A small film that packs a significant wallop, The Humans snuck into view at the very end of 2021 to cast a despairing shadow that extends well beyond the Thanksgiving day during which it takes place. Adapted from the much-traveled Tony-winning play of the same name, writer-director Stephen Karam's screen iteration of his own one-act seems even bleaker in this iteration than it did in my twofold experience of it on stage (including at the Hampstead, with its original New York cast, in autumn 2018). .Those who think American drama too often offers its characters the easy way out won't find that Read more ...

Charles Dickens and Martyn Jacques is a marriage made in heaven (well, hell I suppose): the Victorian novelist touring the rookeries of Clerkenwell the better to fire his imagination and, 150 years or so later, the post-punk maestro mining London's netherworlds for his tales of misfits and misdeeds.So it's no surprise to see The Tiger Lillies bring their unique sensibility to A Christmas Carol, Jacques' song cycle taking us into the head of the miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, paring the tale back to its psychological trauma and its bitter social critique. The Lillies' leader is front and centre, of Read more ...

It’s been seventeen years since Nicholas Hytner first directed Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials at the National Theatre, ambitiously whirling audiences into Pullman’s universe of daemons, damnable clerics and parallel worlds. Now he has collaborated with playwright Bryony Lavery to bring this fluent, fluid adaptation of the prequel to His Dark Materials – The Book of Dust – to the stage, delving into Pullman’s myth-infused landscape to create a compelling narrative for our times.Samuel Creasey plays Malcolm Polstead, the bookish wide-eyed 12-year-old who becomes embroiled in forces beyond Read more ...

I sympathised with the prosecuting barrister when she put it to the court that the accused, a man called Hero (Samuel Adewunmi), was “using his closing speech to construct a work of fiction”.This was a crafty meta-joke. You Don’t Know Me itself is a dramatic fiction adapted from the novel by Imran Mahmood, and Hero’s decision to defend himself at his own murder trial found him standing up in court and giving an actorly rendition of his own version of the plot.I liked it better than the prosecution’s version – is the law really just a story-telling contest? – even though Hero seemed to be Read more ...

When the Canadian Yann Martel went to India as a young adult backpacker he fell in love – not with one person but with the rich imaginative landscape opened up by its religions and its animals. A struggling writer at the time, he channelled this new love into a dazzling idiosyncratic narrative about a shipwrecked Indian boy who survives 227 days at sea with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker.Millions of people have now been swept up in his Booker-winning magical realist odyssey. Director Ang Lee has captured it – not entirely successfully according to Read more ...

"Off-grid" wasn't a thing in the mid-'70s. Sure, people planted a few potatoes in the garden and pottered about a bit in an allotment, but nobody went the whole hog. The rat race was certainly a thing though, a fertile seam for comedies like The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. John Esmonde and Bob Larbey had the brainwave of combining the two in the BBC sitcom The Good Life - that and casting Felicity Kendal of course.The veteran writer-director Jeremy Sams takes us back to Tom and Barbara’s momentous decision to live off the land - in Surbiton - and their love-hate relationship with Read more ...

Katie Mitchell’s desire to bust the boundaries of theatre has taken a brilliant turn. Over her long and distinguished career as a director she has been tirelessly inventive, injecting stylised movement into Greek tragedy, projecting film onto giant screens of the actors onstage, slicing a set into three time zones. To tackle a formally bold novel, Rebecca Watson’s recent little scratch, Mitchell and her adaptor, Miriam Battye, have fashioned something equally inventive that works perfectly in the small Downstairs space at the Hampstead.Watson’s novel offers a day in the head of a young Read more ...

This show has been a long time coming. Neil Gaiman had the first inklings of The Ocean at the End of the Lane when he was seven years old and living near a farm recorded in the Domesday Book. Several decades later, he wrote a short story for his wife, Amanda Palmer, “to tell her where I lived and who I was as a boy”, as he puts it in his programme notes.That short story was developed into an award-winning novel; Joel Horwood’s adaptation opened at the Dorfman Theatre in late 2019, and was meant to transfer to the West End in early 2020. Now it’s back, and the spellbinding beauty of Katy Rudd’ Read more ...

“We haven’t started yet!” Hannah-Jarrett Scott, dressed in Doc Martens under a 19th-century shift, reassures us as she attempts to dislodge a yellow rubber glove from a chandelier in the middle of the set of Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of). So begins this rollicking all-female adaptation of the timeless Jane Austen romcom, in which the servants recreate their famous mistresses’ and masters’ turbulent love lives.Written by Isobel McArthur, the play originated in Scotland in 2018 and has gone through several versions before pitching up in the heart of the West End. Directed here by Read more ...

This weighty box set contains all 52 episodes of the BBC’s take on George Simenon's Maigret, four seasons of which were made and broadcast between 1960 and 1963. Given how much vintage BBC material has been wiped, that this series can now be watched on Blu-ray is little short of miraculous.Decently restored from the monochrome originals, the majority of the instalments stand up pretty well, despite the spartan sets and bewildering range of accents on display. The amount of Parisian location footage is a surprise, adding to the series’ authenticity. Studio sequences were shot live, leading to Read more ...

Let it snow! The Broadway musical adaptation of the Disney film behemoth Frozen premiered back in 2018 and now, following Covid delays, a rejigged version finally makes its home in the West End – to the delight of the army of miniature Elsas in attendance. The good news is that there’s plenty here to keep grown-ups entertained as well.The show faithfully adheres to the film plot – as, indeed, it must to avoid a riot – but Jennifer Lee’s book adds more psychological depth to Elsa and Anna (Samantha Barks and Stephanie McKeon), and addresses, if doesn’t quite solve, the dramaturgical issue of Read more ...

Philoctetes, Odysseus, Neoptolemus: the men’s names in Sophocles’ Philoctetes are all unnecessarily long and weighed down by expectations. Poet Kae Tempest’s lyrical new adaptation for the National Theatre focuses on the chorus, spinning out the original’s scope to examine the effects of conflict on women – and showing off all their Mercury-nominated wit and wordplay in the process.The subject matter located us at the end of the Trojan War, after Achilles’ death but before the horse comes into play. Philoctetes has been festering on an island for a decade, marooned there by Odysseus after an Read more ...