family relationships
Matt Wolf
Might we be nearing light at the end of the lockdown tunnel? It definitely seems that way, with the news in recent days that social life beyond the home may be resuming soon, at least after a fashion. All the while, theatrical offerings continue to come thick and fast, all the while offering up a cheeringly broad away of online prospects. This week's quintet includes a piece of installation art that you are encouraged to experience lying flat on your back, alongside an acclaimed Shakespeare extravaganza from just last year that many at the time experienced on their feet. We've got something Read more ...
Anonymous
The eyes have it in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, which is in no way to discount this venerable writer's gift for words. Time and again in this vaunted series of dramatic solos, ten of which have now been remade alongside two new ones, a character will interrupt a thought only to be seen peering at us or into the middle distance or directly into the dark heart of psychic disturbance. Now 86, Bennett anatomises lovelessness and despair with a mastery second to none, and the timing of these as we emerge from lockdown tallies directly with a collection of people who themselves know a thing or Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Yoram (Menashe Noy), a vet in a Tel Aviv safari park, knows how to treat a sick jaguar (startling to see such a magnificent beast in an oxygen mask) but he has no idea how to comfort his troubled 17-year-old daughter Roni (a powerful Zohar Meidan). Both are mourning the death of Roni’s mother a year ago, but all they can offer each other is a tortured silence.Writer-director Nimrod Eldar’s first feature, which premiered on HBO in February in the USA, is quirky and atmospheric, with extraordinary desert scenes and a bracingly unpretentious, understated feel to Yoram and Roni’s knotted Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Is friendship mightier and more durable than sex? That's the proposition put forward by the engaging if ultimately cautious Banana Split, the Los Angeles-set romcom in which two teenagers become friends unbeknownst to the long-haired himbo boyfriend whom they have shared. Co-written by Hannah Marks, who stars as the wounded (but maybe not) April, this feature film directing debut from cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke is sufficiently lively that one feels the timidity of its closing sequence that much more fully.Up until then, there's a lot that both surprises and satisfies about a movie that Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Simon Bird's feature film debut as a director is a gentle, warm-hearted look at a mother and son's strained relationship as they are forced to spend the summer holidays together when the teenager's dad cruelly cancels a trip to see him and his pregnant, much younger wife in Florida.Days of the Bagnold Summer started life as Joff Winterhart's graphic novel, and Bird's wife, Lisa Owens, has adapted it for the screen. It has a slow-moving, elegiac quality as we see Sue Bagnold (the ever-wonderful Monica Dolan) and 15-year-old heavy-metal fan Daniel (Earl Cave, son of Nick, note-perfect as the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can we really be entering a third month in lockdown? Indeed we can, and culture, thank heavens, shows no signs whatsoever of leaving us in the lurch. This week's lineup of highlights offers a typically electic bunch, ranging from two sizable American talents streaming a two-hander for one night only to the arrival online of the latest work from an octogenarian playwriting treasure, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, who ought to be more celebrated of late than he is. (Some of his smaller-cast plays might lend themselves to revival in our straitened times.) Gillian Anderson, who seems rarely these days to be Read more ...
aleks.sierz
During lockdown, some of the best online theatre has been shows that are specially created for this digital format. Much better than dull records of dramas that might have worked well on stage, but now seem sadly moribund and exceedingly slow on the laptop screen. So it’s good to welcome Midnight Your Time, which is remotely directed for streaming by Michael Longhurst, much lauded artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, after being reconceived by award-winning playwright Adam Brace, who wrote the original version of this one-woman show about a decade ago. Best of all, it features actor Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Deep from the heart of Trumpland comes Cuck, a deeply unpleasant film about a totally repellent character. Directed and co-written by Rob Lambert, the film opened simultaneously last autumn in the States with Joker, with which it shares an overlapping interest in societal outsiders pushed to the brink and beyond by their pathologies. Weirdly, too, both movies feature ailing mums who demand to be bathed by their emasculated, increasingly unhinged sons – parts taken by Frances Conroy in Joker and a take-no-prisoners Sally Kirkland this time out. (Onetime Oscar nominee Kirkland also gets a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Crying never solves anything. Be strong.” An admonishment from a stern grandmother haunts this low key first feature film by Alan Yang (Parks and Recreation, Master of None), loosely based on his father’s 1950s immigrant experience of leaving Taiwan and coming to New York City (his father does the voice-over in the film) and on Yang’s own recent trip to Taiwan with his father.No tigers in evidence here, kings, tails or otherwise. It’s a gentle, elegiac Asian-American story of lost love and emotional repression, told, in Mandarin and English, from the perspective of a disappointed middle-aged Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The National Theatre’s online broadcasts got off to a storming start with One Man, Two Guvnors – watched by over 2.5 million people, either on the night or in the week since its live streaming, and raising around £66,000 in donations. Let’s hope that engagement continues with their next offering: Sally Cookson’s dynamic adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, a Bristol Old Vic and National Theatre co-production which also toured the UK.Cookson’s devised work blows past the problems associated with transferring literature to stage. There is nothing stuffy or static about her version; on the Read more ...
Sarah Collins
When Amer Deghayes departed for Syria in a truck leaving from Birmingham, a worker from a youth arts organisation in Brighton had been trying to get in touch with him. She wanted to inform Amer, an intelligent and creative 18-year-old who had once harboured journalistic ambitions, that his pitch to develop a project about identity in his hometown had been successful. The Heritage Lottery fund had decided to award him £50,000.The news of his success came too late. On route to another life as a jihadi fighting for Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al Qaeda affiliated rebel group in Syria, Amer Deghayes had Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One of the most blistering stage performances in recent memory gets a renewed lease on life with the streaming of the 2019 screen version, aired last autumn on BBC Four, of Cyprus Avenue, the David Ireland play in which Stephen Rea unravels to memorable and merciless effect.A co-production between Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and the Royal Court (and seen later at New York’s Public Theatre), Ireland’s depiction of a mind in meltdown was a galvanic experience within the intimate confines of the Court’s tiny Theatre Upstairs almost exactly four years ago. The Court’s artistic director Vicky Read more ...