class system
Marianka Swain
Steven Levenson, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s Tony and Grammy Award-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen is an institution in the States, running on Broadway since 2016 and currently on its second year of a national tour. It also made a star of original leading man Ben Platt, now appearing in Netflix’s The Politician – and this long-awaited West End production could well do the same for the exceedingly talented 21-year-old Sam Tutty.Tutty plays the titular Evan, a 17-year-old high school senior suffering from debilitating social anxiety. His well-meaning, divorcée mother, Heidi (Rebecca Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Ken Loach’s film Kes, and the 51st of A Kestrel for a Knave, the Barry Hines novel it was based on. The story of Barnsley boy Billy Casper who finds an escape from his painful home life and brutal schooling by training a wild kestrel has resonated down the decades, and the film is regarded as a classic of British cinema, even if the Americans couldn’t understand its Yorkshire accents. According to Greg Davies, English teacher turned comic, it feels even more vital today, in an increasingly divided and inequitable world.For this BBC Four film, Davies Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It’s been 15 years since Cameron Mackintosh’s stage musical version of P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins made its West End debut. Now, the magical nanny returns to the Prince Edward Theatre, with Zizi Strallen (who also headlined the UK tour) succeeding her sister Scarlett in the title role – all set to capitalise on the recent Emily Blunt-starring film sequel renewing our interest in the adventures of the Banks family.“I fear what’s to happen all happened before,” muses Charlie Stemp’s Bert at the start of the show. Well, yes and no. Fans of the original movie should be warned that the Disney Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
If the recent period of British history that has involved recession, austerity, the hostile environment and Brexit is to have chroniclers, who better than Ken Loach and his trusty screenwriter Paul Laverty. Their blend of carefully researched social realism and nail-biting melodrama is angry, shaming, essential. Only the coldest-hearted bureaucrat or corporate heel could leave the cinema dry-eyed.Having exposed a merciless welfare system in I, Daniel Blake, they now turn their attention to the gig economy, that nefarious conceit that sounds funky yet allows public services to be Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A hit comedy about a textile scientist? It might sound unlikely, but Ealing Studios’ 1951 sci-fi satire, starring Alec Guinness, was one of the most popular films of the year in Britain. Now, Sean Foley hopes to repeat its success with his new West End stage version, which tweaks the formula to go big, broad and occasionally Brexit-referencing – with varying results.Stephen Mangan, who also collaborated with Foley on the similarly goofy, high-energy Jeeves and Wooster: Perfect Nonsense, plays chemist Sidney Stratton, whose great invention is fabric that never gets dirty or wears out. But Read more ...
Owen Richards
There’s been no avoiding Rob Beckett in recent years. His high beam smile and infectious personality have made him a mainstay of comedy shows. Now he’s back on the road with what he calls the best job in the world, stand up. You can tell he means it, with a show that thrives on enthusiasm if not consistency.“Wallop” is a show of two halves, quite literally. There’s no tour support, instead favouring a cheap selection of inappropriate songs to introduce two 45-minute sets from Beckett. He uses this time to zip through a mass of topics, including cookware, soft play, family weddings and Kinky Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dolly Wells’ directorial debut employs her best friend Emily Mortimer as reclusive writer Julia Price, having paired up previously in a TV satire of their professionally uneven relationship, Doll and Em. Mortimer cameos this time, as posh twentysomething slacker Lilian (Grace Van Patten) comes to stay at her Brooklyn brownstone and, undeterred by never having opened a Price book or watched a documentary, surreptitiously begins a film about her enigmatic host.Frosty Julia and the tenant she calls a “lazy, entitled oaf” gradually soften each other’s edges. In a conceit happily forced on Wells Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When Joker won the Golden Lion in Venice in September, it was an unprecedented achievement, the first time a comic book-related film had won such a prestigious prize. But then, isn’t your typical comic book film. Starring a phenomenal Joaquin Phoenix, it’s seriously themed, brilliantly executed and quite extraordinary. We’ve seen many Jokers, including memorable turns by Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, so it’s not unreasonable to wonder why we’d need another. One reason is that this is a Joker without his Batman, or any superhero trappings; another, that the ‘origin story’ is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When did Dorothy (Constance Wu) really want to be a stripper? Maybe it’s when she looks with love at Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) during her strutting set piece dance, as she descends to a carpet of cash. If that’s the equivalent of Ray Liotta’s gangster gliding to the best table in Goodfellas, Hustlers is more accurately the Casino of stripper films, sociological and historical, but never salacious, in its depiction of an outré life. Set around the 2008 financial crash, Lorene Scafaria’s film shows how the women’s “side-hustles” with Wall Street clients slipped into drugging them and directly Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Despite the fact that the Downton Abbey 2015 Christmas special wrapped the series up with a seemingly watertight bow, a cinema offering of Julian Fellowes’ much-loved creation was perhaps inevitable. And so virtually all of the series cast and a few new ones descend upon the fictitious Yorkshire pile for more misadventures upstairs and down. With no loose ends, Fellowes needed to devise a new dilemma to unite the Crawleys and the many staff who keep their privileged lives on track in 1927. Cue a letter from Buckingham Palace that heralds the imminent visit to Downton of King Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“I don’t think I have the right to influence her,” says an older character of her daughter in For Services Rendered, W Somerset Maugham’s 1932 anti-war drama. If only all elder statesmen and women felt the same about the youth. Tom Littler’s revival at the Jermyn Street Theatre makes great use of an intimate space, but the first half is a slog and only a few of the large cast make their mark. The setting is appropriately idyllic: a garden in rural Kent (the village’s name is Ramblestone, naturally), late summer 1932, the gentle thwocks of a game of tennis drifting over the fence. Eden Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Joanna Hogg’s melancholy autobiographical drama The Souvenir cuts too close to the bone. That’s a compliment: like Sally Rooney’s equally unsettling first novel Conversations With Friends, Hogg’s movie almost forces the viewer to relive that shattering early romance, founded on collusion and self-delusion, that reordered her or his universe for all time.Like Conversations With Friends, too, The Souvenir, set in the first half of the 1980s, depicts a young woman’s affair with a withholding older man. Whereas Rooney’s protagonist Frances is a poor Dublin undergraduate enmeshed with a married Read more ...