This production of Tennessee Williams’ neglected classic, Summer and Smoke, arrives from the Almeida into the West End with five-star plaudits for its pitch-perfect performances and pressure-cooker intensity. In an ideal world, this should guarantee a high-octane evening – but the chemistry of a space counts for a lot in theatre – so there’s inevitably concern that a larger venue will dissipate some of the essential dramatic steam.It is a pleasure to be able to report, therefore, that Rebecca Frecknall’s boldly expressionist production – with its electrifying soundscape – galvanises the Read more ...

The pre-title sequence – in which a middle-aged man without any trousers lies trussed up on the floor – immediately tells us that we are not to take Billions too seriously. A woman in thigh-high leather boots with killer heels towers over him. Removing a cigarette-holder from her lips, she tells him he’s in need of correction before stubbing out the fag on his bare chest.All that’s missing on the soundtrack is Disco Inferno by The Trammps. Burn, baby, burn… As if this weren’t enough, the dominatrix then puts out the fire by urinating on him. That’s right: someone is taking the piss.A turn-off Read more ...

John Le Carré made it quite clear what he thinks of the new world order in The Night Manager. All together now: a nexus of corrupt money and sinister establishment interests make for cynical realpolitik. It’s a persuasive weltanschauung that plays well to millennials priced out of their own future by ungovernable global forces beyond the reproof of electorates. But the message can become a bit of a stuck record. Take Our Kind of Traitor.The latest Le Carré adaptation features an innocent bystander sucked into a plot to bring down a shady business organisation which has links to self- Read more ...

From the great, gasp-inducing rush of colour when the curtain opens on American Buffalo to the embrace that closes it, this revival of David Mamet’s career-making rummage through the junkyard of the American Dream has you in a vice-like grip. It’s been eagerly anticipated, and doesn’t disappoint.Most great plays have an air of having just been written. American Buffalo is now 40 years old, yet speaks loudly and painfully about the state we’re in today. While a number of our bankers and businessmen are crooks, Mamet’s crooks regard themselves as businessmen. And business, declares junk store Read more ...

Wolf Hall divided viewers from the off. It mesmerised many and left a vocal minority cold, for whom apparently - mystifyingly - it has all been a bit dull. The dialogue was too elliptical, the politics tricksy and convoluted (who is this Holy Roman Emperor anyway?), there was a surfeit of men called Thomas and women stitching in bay windows and big dresses. And to cap it all director Peter Kosminsky, fetishising Mark Rylance’s inscrutable face, seemed to want every take to carry on into next week.In the end, the rewards for loyalty were rich, and never more than in the adaptation's final Read more ...

For weeks and weeks, the BBC has been borrowing Anne Boleyn’s tactic of seduction. Henry VIII was vouchsafed occasional access to his future bride’s breasts, but no more until she was queen. It’s felt rather like that being fed Wolf Hall trailers for the past few weeks: teasing snippets of promised treasure, but there has been no way of knowing precisely what goodies lay in wait under the skirts. Has it been worth the anticipation?In a word, yes. And for one overpowering reason: Mark Rylance, the complete actor. This is his first return to television in more than a decade. For all his Read more ...

You read the book, you saw the play, and in January you can see the BBC's new six-part dramatisation of Wolf Hall. Cunningly adapted by screenwriter Peter Straughan and directed by Peter Kosminsky, the series promises to be both a faithful translation of Hilary Mantel's novel and an absorbingly fresh approach to the telly-isation of history."They're such huge books [ie Wolf Hall and companion piece Bring Up the Bodies] and so layered and epic, the first challenge was to find a kind of through-line for the drama," said Peter Straughan at a screening of the first episode. "I decided it was Read more ...

Homeland's coming home? Well not exactly, but the conclusion to this crazy, mixed-up third series did suddenly feel as if the writers had finally managed to express something that they'd been groping towards for the last three months. Namely, if the show was to stay on the road (series four is in the works), Brody had to go.The endgame to Brody's assassination assignment to Tehran was brutal and shocking, but given the stakes being played for it kind of had to be. True, you had to swallow enormous skip-loads of steaming disbelief before you could allow yourself to experience the cathartic Read more ...

Surfing in on the back of six Emmy awards, Homeland's second season opened with a sizzling episode which banished any lingering doubts about the improbabilities of the ending of series one. Like, for instance, the way zealous Marine-turned-suicide bomber Nicholas Brody had abandoned his mission because of a tearful phone call from his daughter, who somehow managed to get connected to a top-security bunker in the middle of a full-scale terrorist panic.But never mind all that, because we've now moved on several months, and Brody, cover un-blown and revered as an American war hero, has become a Read more ...

The course of the serialised drama finale never did run smooth, particularly in the case of a show like Homeland, which has structured its entire run around a slow-building sense of queasy, paranoid dread with, thus far, very little real payoff.The penultimate episode ended with both series leads fulfilling their long-awaited narrative destinies - rescued prisoner of war Brody (Damian Lewis) was indeed the brainwashed terrorist that CIA analyst Carrie (Claire Danes) had always suspected him to be, while Carrie herself had fallen into the manic state of psychosis she’d long been skirting the Read more ...

The opening credits of US television’s latest watercooler export Homeland have proved to be one of the critically lauded show’s few divisive elements, yet also encapsulate what could be most interesting about it. The sequence – a fragmented, arguably messy blend of real newsreel clips, stylised monochrome footage, anti-terrorism soundbites and the odd persecutory whisper – isn’t really about national security or post-9/11 America, but about psychological illness. Love it or loathe it, it evokes the troubled mind of our de facto heroine Carrie (Claire Danes) more effectively than any moment in Read more ...

While Homeland is hardly unique in being a TV series born in the shadow of 9/11, it may prove to be one of the most resonant and troubling responses to that ghastly event and its aftermath. Sergeant Nick Brody, who went missing with a fellow Marine sniper in Iraq in 2003, is found alive by a Special Forces team raiding a safe house used by notorious terrorist Abu Nazir. He is brought back to the USA as a shining symbol of War on Terror heroism, stoically addresses his fellow Marines at Edwards Air Force Base, and is ferried home through jostling reporters to try to pick up the traces of his Read more ...