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Laura de Lisle
When Bliss, a new play adapted from an Andrei Platonov short story by Fraser Grace, made its debut in Russia in early 2020, Cambridge-based company Menagerie were told that their production was “very Russian”.I’m no expert on Russian culture, but I would agree – in a good way. Paul Bourne’s production for the Finborough Theatre takes a while to warm up, but still packs a poignant punch.Nikita Firsov (Jesse Rutherford) has returned home from the Civil War to a post-apocalyptic landscape: rural Russia in 1921. There’s no food and almost no people. The price of stealing grain is execution, and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Harry Styles’ previous two albums sounded like someone rifling pleasantly through the history of pop and rock, but always genially and politely. More entertaining than his scalpels-ready critics wished when One Direction paused in 2016, those albums still didn’t fully hold together as bodies of work. Harry’s House does. It’s also more middle-of-the-road, albeit in a self-aware and musically sussed way.The nearest historical equivalent to Styles’ career is probably Robbie Williams, but whereas Williams went off on bizarre tangents that somehow usually worked, Styles is smoother. Even more so Read more ...
Gary Naylor
One of the more irritating memes (it’s a competitive field, I know) is the “Name a more iconic couple” appearing over a photo of Posh and Becks, or Harry and Megan, or Leo and whoever. I’ve always been tempted to close the discussion down with a photo of Bonnie and Clyde, because couples do not come more iconic than they are. So it’s a surprise to discover that Nick Winston’s production is the first ever musical dedicated to them in the West End, reviving a show that was in and out of Broadway ten years ago quicker than the Barrow gang were in and out of a Wells Fargo bank. Since then, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Juho Kuosmanen’s Cannes Grand Prix-winner observes two strangers on a train, taking the arduous journey from Moscow to Arctic Murmansk in 1998. Laura (Seidi Haarla) is a Finnish student hoping to study ancient rock paintings, Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) a skinhead Russian miner. Their first encounter is disastrously un-cute, as he leeringly suggests she’s heading north to sell herself, pawing her lap for emphasis. But this idiosyncratically romantic film testifies that most people have something in common, if forced together long enough to find out.Laura thought she’d be sharing her Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It’s not hard to see, watching Tom Fool at the Orange Tree Theatre, why Franz Xaver Kroetz is one of Germany’s most staged playwrights.Born in Munich in 1946, he’s known for unflinching portrayals of poverty and what it does to people. Directed sensitively by Diyan Zora, this production is a masterclass in what critic Richard Gilman dubbed “the theatre of the inarticulate” – but it does leave us yearning for a little more depth.The inarticulate in this case are the Meier family, of 1970s Bavaria. Martha (Anna Francolini) looks after the home while her husband Otto (Michael Shaeffer, pictured Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Steven (David Ames) is having a birthday party. He’s invited his closest friends – two of whom have recently started dating their personal trainer, Steve – and his partner, of course: Stephen (Joe Aaron Reid). Their eight-year-old son, Stevie, is being babysat by his grandma. Even the handsome Argentine waiter (Nico Conde) is called Esteban.As homages to Stephen Sondheim go, Steve, a play by Mark Gerrard previously seen Off Broadway and now inaugurating the Seven Dials Playhouse, is pretty obvious.Andrew Keates’ direction and Lee Newby’s set design make great use of the theatre Read more ...
Lizzie Hibbert
A garden is a space defined by its limits. Whatever its contents in terms of style and species, and however manicured or apparently wild its appearance, what distinguishes a garden from its equivalent quantity of uncultivated land is its enclosure within an uninterrupted border, which might be a wall, a hedge, a fence, or else natural dividers such as streams or woodland.The border creates the garden by shutting it off from the rest of the encroaching world. What is allowed to pass in and out of this bounded space is then up to a gardener: over this small portion of a chaotic planet, he or Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Edmond Rostand’s familiar story of ventriloquised love becomes a sensual, sacrificial tragedy, in Joe Wright’s heady cinematic Valentine, adapted by screenwriter Erica Schmidt from her own stage musical, with music by members of The National.The setting is somewhere between the 17th and 18th century, earthy history and fairy tale. We begin in the boudoir of Roxanne (Haley Bennett), as her maid explains the female facts of life: “Children need love, adults need money.” Cash comes from the sinister Duc de Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn), who sweeps her off to the theatre; en route, Wright builds a Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“You could read at home,” says Bettina (Anoushka Chadha), Year 10, her school uniform perfectly pressed, hair neatly styled. “You could be an annoying little shit at home,” retorts her sister Asha (Safiyya Ingar), Year 13, all fire and fury in Doc Martens and rainbow headphones. Two Billion Beats, Sonali Bhattacharyya’s new play for the Orange Tree, draws us in with snappy lines and raucous energy before delivering an emotional wallop.Asha is waiting to go home until their mum has left for work so she doesn’t have to talk about her history essay. She got 85%, but her mum only cares about the Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“If you want romance,” the cast of Emma Rice’s new version of Wuthering Heights say in unison just after the interval, “go to Cornwall.” They’re using the modern definition of romance, of course – Emily Brontë’s novel is full of the original meaning of "romantic", much wilder and more dangerous than anything Ross Poldark gets up to.Rice’s anarchic adaptation preserves that feral quality, with the Moor itself telling the doomed love story of Cathy (Lucy McCormick) and Heathcliff (Ash Hunter), but doesn’t do enough to keep up its energy.The opening is more Kafkaesque than Brontësque (though Read more ...
Marianka Swain
One of the many theatrical casualties of Omicron in December was the official UK opening of Moulin Rouge!, the stage version of Baz Luhrmann’s indelible 2001 film that has already racked up 10 Tony Awards for its 2019 Broadway production (albeit in a depleted season). Thankfully, the show is now back at full strength, and, if anything, its explosion of song, colour and eye-popping spectacle is even more welcome during these grey January days.Once again, we’re entering the fantasy that is the Moulin Rouge nightclub in fin de siècle Paris, where the show’s star, courtesan Satine (Liisi Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Three films, each restored to glorious 4K, make up Second Run’s Hungarian Masters set. Billed as “essential works by three of Hungarian cinema’s most renowned filmmakers”, each film earns that praise in its own way.Zoltán Fábri’s Merry-Go-Round is the first, released amid the final months of Mátyás Rákosi’s de-facto leadership, a period defined by intense industrialisation, militarisation and collectivization. Fábri and his contemporaries witnessed a severe decline in living standards, purges, and the deportation of more than half a million Hungarians to the Soviet Union, where Read more ...