adultery
Matt Wolf
The water proves newly inviting in The Deep Blue Sea, Terence Rattigan's mournful 1952 play that some while ago established its status as an English classic. Lindsay Posner's production, first seen in Bath with one major change of cast since then, takes its time, and leading lady Tamsin Greig often speaks in a stage whisper requiring you to lean into the words. (This is that rare production that, praise be, is unamplified.) But what develops is a study in coping that is required once people arrive at a place beyond hope, not to mention a scalding portrait of the lacerating effect of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie. Having explored similar territory for 50 some years, you’d have thought the American artist would have run out of ideas. Not a bit of it. Dominating the central space was a huge screen showing Untitled (No Comment) (main picture) which explores the Orwellian soup of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A middle-aged man, expensively dressed and possessed of that very specific confidence that only comes from a certain kind of education, a certain kind of professional success, a certain kind of entitlement, talks to a younger woman. Despite the fact that she isn’t really trying, she’s attractive, bright and just assertive enough to weave a spell of fascination over men like him, with a tinge of non-dangerous exoticism evidenced by her East European accent to round things out. They are catnip to each other. And so it had been until almost two years ago. A torrid affair had been conducted, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This book is quite a sad read. I had been looking forward to it, as a posthumous supplement to Adam Sisman’s 2015 biography of John le Carré/David Cornwell, which, at the time, quite clearly drew a discreet veil over his later private life. But the central section of the new book is little more than a catalogue of Cornwell’s many, many affairs, which is repetitive, a bit tawdry, and hard to find the will to plough through. I would probably have been happy to have confirmed that he actually was the shit he was always rumoured to be, without having to wade through all the gruesome details.Not Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Towards the end of the 18th century, Lady Emma Hamilton (like so much in this woman's life, hers was a title achieved as much as bestowed) was the “It Girl” of European society.They’ve always been around – women who have the combination of looks, intelligence and transgressive confidence fused by a rare alchemy into a concoction that a certain kind of powerful man cannot resist (and plenty of not so powerful men, too). Then, as now, such women were dangerous and the patriarchy exacted a price for the challenge not so much to its norms but to its hypocrisy. Such people burned bright, but Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Drama is writing in thin air, its content instantly spirited away into unreliable memory, so if a play is to be revived a quarter century on from its first run, it has to say something substantial about the human condition. Patrick Marber's Closer does so because people are always balancing the need for love with the need for sex, dealing with the gnawing desire for someone just out of reach, wearily coping with the emotional baggage of lives lived badly.And here it is in a 25th anniversary revival at the Lyric Hammersmith directed by Clare Lizzimore: not bad for a play that opened Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If Florian Zeller isn’t a Wordle fan, I’d be very surprised. As with the hit online game, the French playwright likes to offer up a puzzle for the audience to solve, clue by clue, before the curtain falls. His latest play, The Forest, which had its world premiere at the Hampstead Theatre in an unusual move for this writer, is his most purely puzzle-like yet, and also his least rewarding. Whereas Zeller’s standout play, 2012’s The Father (a double Oscar-winner in its screen adaptation last year), wrung poignancy from its theatrical tricks at every turn, his shtick here is all trick: Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Free Love opens in 1967 and remains within that heady era throughout; no flashbacks, no spanning of generations as in Hadley's wonderful novels The Past or Late in the Day. Phyllis, aged 40, is a suburban housewife, C of E, deeply apolitical and a contented mother of two.She likes L’Air du Temps perfume (one of Hadley’s Sixties tropes: Jill, a character in The Past, also uses it), loves the panelled oak doors in her hallway, and has a special bond with her nine-year-old son, Hugh.Hadley’s eighth novel is as absorbing as any of her other fiction, with complex family secrets, brilliant insights Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In the first 35 minutes of Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s three-hour Drive My Car, which the Japanese director adapted with Oe Takamasa from a story in Murakami Haruku’s Men Without Women collection, the successful actor Kafuku Yūsuke (Nishijima Hidetoshi) endures experiences that would derail a less stoical man.One is the sight of his screenwriter wife, Oto (Kirishima Reika), having sex with a handsome young actor, Takatsuki (Okada Masaki), in their apartment. Mr Kafuku doesn’t react, but walks away and never mentions Oto’s infidelity to her.That Oto loves her husband is evidenced by the compassion she Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Back in 2017, writer-director Eliza Hittman won over audiences with her beautiful coming-of-age drama Beach Rats. Her latest film, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, is a more quietly devastating drama, shifting the focus away from sexual awakenings to a more politically charged arena.Autumn (newcomer Sidney Flanigan) first appears as your average sullen 17-year-old of few words, living in a tightknit Pennsylvania town. Then we realise that her silence might have a reason. Jocks at a school talent show taunt her with cries of ‘slut!’ Her parents ignore this, just as they ignore her. Read more ...
Heather Neill
Ibsen's Nora slammed the door on her infantilising marriage in 1879 but the sound of it has continued to reverberate down the years. In 2013, Carrie Cracknell directed Hattie Morahan in an award-winning performance at this theatre, last year Tanika Gupta profitably wove her story into that of colonial India at the Lyric, Hammersmith, Robert Icke's Children of Nora is due to open in Amsterdam in April and Samuel Adamson's exploration of relationships in four distinct periods, Wife, at the Kiln last summer, echoed Nora's experience. Jamie Lloyd is scheduled to bring his original touch to Frank Read more ...
Marianka Swain
William Finn and James Lapine’s musical – which combines two linked one-acts, March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland, set in late 1970s/early 1980s New York – picked up Tony Awards in 1992 for its book and score, and was nominated again in 2016 for an acclaimed revival. Yet the UK hasn’t sighted this landmark piece until now, with Tara Overfield-Wilkinson directing and choreographing an engaging if somewhat chaotic production.Daniel Boys plays Marvin, who recently left wife Trina (Laura Pitt-Pulford) for lover Whizzer (Oliver Savile, pictured below) – while maintaining close ties for Read more ...