Popular culture includes both will-o'-the-wisp confections, gone in 900 seconds pace Warhol’s aphorism, but can also creates a shorthand that conveys more than a lengthy monograph in The London Review of Books. Long before he was Prime Minister, Andy Burnham was dubbed the "King of the North", and nobody felt the need to explain. That was the kind of cut-through achieved by Game of Thrones on page and screen.So it’s a surprise to learn that in 30 years since George RR Martin introduced Ned Stark to the world and 15 since he lined up with his family in the cold on TV, that he had never Read more ...

Attending the tale of Sweeney Todd was my introduction to musical theatre. I was in my early 20s and a friend of mine had invited me to the summer show at Guildford School of Acting and Dance. Reluctantly, I went along, fearing jazz hands, happy talk and an overdose of The Kids From Fame. I was much too cool for that – or so I pretended.I could hardly believe what I saw. So much of The Macabre that I had grown up with was there being sung by characters unrepentant in their violence and mendacity. My mother was a very enthusiastic reader of fairytales as bedtime stories and, not much later, Read more ...

Growing up in Liverpool, it’s usually not long before you visit the vast golden sands of Prestatyn, still the best beach I’ve ever seen, and the dubious arcades of Rhyl to roll a penny between the lines. Your accent and age announces you as someone to be watched - not without cause, most of the time  - and you wonder how the locals can tell, as they seem to have the same one anyway.Not long after, as a Scouser, you’ll hear of a lost underwater city, well, village, the local Atlantis. Nearly 150 years ago, the then thriving city of Liverpool decided that it liked the super soft Welsh Read more ...

The regular scriptwriter for Yorgos Lanthimos’s films, Efthimis Filippou, has worked with another director, Karim Aïnouz, on Rosebush Pruning. It’s a film that bills itself as “inspired by” Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 satire, Fists in the Pocket, but deals in the same kind of lurid surrealism as Lanthimos’s off-kilter yarns.This is a narrative that’s by turns enigmatic and unsubtle. Bellocchio’s starting point is there – the son of a large, dysfunctional family, in which one child is epileptic and one parent blind, sets about downsizing it – but in Filippou’s hands it’s become a cluttered story Read more ...

A couple of years ago, on a drive through the picture book hills and lakes of Connemara, my pal (his car, his driving, his choice) played a compilation of Frank Sinatra’s hits on the music system. He sang along lustily, as I contemplated the contrast with the landscape and wondered about how long it would be before I could suggest a bit of Van Morrison, The Pogues, Val Doonican…Because I’ve never really got "The Chairman of the Board". I see what others see, but it’s all too clean, too consciously produced, too overweening in its sheer Frankness for me to engage. Every song was Sinatra first Read more ...

Ben Ockrent’s Relics had me hooked from the moment the safety curtain started rising: a metal number with a banner of packing tape marked FRAGILE on it. As it rose, the teddy bear that had been lying in front of it was silhouetted, hanging from it by one arm.It’s not just a cute opener. Director Michael Longhurst and his designer, Joanna Scotcher, are projecting the core of the piece with minimum means. Things in this house are fragile. And when nerdy Rob (Sam Swainsbury, pictured bottom) appears, this mini-prelude is rounded out as he silently and warily, like a kid doing something naughty, Read more ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...