family relationships
Tom Birchenough
There’s a rather sublime equilibrium to Arthur Miller’s 1968 play between the overwhelmingly heavy weight of history and a sheer life force that somehow functions, against all odds, as its counterbalance. But in purely dramatic terms the scales of The Price are tipped from the moment that Gregory Solomon, octogenarian second-hand furniture dealer extraordinaire, wheezes his way into the action. David Suchet’s peerless performance, flavoured with a masterful spiel that puts his character squarely (and knowingly) in the traditions of Jewish comedy, has such bravado insouciance that everything Read more ...
Sir Trevor Nunn
So here we are with another edition of IQ, and the subject this week is theatre. Question one: which actor originated several leading roles in the plays of George Bernard Shaw, including Marchbanks in Candida, Dubedat in The Doctor's Dilemma, and Jack Tanner in Man and Superman? Answer: Harley Granville Barker. Question two: which writer originated the use of the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square as a home for new plays and rediscovered classics? Answer: Harley Granville Barker. Question three: which activist/essayist campaigned for a National Theatre to be an ensemble playing in Read more ...
Owen Richards
What's worse than grieving? That all-consuming loss. For those that have experienced it, nothing really comes close. It starts to bug Thomas (Jordan Bernarde, main picture second right) during his visit to the Williams household. Recently bereaved himself, he senses the fragility in the air but no-one seems to give a straight answer. Everyone would rather focus on him, talking at speed but never really engaging beyond the surface. In Blue, at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, this lack of communication is played for both big laughs and hard hits.Thomas has been brought to the house by Elin ( Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
The Fifties? They were terrible: bone-cold houses where people huddled round the fireplace for heat, empty Sundays that lasted a month, drawn-out rationing, bread you could build houses with. It was all making do and mending and "grey meat, grey people, everything grey," or so declares Susan Brown's Sylvia in a mother's get-real rant in Home, I'm Darling, the Laura Wade play now on the West End after a sellout run at the National Theatre/Dorfman last year and Theatre Clwyd before that. Women were frightened of a new invention called yoghurt, not to mention of husbands, who had all the rights Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Joel Edgerton’s second turn as a director is the second film in a year to treat the subject of gay conversion therapy. The first was Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post, whose victory at Sundance a year ago confirmed, symbolically not least, its origins within the world of American independent cinema. By contrast, Boy Erased comes squarely out of the studio system, with an approach to theme and broader treatment that is clearly aimed at a wider audience.For once, however, it’s not a case of Hollywood simplifying or reducing its starting material. Edgerton himself adapted Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The tortuous road to addiction and back again – or maybe not – makes for a faintly tedious experience in Beautiful Boy, notwithstanding the committed performances of an A-list cast. On the road to his second consecutive Oscar nomination following his breakout performance last year in Call Me By Your Name, Timothée Chalamet confirms a degree of sensitivity rare in actors of any age, and Steve Carell finds numerous ways to furrow his brow even when the film as a whole leaves you checking your watch. Based, unusually, on a pair of memoirs by a father and son, the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a stark power to Jack Gamble’s production of DH Lawrence’s The Daughter-in-Law, which has transferred to the Arcola’smain stage after an acclaimed opening run in the venue’s downstairs studio last May. It still plays with a concentrated darkness in this larger space, heightened by the colloquial vigour of Lawrence’s language (wonderful phrasings like "th' racket an' tacket o' children"), and the heady dialect of the Nottinghamshire mining area where he grew up; you don’t assimilate it immediately, but it certainly grows on you with its sinewy expressiveness.There’s as little Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How much more is there to say about the thrills and spills of midlife? Cold Feet made a surprisingly nimble return to ITV a couple of series ago after a long furlough. There was little evidence of stiff joints or saggy bottoms in Mike Bullen’s writing as he welcomed a gang of teens to the cast list. A second series of Cold Feet 2.0 wore the slightly botoxed rictus of a drama that was running out of new expressions and at that point it would have been no dishonour to call it a day.But no, ratings suggest there’s still a national appetite for this friendship group. The key to tolerating Cold Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Dallas writer-director Yen Tan has brought 1985 back to stylistic basics, and the resulting resolute lack of adornment enhances his film’s concentration on a story that achieves indisputably powerful, and notably reserved emotion. Independent cinema through and through, it’s economical in every sense and thrives on excellent all-round performances.Tan’s drama of family relations, set at the moment when the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic was gradually becoming clear to Middle America, takes us back three decades, and there’s a similar feel to the visual style that he and his cinematographer ( Read more ...
Matt Wolf
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade: that bromide is about the only one absent from the astonishingly bad Life Itself, which in actuality might require a stiff drink to make it through the film intact. Folding together an interconnected set of stories told across continents and out of sequence, writer-director Dan Fogelman (of TV's This Is Us) hurls one tragedy after another at his hapless characters, none of them so serious that they can't be caught up in the tidal wave of triteness. By the time we're informed, near the end, that "life brings you to your knees", you may well be full of Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
One emotional high point in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the much-lauded Simon Stephens adaptation that is back in our midst once more, comes when the teenage Christopher Boone is floated in the air as part of his dream of being an astronaut. It's a touchingly improbable, escapist fantasy – that a teenager with autism would be launched in a spacecraft – and it comes via a piece of stage magic when he is borne aloft by the rest of the ensemble cast, his pet rat, Toby, flying in tandem. Perhaps space is the solitary place where he won't panic and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of Lizzie Borden, controversially acquitted of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1892, has been explored many times on screen and in print (there’s even an opera and a musical version, not to mention the Los Angeles metal band Lizzy Borden). However, this new take on the story starring Chlöe Sevigny and Kristen Stewart from director Craig William Macneill and screenwriter Bryce Kass focuses forensically on the why rather than the who, and transforms the story into a fraught and penetrating psychological thriller.Fittingly for our Read more ...