family relationships
Matt Wolf
There are any number of ways to perform A Number, Caryl Churchill’s bleak and beautiful play about a father and three of who knows how many of his genetically cloned sons. Since it first opened at the Royal Court in 2002, this hourlong two-hander has been staged in London with some regularity, as often as not with actual fathers and sons (Tim and Sam West, John and Lex Shrapnel). But director Polly Findlay’s entirely fresh take for the Bridge Theatre is the most literal I have yet seen, and also the most lacerating: this Number may not have family on its side, but it certainly boasts two Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Simon Evans is a comic known for pithy observational humour, and an often acerbic take on politics, with occasional bits of biography thrown in. But The Work of the Devil (which started life at the Edinburgh Fringe last year as Dressing for Dinner), is his most personal show yet, and all the better for it.The reason for the reboot is that, as audiences will discover, the story he tells has had to be updated, and here, in its touring form, he tells the tale over two hours rather than a more festival-friendly 60 minutes. This means the comic can lay a series of clues throughout the first half Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This eight-part mystery from Netflix is based on the titular novel by American writer Harlan Coben, who has formed a production company with Rochdale’s own Nicola Schindler, the production brains behind Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax and many more. The action has been transposed from New Jersey to Manchester – the one in England, not Massachusetts – and a strong and varied British cast does the heavy lifting, but there’s something in the mix that never quite feels right. Maybe it’s that things that seem par for the course in America’s moronic inferno can look hilarious in a homely Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Netflix’s Sex Education has returned to our screens and streams. The show made waves last year for its refreshing take on the teen comedy-drama. It took on abortion, consent and female pleasure — subjects strikingly absent from our actual high school educations. The result was a show that was always bingeable, sometimes educative, and oozing with sex-positive delights. Not everyone liked it. But those of us who did — teenagers all over again — could not stop talking about it. These are high expectations for a show going into its sophomore season. But thank God and thank Laurie Nunn: this is a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jen Brister loves her five-year-old twin boys, she is at pains to tell us, even when they have a major meltdown and, like Little Lord Fauntleroys, refuse to eat broken biscuits. Stories like these are sprinkled throughout her new show, Under Privilege, in which she describes trying to instil proper values in children who, she hopes, will probably never know any life struggles, and the broader issue of what privilege is.There’s a lot of domestic detail in the show, and Brister is disarmingly honest about the irritations of parenting – although, she says drily, she dodged a bullet by not being Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's not been three years since Albion premiered at the Almeida Theatre, since which time Brexit has happened and, not without coincidence, Mike Bartlett's time-specific play is beginning to look like one for the ages. Set amongst a community in physical and psychic limbo, Bartlett takes the pulse of a people, and a nation, at odds with themselves. But whereas a lesser writer might opt for a harangue, Bartlett's tone (and the play's four-act structure, too) owes not a little to Chekhov, albeit here inflected with occasional dollops of Arcadia as befits a play set in a vast expanse Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” Director Richard Jones has certainly taken Beckett’s words to heart in this vividly comic, star-cast Old Vic double bill, pairing Endgame with a lesser-known short play – which acts as a sort of stylistic and thematic amuse bouche. The result is a richly engaging evening, though one that skirts real profundity.We open with Beckett’s Rough for Theatre II, a half-hour vaudevillian sketch in which two dark-suited, bureaucratic colleagues (Alan Cumming and Daniel Radcliffe, pictured below) discuss whether or not a man will commit suicide; echoes here of both Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The fast-rising young actor Jack Quaid comes naturally by the ease with which he takes to Plus One, a modern-day inheritor of the sorts of romcoms his mum, Meg Ryan, used to do alongside Tom Hanks. Playing a damagingly choosy singleton called Ben who realises that love has been staring him in the face all along, Quaid lends undeniable charm to a movie that often pushes back hard against it. Let's just say that Jeff Chan and Andrew Rhymer, the film's co-directors and writers, have come up with a putative partner for Ben whom audiences may well give up on, even if Ben ultimately doesn't: his Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Changing the gender of the title character “highlights the way in which women still operate in a world designed by and for men,” argues Chris Bush, whose reimagining of Marlowe’s play premieres at the Lyric ahead of a UK tour. It’s certainly a compelling idea – albeit one already explored in previous productions like Pauline Randall’s 2018 gender-swapped Faustus at the Globe – but the resulting piece, though impassioned, is unfortunately rather a muddle.Johanna Faustus (Jodie McNee) is the epitome of powerless: a low-born, 17th-century woman whose apothecary father (Barnaby Power) crushes her Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Take our country back!” is the rallying cry of the self-identified “real” Americans gathered to protest the arrival of immigrants. It could be a contemporary Trump rally – or, indeed, the nastier side of current British political discourse – but in fact this scene is from a 1986 musical, set in 1910, from an all-star creative team: book by Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof), score by Charles Strouse (Annie) and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Wicked). Despite that pedigree, it bombed on Broadway, but this opportune revival, transferred from Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre, gains potency by Read more ...
India Lewis
Published in the year following Orr’s death at the age of 57, Motherwell is an analysis of the author’s childhood in Motherwell, on the outskirts of Glasgow, and her first steps into adulthood. However, while this book is ostensibly about Deborah Orr the child, it is as much about her parents, John and Win, and about Deborah Orr the adult. Everything seeps into everything else, just as Win seeped into Orr’s life, claiming her daughter’s whole being as her own. As Orr recognises in retrospect, “I realise now that my mother’s main trouble was her pathological inability to understand at all that Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Cakemaker is Ofir Raul Graizer’s debut feature, and the film must somehow reflect the parabola of the Israeli-born director's life: it’s set between Berlin and Jerusalem, the two cities apparently closest to him, and one of its main subjects – alongside weightier themes such as grief and loss – is food, especially the rich experience of cooking. (Graizer’s biography records how he studied film, as well as – a phrase you don't expect to find in such contexts – “trained in kitchens as a cook and will soon publish his own Middle Eastern cookbook”.) The result is independent cinema at Read more ...