adaptation
Marianka Swain
This London premiere of Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe’s 2010 musical (based on Daniel Waters’ oh-so-Eighties cult classic movie, starring Christian Slater and Winona Ryder) had a development period at The Other Palace – no critics allowed – before cruising into the West End with a cult following already in place. A winning strategy, as it turns out, resulting in adoring audiences cheering on a show that’s largely worthy of their adulation.Veronica (Carrie Hope Fletcher, pictured below with Jamie Muscato) decides to strategically befriend it girls the Heathers (Sophie Isaacs and T’ Read more ...
Owen Richards
What signals the end of a relationship? The loss of attraction? Infidelity? Or is it, as Wanderlust explores, something more innocuous? The opening episode of BBC One's latest show packed in enough domestic drama to sustain most series, but found its pressure points in unexpected places. This is not a story of betrayal, but an honest conversation on what happens when lust leaves but love remains.When we met Joy and Alan (Toni Collette and Steven Mackintosh, main picture), they're going through the motions. Foreplay consists of a disinterested strip and a mild reassurance of “ready?” This isn’ Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Emcee Michael Palin, as William Makepeace Thackeray himself, introduces us to the show: “Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy.” All his major characters – or “puppets” – are riding a fairground carousel. They – and very soon, we – are having a great time.Vanity Fair – the title comes from The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the town of Vanity holds a year-round fair – charts the uncertain progress of a minx called Becky Sharp (Olivia Cooke, pert and pretty in equal measure, main picture). First seen giving lip to her elder and better Miss Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The first significant British film to explore the influence of Jamaican sound systems in London was Babylon. Shot in 1980, its street patois was deemed impenetrable enough to merit subtitles. Times change. Yardie revisits the same world and era – it is bookended by heaving get-togethers in which sound systems pulse and throb. But there are no subtitles and one of the film’s pleasures, alongside the music of the soundtrack, is the music of the dialogue.For his debut behind the camera, Idris Elba has adapted the 1992 novel by Victor Headley about a young man tasked with the age-old choice Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“To our enormous suffering!” There are many macabre vodka toasts, accompanied by some appropriately gruelling visuals, in A Gentle Creature, but that one surely best captures the beyond-nihilist mood of Sergei Loznitsa’s 2017 Cannes competition contender. It’s a film guaranteed to leave viewers – those who make it through to the end of its (somewhat overlong) 140-minute-plus run, that is – scrabbling to find words to describe what they have just seen. The likes of “visceral” or “phantasmagoric” somehow aren’t enough to catch the film’s mixture of horror and hallucination, both elements made Read more ...
Owen Richards
Childhood is an inimitable experience – the laws of the world are less certain, imagination and reality meld together, and no event feels fixed. A Sicilian Ghost Story recreates this sensation in the context of real world trauma, producing a unique and sometimes unsettling cinematic experience.Luna (Julia Jedlikowska, pictured below) is a rather typical 12-year-old girl: precocious, imaginative, and very much infatuated with her classmate Giuseppe. Although they don’t have the same interests, they share something deeper, a comfort and belonging in each other’s company. On the walk home Read more ...
Heather Neill
Jonathan Munby's production starring Ian McKellen, first seen last year in Chichester and now transferred to the West End, reflects our everyday anxieties, emphasising in the world of a Trump presidency, the dangers of childish, petulant authoritarianism. And while King James I was keen to promulgate the benefits of a united kingdom - having joined England and Scotland under his rule only three years before Shakespeare's tragedy was presented at court in 1606 - the corrosive nature of divisions within the state is equally clear now in the era of Brexit. The Union Flag features frequently in Read more ...
graham.rickson
That this Peter Rabbit took more money in the UK than Disney's sublime Coco is a tad depressing. I know I’m no longer a member of the film’s target demographic, but I can imagine many under-tens being underwhelmed by Will Gluck’s family comedy. We live in a golden age of children’s cinema, the recent Paddington sequel showing that it’s possible to update canonical source material with wit and affection.Tonally, Peter Rabbit is a mess, an unsavoury stew of mean-spirited slapstick held together with the flimsiest of plots. And maybe I’m being over sensitive, but aren’t many of the gags Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The image of a raging, narcissistic tyrant, convinced that he can crush even death into oblivion, has all too many resonances these days. So this visually spectacular National Theatre resurrection of Ionesco’s 1962 play, adapted and directed by Patrick Marber, promises to pack a punch beyond its absurdist proposition of a selfish child-man trying to dodge his mortality.The fact that the punch never quite seems to land is something of a mystery, since the evening features a crack cast, several brilliant one-liners, and a sensational set. Anthony Ward’s design is dominated by a large coat of Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A raw pagan vitality animates this extraordinary story about a teenage boy wrestling with tumultuous emotions in the face of his mother’s terminal illness. Director Sally Cookson has taken the potent blend of myth and realism in Patrick Ness’s book and transformed it into a wild, beautiful piece of theatre that visually beguiles at the same time as it bruises the heart.Grief – even when suppressed – is an isolating phenomenon, and the production emphasises this from the start by stranding the boy, Conor (Matthew Tennyson, pictured above right), at the centre of a stark, clinical white stage. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mozart: Piano Concertos nos 12 and 13, Double Concerto in Eb Marie-Pierre Langlamet and Joan Rafaelle Kim (harps), Varian Fry Quartet (Indésens)Mozart himself adapted three of his piano concertos for soloist and string quartet. Here, two of them are played by French harpist (and Berlin Philharmonic principal) Marie-Pierre Langlamet. The harp's lighter, cleaner sound means there’s no danger of it overwhelming the strings, and the results are delicious. Langlamet is exceptionally good, and she's smartly accompanied by the Varian Fry Quartet, its players also drawn from the BPO. Mozart doesn’t Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How many people were watching Picnic at Hanging Rock as it took its bow on BBC One? This opening episode happened to be preceded by a rival attraction on ITV. The premise of the story, set in Australia in 1900, is that almost no one sees three girls in their long white summer dresses abscond from the eponymous school outing to explore a local attraction and vanish without trace, to be followed by their teacher. Thanks to an unlucky accident of scheduling, the audience may have vanished too.This is a six-part adaptation of the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, but the story is far better known for Read more ...