violence
Gary Naylor
Straddling the USA Presidential elections, Simple8’s run of Land of the Free could not be better timed, teaching us an old lesson that wants continual learning – the more things change, the more they stay the same.We open on the Booth family kids rehearsing Julius Caesar (a motif that runs through the play) with John Wilkes Booth already displaying narcissistic tendencies in kids’ squabbles. That changes when their father, a successful British-born actor with a murky past, returns from touring to dominate the space, physical and mental. It’s easy to spot the damage done to Wilkes and one’s Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I knew he was risky, but like fuck it, everyone’s risky.” A young woman (Kelley Jakle) poses for pictures on a deserted mountain road in Wyoming in 1977, telling Rodney, a charming, award-winning photographer (Daniel Zovatto), about the boyfriend who walked out on her when she got pregnant. She cries, grateful for his attention, and he listens sympathetically. Suddenly, his expression changes and he attacks her, strangling her, then revives her, then attacks again.Anna Kendrick directs for the first time and also stars in this gripping drama, written by Ian McDonald and based on the true- Read more ...
James Saynor
“Psychopaths sell like hotcakes,” William Holden observed in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, and those individuals have been doing good business for Hollywood before and since.We root for them and we don’t root for them at the same time, which is perhaps why not everyone in Hollywood has agreed with the hotcake thing. Queasy marketeers have often underestimated the likely box office of mad-killer pics – from Psycho (1960) through The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and then on to Todd Phillips’s Joker, which was also seen as a bit of a gamble by its studio in 2019.The Warner Bros sequel to that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
News reaches us that Gary Oldman has mysteriously been vetoed from playing George Smiley in a new film version of Smiley’s People, despite his Oscar-nominated performance as John le Carre’s wiley spymaster in 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Oldman’s people have described this decision as “the damnedest thing”.But never mind that now, because Oldman is back to play Jackson Lamb in the latest instalment of Slow Horses. Indeed, perhaps it’s this performance which has soured the le Carre estate’s view of him, since Lamb is a bit like Smiley’s portrait in the attic, growing increasingly Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If I were a rich man, I'd be inclined to put together a touring production of Fiddler on the Roof and send it around the world, a week here, a week there, to educate and entertain. But, like Tevye, I also have to sell a little milk to put food on the table, so I’ll just revel in the delights of this marvellous show in the theatrical village nestling within Regent’s Park.The book (by Joseph Stein based on the short stories of Sholem Aleichem) pulls off one of great art’s essential tricks - it finds the universal in the specific. That’s why it ran for 3000+ performances on Broadway Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You have to tiptoe around the edge of the set just to take your seat in the Park’s studio space for Lidless Theatre’s Miss Julie. There’s a plain wooden table, a few utensils on it, wooden chairs and a small cabinet – not much, but, we’re smack inside this 19th century country house kitchen, uncomfortably close to discomfiting passions. It may be the longest day outside, but we're in a dark, claustrophobic space in more senses than one.The cook, Christine, hair tied back ferociously, is cooking up poison to effect an abortion for the house dog, but there are sounds of revelry in the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We open on one of those grim, grim training rooms that all offices have – the apologetic sofa, the single electric kettle, the instant coffee. The lighting is too harsh, the chairs too hard, the atmosphere already post-lunch on Wednesday and it’s only 10am on Monday. We’ve all been there – designer, Rosie Elnile certainly has. Where we haven’t been is a war zone which is where our keen, but wary trio, marshalled by a slightly on-edge facilitator are heading. It’s a Médecins Sans Frontières type NGO doing good work within a White Saviour framework, somewhere in the Arabic- Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
History is very present in Philippa Gregory’s new play about Richard III. Literally - History is a character, played by Tom Kanji. He strides around in a pale trenchcoat, at first rather too glib and pleased with himself, but quickly sucked into the action as Richard’s life plays out in front of him. If only Katie Posner’s production, which started at Shakespeare North Playhouse and is now at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmund’s, could draw us in so powerfully.The blurb describes “an explosion of tarmac” as Richard III bursts into the modern day in a Leicester car park, but Kyle Rowe’s entrance Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a too brightly tiled Gentlemen’s public convenience (Nitin Parmar’s beautifully realised set is as much a character as any of the men we meet), a lad is shaving his head. He’s halfway to the skinhead look of the early Seventies, but he hasn’t quite nailed it – he's too young to know the detail.Another walks in, older, confident to the point of arrogance, looking not just for another man, but for this particular man-child. Handing over a pair of oxblood DMs with the garish red laces, he doesn’t just complete the boy’s outfit, he inducts him into the two worlds that he will Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You do not need to be Einstein to feel it. If the only dimension missing is time, 75% of a place’s identity can invade your very being, hollow you out, replace your soul with a void. It happened to me at Auschwitz and it’s happening to Samuel at Cape Coast Castle, Ghana.Not at first. We meet him as our host, full of bonhomie, not just reading his script, but revelling in communicating his love of history to the tourists who come to the last staging post for slaves before the dreadful Middle Passage to the Americas. Disillusion sets in. Some visitors are ticking off a bucket list, others Read more ...
Sarah Kent
From its opening shot – of a flock of sheep backlit by the sun’s rays – The Settlers is visually stunning. But the beauty ends there; as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that everything else about this episode in Chile’s history is cruel and ugly.The year is 1901, the location a sheep farm in Tierra del Fuego, a wind-swept island at the southern tip of South America. Don José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), who owns large swathes of land in Argentina and Chile, is erecting a fence to prevent the indigenous people from killing his livestock.A scream rends the air; the fencing cable has Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Detective Chief Inspector Othello leads a quasi-paramilitary team of Metropolitan Police officers investigating gang activity in Docklands. With a chequered past now behind him, he has reformed and has the respect of both the team he leads and his superior officers. But his secret marriage to Commander Brabantio’s daughter, Desdemona, unleashes a stream of racist invective from her father, triggering memories of abuse that are never far from the surface. Meanwhile his Detective Sergeant, Iago, lurks in the shadows, plotting revenge for his slight in being overlooked for promotion. Ola Ince’s Read more ...