drama
Owen Richards
When director Jenny Lu graduated from university, the promise of a big city career quickly turned into a series of rejections. Around this time, a close friend of hers committed suicide by jumping off a bridge – unbeknownst to their circle of friends, this girl was working in the sex industry. Lu has mined these real-world experiences to craft an unflinching but deeply touching film.Taiwanese graduate Tina (Teresa Daley, pictured above right) is our gateway into this world. With post-university funds running low, and a boyfriend recently made redundant, her job hunt eventually leads her to a 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
The first words we hear in The Piano are the thoughts of Holly Hunter’s Ada, and they set up the film’s premise perfectly: “I have not spoken since I was six years old. No one knows why… not even me. My father says it is a dark talent …Today he married me to a man I have not yet met.” Ada and her young daughter (a deservedly award-winning turn from a young Anna Paquin) pitch up on a bleak New Zealand beach. With them is Ada’s beloved Broadwood piano, transported from Scotland and left abandoned on the sand when her colonist husband claims he has no room for it in his house. Ada’s keyboard is Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Britain is rightly proud of its record on multiculturalism, but whenever cross-cultural couples are shown on film, television or the stage they are always represented as a problem. Not just as a normal way of life, but as something that is going wrong. I suppose that this is a valuable corrective to patting ourselves on the back about how tolerant a society we are, but do such correctives make a good play? The latest exploration of this cross-cultural theme is Stephanie Martin’s new play, which is half comedy and half drama about Islam, and which opened tonight at the ever-enterprising Park Read more ...
Owen Richards
How well do you know the person you love? Are they someone completely different when you’re not around? This is the central question Eve Myles (main picture) has to answer in the BBC’s latest mystery drama. Faced with the sudden disappearance of her seemingly lovely husband, she must piece together where he’s gone and what she’s been missing.Keeping Faith was broadcast in Welsh on S4C last November, and played on BBC Wales earlier this year, following a string of recent Welsh-made dramas. Like them, there’s your obligatory gorgeous scenery, but where Hinterland and Hidden went for Scandi-lite Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Carla Simón’s debut feature Summer 1993 is a gem of a film by any standards, but when you learn that its story is based closely on the thirtysomething Catalan director’s own early life, its intimacy becomes almost overwhelming. It has at its heart a simply terrific performance from Laia Artigas as Simón’s six-year-old heroine Frida, the intonations of her face conveying variations of emotion that are powerful beyond anything words could achieve.Following in the tradition of cinema about childhood, we experience events as much through Frida’s eyes as we do from any knowing, adult perspective. Read more ...
Owen Richards
On the surface, Pin Cushion is a whimsical British indie, packed with imagination and charm. But debuting director Deborah Haywood builds this on a foundation of bullying and prejudice, creating a surprisingly bleak yet effective film.Teenager Iona and her mother Lyn (Lily Newmark and Joanna Scanlan, main picture) are a pair of social outcasts, recently moved to Swadlincote in Derbyshire. They’re constantly festooned in bright woolly layers and surrounded by ornamental tat and misplaced furniture (including a toilet at the head of their shared double bed). Iona boasts about her new school Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There is something irresistibly haunting about tales of epic sea voyages and the perils they entail. Recently we’ve had two versions of the tragic saga of lone yachtsman Donald Crowhurst (not to mention the excellent documentary Deep Water from 2006), and you could lob into the mix the Robert Redford vehicle All Is Lost, Kon-Tiki, White Squall and… er… many more.But never mind the competition, because Adrift can stand proud as one of the finest specimens of this watery genre. Based on the true story of Tami Oldham and Richard Sharp, which Oldham later set down in her book Red Sky in Mourning Read more ...
Owen Richards
The Ciambra is a wonderful and subtle piece of filmmaking. Director/writer Jonas Carpignano captures the genuine heart and fire of family relationships with an amateur cast of relatives, led by the magnetic young Pio Amato. By trusting the audience to find the subtext themselves, they create touching and persuasive cinema over two hours.Pio is 14-years-old, living with his large family in the Romani community known as the Ciambra, in south Italy. Life here is tough – the electricity is stolen, and money is made by hijacking cars for ransom. Age works differently here, with establishing shots Read more ...
David Benedict
In Harold Pinter’s memory play Old Times, one of the women declares, “There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.” Elizabeth Strout’s heroine in My Name Is Lucy Barton is in the reverse position. When it comes to the difficult childhood she has long since escaped, she’s uncertain of what she can – or wants to – remember, yet she is anything but the standard issue unreliable narrator. In Richard Eyre’s flawless production at the Bridge Theatre, Strout’s writing, as adapted by Rona Munro and performed by a luminous Laura Linney, pulls off the considerable trick Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Brilliant and innovative though it is in many respects, The Flying Dutchman is by no means a straightforward piece to stage. It’s an odd, sometimes uncomfortable mixture of the genre and the epic. At Sadler’s Wells in the sixties they had a little ship and a big ship that hove into view, a fishing village, sailors with tankards and striped shirts, and girls at looms. At Bayreuth in the eighties Harry Kupfer set the whole piece in a lunatic asylum, which solved all dramaturgical problems, if at some psychological cost. Now, at Longborough, Thomas Guthrie and his designer, Ruth Paton, have Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Masculinity, whether toxic or in crisis (but never ever problem-free), is a hardy perennial subject for British new writing, and this new piece from playwright Simon Stephens, Frantic Assembly director Scott Graham and Underworld musician Karl Hyde is a verbatim drama made up of interviews with men, which the trio conducted in their home towns of Stockport, Corby and Kidderminster. The overall theme is fatherhood, men’s relationships with their Dads. Given that this is such well-trodden ground, does Fatherland, which was first seen as part of the Manchester International Festival in 2017, Read more ...