family relationships
theartsdesk Q&A: actor Damien Molony on 'Bergerac', 'Two Weeks in August' and returning to the stage
Pamela Jahn
Everyone knows Bergerac, or so you'd think. "I didn't", says Damien Molony. "I knew of the series, but it was only after I got the job that it dawned on me how big it was. I was at a wedding and people said to me, 'Damien, the car, the leather jacket, Jersey.'" Not least, John Nettles who, over the course of ten years, made the original archetypal "maverick cop" so iconic. The series ran successfully from 1981 until the early 1990s.Since Toby Whithouse's reboot of Bergerac in 2025, Molony has made the character of Jim Bergerac his very own. Season two launched in April this year, and although Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
It’s the summer vacation and eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven) and her three brothers have moved into a new house on Vancouver Island with their Hungarian parents. The kids trampoline, visit a wildlife preserve with their mother, walk on the beach, make paper boats and sail them in the kitchen sink. Dappled sunlight is filtered through trees. There’s a feeling of boredom and of time passing slowly. Their father (Adam Tompa) silently films everything on his video camera.Jeremy (an impressive Erik Beddoes, pictured below), a teenager, is several years older than the other three and a lanky, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
About two hours into this big, brash Beetlejuice, the door to Hell opens up, and I felt a sudden desire to rush the stage, dash through and take my chances. Well, perhaps not on press night, when it's poor form to leave before the end.Reflecting further (and this is one of those shows in which something is always happening, but everything is said at least twice, so you can take a time out) I realised that I was breaking one of my Golden Rules. This is a musical adaptation of an 80s blockbuster movie and has a wild-eyed, leering man with green hair as its marketing image, so what did I expect Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Just a flimsy music stand on the RSC’s biggest stage greets us. Sir Ken, no longstaff in hand as we might have expected, dons his coat, perhaps left over from Abanazar’s costuming in an upscale pantomime, and raises his weedy, reedy baton. Instantly, all hell breaks loose on Bob Crowley’s beautiful sparse, now tilting set, supplemented by Akhila Krishnan’s Donner and Blitzen videos. The game’s afoot all right.The clue is in the title of course. Prospero, like a wizardy Leonard Bernstein, conjuring a storm to shipwreck his usurper brother, Antonio, Duke of Milan and shipwreck, amongst others, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It took me a long time to "get" the English Middle Class, though I don’t think I completely understand them even now. Sure drowning in accents and assumed privilege in a Russell Group university Law faculty was a helluva’n education (some of it even on the curriculum). But it was only up close and personal, in their natural habitat, that allowed me to start on deciphering their arcane codes.Until then, as a kid does, I thought everybody just talked all the time, whether another person was speaking or not, said exactly what they thought and felt and that listening was optional (at best). If Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In the 70s, a science-inclined schoolboy like me was directed to young adult oriented biographies of Thomas Edison, of which there were many. They left out the more problematic aspects of his life, the dubious business practices and some of his more Victorian approaches to demonstrating the power of electricity (don’t Google it). Instead, they favoured the legend of a lone genius beating the odds to, quite literally, enlighten the world.The iconography of his story runs deep in the human soul. But there’s always an Icarus to warn us of the dangers of hubris, lurking on our left shoulder and Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Julian Sklar (Ian McKellan) has, he says, painted nothing but shit in 30 years and nothing at all for 20. In the Sixties he was a major star of the British art scene. Now he’s reduced to making personalised video messages for fans (apparently he still has plenty), wearing a blue beret for an authentically artistic look. £149 a pop, £249 “if I sign”.This is prolific director Steven Soderbergh’s fourth collaboration with screenwriter Ed Solomon (Mosaic, No Sudden Move, Full Circle) and they created it with McKellan and Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You), who plays an art forger, specifically in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Carla Simón’s latest autofiction disinters the post-Franco plague of heroin and AIDS which killed her parents and that of Marina (Llúcia Garcia), her indefatigable 18-year-old surrogate in this lyrical story of shame, memory and love.Simón was orphaned by AIDS contracted from sharing needles by the time she was six, and Marina shares this biography, being raised in Barcelona by her mum’s family. Discovering a document she requires for a scholarship to study cinema states her dad had no child, she contacts his Galician family for the first time since his death. The quest to correct the legal Read more ...
Gary Naylor
For a master dramatist - even for a tyro really - The Price is a strangely uneven play, brilliant psychological insights diluted by clunking structural issues. You wonder what it would be like in the hands of a less talented cast, a less experienced director, performed on a less convincing set - it could unravel very quickly. It was something of a surprise to find that amongst the credits in the programme, its weakest link proved to be its writer, Arthur Miller.We open on a middle-aged NYPD cop rooting through a treasure trove of stuff that you might find presented at an Antiques Roadshow Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
One of the most resonant contemporary slogans is “Build bridges not walls”. Because it applies to the personal as well the political, it has the force of simplicity and directness. The way that building walls can be psychologically destructive, cutting a person off from emotional connection, is exemplified in Mancunian playwright Kit Withington’s new family play, Heart Wall, currently on the main stage at the Bush Theatre. Once part of this venue’s Emerging Writers’ Group, Withington now returns with a distinctly Northern voice – and a work which has power and subtlety, but also some problems Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Nine-year-old-year-old Callie-Rose (the extraordinarily talented Australian actor Lily LaTorre; Run Rabbit Run) needs the Wi-Fi to do her homework. The trouble is, there's no signal because her dad, a reticent cowboy named Dusty (an excellent Josh O’Connor), is living in a trailer on a FEMA campsite, his farm having burned down in wildfires.This quiet, beautiful film, directed by Max Walker-Silverman (A Love Song) with a great score by Jake Xerxes Fussell and James Elkington, is set in southern Colorado. There’s an atmosphere of John Prine-esque melancholy running through it, and indeed one Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Though there are few starry, starry nights in Stockwell these days, nor flaming flowers that brightly blaze, you can find ragged men in ragged clothes outside the Tube station. One hundred and fifty years ago, when a fiery redheaded lad pitched up in SW9 asking for a room, something happened and, if we don’t know exactly what, we can have fun wondering can’t we?It wasn’t just Don McLean who was drawn to the legend of Vincent van Gogh. In 2002, Nicholas Wright used a fragment of fact and a whole lot of imagination to spin a play out of the youthful Dutch master’s brief sojourn in South London Read more ...