience members can be heard tutting at the amount of times “the c-word” is casually thrown around. But it’s not just the swearing. The play makes mayhem over our awkwardness around disability while also ruthlessly sending up institutionalised inclusivity. Much of the humour derives from crossing lines not usually crossed.The action takes place in a municipal hall, with the set detailed and realistic, blandly grubby, right down to the ancient radiator and cork board of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
When critics praise a first-rank string quartet, convention demands they claim that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts. True enough, maybe, but with the Takács Quartet, each separate element really does blaze with a soloistic, virtuosic flame. From the first bars of last night’s opener at the Wigmore Hall, as Haydn plays pass-the-parcel with an apparently straightforward tune at the start of his G major quartet Op.76 no. 1, the sheer class and distinctive voice of each instrumental contribution grabbed the ear.Remarkably, this group – first mustered in Budapest in 1975 but Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Where would Tennessee Williams's onetime flop be without the British theatre to rehabilitate it on an ongoing basis? Arriving at the Menier Chocolate Factory in a co-production with Theatre Clwyd, where Tamara Harvey's production has already been seen, this marks the third London outing for this lesser-known title in as many decades: Orpheus, too, has played elsewhere around the country (Manchester in 2012 for one) even while languishing largely unperformed Stateside. What, then, does Harvey add to our understanding of a work that Peter Hall rescued from obscurity in 1988 in the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It is a cliché that never grows old. From Fawlty Towers via The Office all the way through to (so we are told) Fleabag, a great half-hour comedy that bows out after two series cements its place in the pantheon by ensuring posterity wants more. Twelve episodes seems to be the platonic ideal of the perfectly proportioned sitcom. When Stefan Golaszewski’s Mum (BBC Two) ended last time round there was thus a case for stopping there. It finished on a moment of such exquisitely subtle optimism. Parting from Cathy (Lesley Manville) and her daft coterie would have been a sweet sorrow that made Read more ...
Heather Neill and David Nice
Henry IV Part One (***)Women as Hal, Hotspur and Falstaff? It's been done before, and superlatively well, in Phyllida Lloyd's Shakespeare-in-prison trilogy (Henry IV Part One, with several crucial scenes from Part Two, between Julius Caesar and The Tempest). Loyalties need some shifting from lock-in with an all-female-cast to Wooden O with men in the picture too. The different values of Shakespeare's Globe - which is all about communication, too, but of an even more direct sort - as well as the knowledge that the best woman standing, the supremely charismatic Sarah Amankwah, will make it as Read more ...
Tom Baily
The Virtues (Channel 4) sees director Shane Meadows (Dead Man’s Shoes, This Is England) reunite with actor Stephen Graham in what is certainly their most raw and emotionally bruising project to date. Meadows returns to familiar territory, with themes of disaffection and familial separation mapped over a small cast of characters who are grappling with emotional turmoil. Graham, in a career standout performance, has never seemed so bare – or so dramatically powerful – as he is here. It is a supremely controlled display of a man in chaos, grasping for redemption.He plays Joseph, a middle-aged Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Achingly nostalgic for rave culture, Beats will likely appeal to anyone whose formative experience of ardent friendships and communal joy peaked in a transcendent musical setting with or without the help of Ecstasy.Director Brian Welsh’s Scottish film, larky though it is in places, packs a greater social punch than such previous rave movies as Human Traffic (1999), Groove (2000), and Eden (2014). It was expanded by Welsh and Kieron Hurley from the latter’s 2012 play. Johnno (Cristian Ortega) and his best mate Spanner (Lorn MacDonald), techno-obsessed 15-year-olds living in a dying industrial Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As the double-edged Chinese proverb has it, “may you live in interesting times.” Screenwriter Russell T Davies evidently thanks that’s exactly where we’re at, and his new six-part drama Years and Years (BBC One) is a bold, sprawling but – as far as episode one is concerned at least – amorphous attempt to assess the state of play.From Queer as Folk to Doctor Who and Cucumber, Davies’s favourite themes have included LGBT issues, science fiction, left-ish politics and a fondness for soaps. All of them reappear here (although sadly, the caustic humour and searing dramatic focus he brought to A Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Here they come again – the band most adept at capturing the mood of an era in catchy, critical three-minute songs. Just at the very point we need them most, the original ska-punk popsters surface and their message is as deeply relevant as it was four decades ago. But is this a 40th anniversary or a number one album tour? Or both?In these unprecedented times, receiving political commentary from near-pensioners seems strangely apt (remaining original members frontman Terry Hall, guitarist Lynval Golding and bass player Horace Panter are 60, 67 and 65, respectively). It’s a turn of events Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
We are living in a time when gang culture rips and roars its way down London streets, and through newspaper headlines, at increasingly alarming levels. Recent news reports revealed how a surge in knife and gun crime is leading to more young black men being murdered in the capital than anywhere else in the country, with problems increasingly amplified by social media and drugs money.The return to the stage, then, of Roy Williams’ hugely successful South London gang drama The Firm feels timely – though as the play itself demonstrates, the Big Smoke’s gang culture, with all its shifts and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the past, Bear Grylls has taken President Obama up an Alaskan glacier and trekked through the Swiss Alps with Roger Federer. This jaunt with David Walliams (ITV) was on a more modest scale, merely requiring the Britain’s Got Talent judge to be dragged across rivers and down rock faces in wildest Devon.Grylls believes that everybody has a little bit of Bear in them, if they can just screw up their courage and face their worst fears. By the end of this, Bear and Walliams also had a little bit of rat in them, after Bear had barbecued a dead one for lunch. Walliams, togged up in comically Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What could have been merely a cheap and cheesy piss-take registers as considerably more robust in The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson, journo-turned-playwright Jonathan Maitland's latest venture for his de facto home at north London's Park Theatre. While one foot is surely planted in Spitting Image, a top-rank alumnus from which can be found amongst the cast in Steve Nallon, Maitland's vision of Brexit-era Britain now and to come owes at least as much to something like King Charles III (minus the verse). The result is as funny as one might expect and chilling, too, in its portrait of a Read more ...