Brexit
Matt Wolf
Broadway tends to be the Darwinian environment where a show's opening night can also mark its closing. But such has been the Covid-prompted fate of the National Theatre's fiery return to the fray that Death of England: Delroy managed 11 performances before shuddering to a lockdown-induced halt following its Nov 4th opening night. The good news is that Clint Dyer and Roy Williams' sequel to last winter's National entry, Death of England, was filmed at that decisive performance for tranmission in due course. The even better news is that the play, and co-author Dyer's direction of it, Read more ...
Sarah Collins
Nick Hornby’s protagonists are worlds apart. Joseph is a Black 22-year-old with a “portfolio career", which includes shift work at a butcher’s and a leisure centre and the distant dream of becoming a DJ. Lucy, a regular customer at the butcher’s where Joseph works, is a white, forty-two-year-old mother, recently divorced from an addict ex-husband and Head of English at a local “troubled inner city school.” When she asks Joseph to be a babysitter for her two children, the pair embark on an unexpected romantic relationship. Just Like You charts the highs and lows of that journey, as they Read more ...
Matt Wolf
After months spent sifting amongst the virtual, I'm pleased to report that live performance looks to be on the (socially distanced) rebound. The week ahead sees the start of a six-week run at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park of the alfresco venue's seismically exciting revival of Jesus Christ Superstar, this time performed in concert with multiple casts due to the vocal demands of the score. And the ever-wistful and beautiful A Little Night Music finds the onetime Olivier Award winners from Carousel (a lifetime ago, and yet the memory is entirely immediate) pairing up once again: Janie Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Uncertain Kingdom is a VOD anthology of 20 short films, 10 directed by women, comprising a tapestry of life in – and, in one case, outside – Brexit-era Britain. Though hope, humour, and whimsy were threaded into the project, its dominant fabric is grey. The majority of the filmmakers recognised that a nation afflicted with poverty, unemployment, racism, xenophobia, and other injustices, mostly perpetuated by the class war, couldn’t be portrayed in brilliant hues, either literally or metaphorically.The films are being shown online in two volumes of 10. Eight of them are works of fiction. Read more ...
David Nice
Are we really past all this? From Ivo van Hove's 2019 polyphony of opinions and reflections down the centuries, so much has gone into the oven on a low heat while more Brits discover that "better together" in the European Union might be a better catchphrase than "take back control". The flames will flare up again as the government finds it has no better way of mastering the Brexit problem than it has the C-19 crisis which has so ruthlessly exposed its unpreparedness. Still, it seems like another world in which questions of European identity were the main issue. But to be honest van Hove's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's not been three years since Albion premiered at the Almeida Theatre, since which time Brexit has happened and, not without coincidence, Mike Bartlett's time-specific play is beginning to look like one for the ages. Set amongst a community in physical and psychic limbo, Bartlett takes the pulse of a people, and a nation, at odds with themselves. But whereas a lesser writer might opt for a harangue, Bartlett's tone (and the play's four-act structure, too) owes not a little to Chekhov, albeit here inflected with occasional dollops of Arcadia as befits a play set in a vast expanse Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The first time I heard Madonna, I was 8 years old at a school disco. Horrified parents, who came to pick us up as we jumped up and down yelling along to “Like A Virgin” in a fluorescent flurry of topknots, puffer skirts and lace gloves, subsequently lodged a formal complaint (it was a Catholic junior school) and thus, the spirit of Madonna, was borne into my story. Since those days of stonewash and crimping only one thing has remained consistent in my life – Madge’s persistent ability to re-invent herself. Now, 30 years later, I am bearing witness to a conglomeration of her identities, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Matt Forde sets out his stall in Brexit: Pursued by a Bear from the first line: “We meet in diabolical circumstances.” These aren't good times, he says, with two major leaders in the Western world whose relationship with the truth is merely that of passing acquaintance. Add in the UK's continuing divisions over Brexit, and diabolical seems apt.We know where Forde is coming from. He's a proud Remainer and Blairite, a former adviser to the Labour Party and a vehement critic of Jeremy Corbyn – who gets it in the neck just as much as Boris Johnson does. Forde sees little difference between Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jonathan Pie is a YouTube star, a spoof television news reporter (created by actor and comic Tom Walker), who is prone to gaffes. It was one of those on-screen gaffes that led to Pie being sacked as the BBC's Westminster correspondent, footage of which we see here on the onstage big screen alongside the highlights and lowlights of Pie's career – mostly the latter. The Fake News Tour is Pie salvaging what he can from his fame as he starts a lecture tour to explain how we got into this Brexit mess.The show is indeed mostly about Brexit, but Pie also takes aim at TV “celebrities”, social media Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
That John le Carré! It turns out the agent isn’t so much running in the field as playing badminton. The master of the spy novel, of the foibles fantasies and sadnesses of our imperfect world – with the occasional excursion to excoriate Big Pharma and the like – has produced a magnificent slow burner. The short novel is predicated on Britain’s current mess, in which the country is betrayed by its own nostalgia and incipient xenophobia.Now in his 88th year this is Le Carré’s 25th novel. His last, A Legacy of Spies, was elegiac: a trip down memory lane to sort out an incident from the distant Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
David Cameron has been a recluse since the fateful days of June 2016 when the referendum on EU membership didn’t go quite the way he’d hoped. He’s probably been living through a private purgatory. “I think I will think about this forever,” he murmured to the camera in this first instalment of BBC One’s two-part doc.Finally, though, his inevitable (though surely not “long-awaited”) autobiography is hitting the shops. Dave, who now looks like a slightly melancholy hedge fund manager or the kind of chap who skippers a 40-foot gin palace down the Solent on the weekend, has dragged himself out of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Al Murray's Pub Landlord character has been around since the mid-1990s. As such, it's a wonder that Murray has managed to reinvent the embittered, xenophobic loudmouth so many times, but he has – and the EU referendum in 2016 should have, you may have thought, given the character new life or killed him off altogether.What has happened, though, as Murray's latest show Landlord of Hope and Glory proves, is that the Pub Landlord has entered a state of stasis. Three years on from that seismic vote and after the UK was supposed to have left the EU, Murray has a dilemma. He could go with Read more ...