family relationships
Markie Robson-Scott
“I never abandoned you,” says Jule (Ophélia Kolb; Call My Agent!) to her 10-year-old daughter Claire (Jasmine Kalisz Saurer), setting a fairly low bar as far as motherhood is concerned.Swiss-American director Jasmin Gordon’s first feature, with a screenplay by Julien Bouissoux, is a compelling, though too mysterious, portrait of a single mother versus society. Set in a wealthy town in the mountainous Lower Valais in Switzerland, Jule, a woman on the margins, gazes out from her window at the murmuring trees that, in a hypnotic, recurring motif, seem to offer a portal for escape.She lives in a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
$8.2B. That’s what can happen when you re-imagine Hamlet.I doubt that writer, James Ijames, had The Lion King’s box office in mind when he set out to create a Deep South, black and contemporary version of Shakespeare’s drama of familial dysfunction, but he’s got a Pulitzer on the mantelpiece at home and now a run at the RSC. I suspect he’d have settled for that.We open on a barbecue to celebrate the marriage of Juicy’s mother, Tedra, to her husband’s brother, Rev, after the murder, in prison, of Juicy’s father, Pap. Juicy’s friend, Tio, is larking about, but sees the ghost of Pap and, soon, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Gathered Leaves is set on the tectonic plates of a middle-class family menu reunion, in which three generations grapple with the shifting values of an indifferent world. Adrian Noble’s sensitively observed production investigates what happens when a tyrannical patriarch starts to succumb to dementia, making disorientating demands on a family that till this point has been more concerned with protecting a son suffering from autism.Ten years ago, The Gathered Leaves played at this same venue with a cast that included Jane Asher and her real life daughter Katie Scarfe and Alexander Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Two chimney sweeps sit by a window. The boss (Thorbjørn Harr) recounts a dream meeting with David Bowie, who disconcertingly looks at him like he’s a woman. Funny thing, his friend (Jar Gunnar Røise) replies. Yesterday, a male client asked him to have sex, and he did. It felt good. He hasn’t told anyone else, apart from his wife.Sex opened Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy in Norway, and closes it here, forming an appropriate climax to his distinctive MO. The nameless sweeps’ 15-minute break-room conversation at its start, panning from widescreen one-shot to two-shot with sometimes Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Weapons’ enigmatic title, as with Zach Cregger’s previous film Barbarian, reveals little of what follows. The smalltown Pied Piper premise is sufficiently alluring: at 2.17 am, all bar one of a primary school class leave their beds and sprint through night streets, arms flung back like fighter jets, before vanishing utterly.This mystery at first seems secondary to its effect on six protagonists, whose points of view provide pieces of the puzzle. Alongside artfully creepy imagery and gorehound excess, Cregger relies on structure and characters to reel you in, till the central enigma is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Rising temperatures, prickling skin, longing’s all-consuming ache: first love’s swooning symptoms overtake 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye) in the Golden Bear-winning Dreams, the first UK release from Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy. Love and Sex complete the thematically interwoven sequence, which unpick assumptions about sexual identity with gentle irony.Johanne’s lengthy voiceover relates her romantic awakening first by a French novel then her new French teacher, the felicitously named Johanna (Selome Emnetu). Johanne emotionally shoots up fast as she feels Read more ...
David Kettle
I’m Ready to Talk Now, Traverse Theatre ★★★★There are, inevitably, certain challenges when reviewing a one-to-one immersive show that’s already pretty much sold out its entire Edinburgh Fringe run (though there are rumours of some last-minute additional tickets for I’m Ready to Talk Now being released). For a start, influencing potential audience members to buy or not buy a ticket goes almost entirely out the window. In addition, giving too much away might spoil the impact of Oliver Ayres’s brief, fragile but hugely powerful creation for those who have already booked.All that said, it’s the Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Many readers and writers think of epistolary novels as old-fashioned, just as letter writing itself can seem a bit quaint nowadays. The genre became popular during the 18th and 19th centuries following the success of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1749) and of later Gothic novels like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).Unsurprisingly, however, it began to fizzle out after the invention of the telephone. In 1984, the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg published her epistolary novel The City and the House (La città e la casa), and the action, such as it is Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As the nation basks in the reflected glory of The Lionesses' Euro25 victory, it could hardly be more timely for the Southwark Playhouse to launch a new musical that tells the tale of The Maiden. That was the boat, built and sailed by Tracy Edwards and her crew of resourceful, resilient women, in the Whitbread Round The World Yacht Race 1989, the first such crew to finish the gruelling challenge.It’s hard to credit now, but women, you know, that demographic that do childbirth, were once deemed too fragile for many sports. The first woman allowed to ride the Grand National, Charlotte Brew, only Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s a deal to be made when taking your seat for The Winter’s Tale. It’s one the title alone would have signalled to the groundlings as much as those invited to rattle their jewellery upstairs back in the 17th century – it’s a fairytale, a fantasy, a funny-peculiar play. Perhaps the only play outside pantomime in which a bear gets involved. The plot breaks into two halves and, whether you know that the sun will literally and metaphorically shine after the interval or not, the dark opening scenes can drag. Essentially we’re witness to what would, these days, be called a psychotic Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Michael Shannon's long legs reach to the stars – or perhaps one should say the moon – in the Almeida's hypnotic revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten, the late Eugene O'Neill play that hasn't been seen in London since Kevin Spacey and Eve Best led an Old Vic revival of it in 2006. And Shannon, seen in London early in his career Off West End in Tracy Letts's Bug, makes an occasion of a play that I, for one, am always happy to welcome back to the repertoire.Sure, there will always be those for whom O'Neill goes on too much, and for too long, and who resist the heightened tendency to Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Now 45 years in the past, its dazzling star gone a decade or so, The Long Good Friday is a monument of British cinema. Its extraordinary locations, caught just before London’s Docklands were transformed forever, speaks to a past world. But the wheeler-dealer, Harold Shand, played by Bob Hoskins at the peak of his powers, left many ancestors, from his near contemporary, Arthur Daley, to a few who have ascended to the highest Offices of State.One such, conjured into life by Robin Hawdon in the early 90s, is Arthur Bullhead (of course, Arthur Bullhead) owner of The Bunty, moored on the Thames Read more ...