adaptation
The Buddha of Suburbia, Barbican Theatre review - farcical fun, but what about the issues?Friday, 01 November 2024
Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia begins like this: “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost”. Almost. Yes, that's good. We are in 1970s south-east London, and this immediately introduces, despite its... Read more... |
How To Survive Your Mother, King's Head Theatre review - mummy issues drive autobiographical dramedyThursday, 31 October 2024
It is unsurprising to learn in the post-show Q&A that each audience receives Jonathan Maitland’s new play based on his 2006 memoir differently. My house laughed a lot (me especially) but some see the tragic overwhelming the comic, and the laughs... Read more... |
Dr Strangelove, Noël Coward Theatre review - an evening of different partsWednesday, 30 October 2024
Even by Stanley Kubrick’s standards, Dr Strangelove went through an extraordinary evolutionary process. After starting it off as a serious film about nuclear war based on the 1958 novel Two Hours to Doom, he decided to turn it into a comedy with the... Read more... |
London Film Festival 2024 - Nickel Boys, crime and punishment and UkraineSaturday, 26 October 2024
RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves... Read more... |
The Forsyte Saga Parts 1 and 2, Park Theatre review - if Chekhov did soap operasSaturday, 26 October 2024
The misadventures and misbehaviours of the English upper-middle class is catnip for TV executives. All those posh types on which us hoi polloi can sit in delicious self-righteous judgement, as we marvel at their cut glass accents, well-tailored... Read more... |
Rivals, Disney+ review - adultery, skulduggery and political incorrectnessMonday, 21 October 2024
Delirium has greeted Disney’s eight-part adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel Rivals (part of her Rutshire Chronicles series).Perhaps it’s nostalgia for the previously-unloved Eighties, or maybe it’s because its non-stop conveyor belt of adultery... Read more... |
Salem’s Lot review - listless King remakeSunday, 13 October 2024
A boy’s dead friend scratching at his first-floor window, Nosferatu-like vampire Barlow rearing up with heart attack shock…The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV take on Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot scared a teen generation out of... Read more... |
The Other Place, National Theatre review - searing family tragedyWednesday, 09 October 2024
Contemporary reworkings of Greek tragedy run a very particular risk, that out of context the heightened actions of the original plays – the woefully poor judgement, the copious bloodletting, the rush to disproportionate vengeance and suicide – can... Read more... |
French Toast, Riverside Studios review - Racine-inspired satire finds its laughs once up-and-runningWednesday, 09 October 2024
It’s always fun jabbing at the permanently open wound that is Anglo-French relations, now with added snap post-Brexit, its fading, but still frothing, humourless defenders clogging up Twitter and radio phone-ins even today. So it’s probably timely... Read more... |
The Hardacres, Channel 5 review - a fishy tale of upward mobilityTuesday, 08 October 2024
Set in Yorkshire in the 1890s, and based on the novels by CL Skelton, The Hardacres is the story of the titular family who, it seems, were pioneers of takeaway fish, although not accompanied by chips. It’s their stall selling fried herring fresh... Read more... |
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Royal Ballet review - big, bold and ultimately brashWednesday, 02 October 2024
In many ways Lewis Carroll’s 1865 compendium of literary nonsense is ideal material for ballet. We all like a story we can hum, even if we’re hazy on the details. And this story, with its topsy-turvy logic and anthropomorphic creatures, is stuffed... Read more... |
Slow Horses, Season 4, Apple TV+ review - Gary Oldman returns as the 'gross and inappropriate' Jackson LambWednesday, 04 September 2024
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... Read more... |
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