satire
aleks.sierz
Some theatre genres seem indestructible. One of these is the satirical city comedy, for which playwrights dip their pens in poison and spray their venom over the teeming mass of the shallow, the stupid and the successful. When they do this today, they inevitably recall all manner of past plays from Jacobean and Restoration times to Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, and beyond. In American Trade, a new play from the immensely talented American playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, which opened last night, we revisit this familiar territory.Things start well. Pharus, a gay Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
"There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature,” preaches the Gospel according to Richard Brinsley Sheridan. What the playwright omits to mention, however, is that it is possible to be ill-natured without in fact being terribly witty, a flaw that proves almost fatal for Warner’s acerbic, alienated new production of The School for Scandal. Overstyling Sheridan’s most stylised of comedies, Warner turns what Hazlitt described as the most “finished and faultless” play into a mass of tensions, exaggerations and contradictions. The result can be exhilarating in the moment, but Read more ...
Veronica Lee
One of the great pleasures of being a critic is watching a career develop, and Stewart Lee’s is one that I’ve had the pleasure of, so to speak, for many years. I’m not a Stewart Lee completist but I enjoyed his early days on television with comedy partner Richard Herring in Fist of Fun (just about to be released on DVD for the first time) and This Morning With Richard Not Judy, his solo stand-up shows, his work on the wonderfully subversive Jerry Springer: The Opera and much, much more in between.I missed him in the early Noughties when Lee took a rest from stand-up and rejoiced when he Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Czech New Wave sprouted out of a fertile collaboration between film and fiction. Milan Kundera started out as a lecturer in film, lest we forget; one of his pupils was Miloš Forman. Both flew the communist nest to live and create abroad, which is why their names reverberate down the decades much more than those of the director Jiří Menzel and novelist Bohumil Hrabal, whose collaboration on Closely Watched Trains won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1967. They followed it with the delightful Larks on a String but, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia having put an end to the Prague Read more ...
fisun.guner
London’s literary world must be as small as it was in the 18th century. Or at least that’s the impression you get when you watch book programmes on the BBC, for it’s the same old characters that keep cropping up. Martin Amis, Will Self, Jenny Uglow – like minor players in a picaresque novel in which the novel itself is the hero devouring new experiences, you’re sure to encounter at least two of their like in quick rotation, ubiquitous with their insights and wisdom. And so it was with BBC Two’s Faulks on Fiction and BBC Four’s Birth of the British Novel. The first aired on Saturday Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Very early in 2003 I went to the offices of Faber & Faber in Bloomsbury to meet a first-time novelist. At 41, he looked slightly long in the tooth to be fresh out of the traps, even a bit roughed up by life. With seasoned teeth and capillaried cheeks, he had evidently survived a battle or two. It was his first ever interview. I remember asking him if he had any idea how good his book was. To be taken on by such reputable publishers after half a lifetime of epic underachievement was fairy tale enough. But that year the story moved rapidly on when Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre won Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Luke Haines holds a small cassette player to the microphone, switches it on and the sounds of birds are heard. It’s “Me and the Birds”, one of his new Outsider Music songs. His old Britpop-era band The Auteurs were guitar pop. His next outfit, Baader Meinhof, were edgier, noisier. After that, Black Box Recorder were artier. But this is beyond any of that. He sings of drinking cocktails in the lounge of a Travelodge with the birds he’s heard outside his window. The Suede reunion wasn’t like this.Although The Auteurs cropped up just before Britpop, Haines was more arch than the aiming-high Blur Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis originally came to fame in the late 1980s as one half of the satirical sketch group The Mary Whitehouse Experience, with fellow Cambridge alumni David Baddiel and Rob Newman. Now, though, most people know them (as a double act, at least) as the lead performers in The Now Show on Radio 4.You may also know Dennis as an actor in Outnumbered on BBC One, and as one of the regulars on BBC Two’s Mock the Week, where Punt also works behind the scenes (those ad libs don’t write themselves, you know), and Dennis is now also the frontman of BBC Two’s new improv show, Fast Read more ...
carole.woddis
I suspect there is a different production waiting to be unveiled for Witold Gombrowicz’s 1938 black comedy Ivona, Princess of Burgundia. Under the arches at Waterloo, tucked beside the station down a dark and dank service road is the Network Theatre. Home for half the year to amateur theatre, it also now hosts professionals such as Sturdy Beggars, a fledgling group set up by post-grads from The Poor School drama training space at King’s Cross. A complete surprise to me, the Network Theatre boasts one of the finest pair of red velvet stage curtains you’re likely to see in London, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The world of the media offers plenty of opportunities for satire, but the idea of a comedy about sub-editors at first glance seems odd. After all, the sub-editors, or subs, are hardly journalism’s most glamorous beings: these office-bound nerds spend their working days correcting the spellings of journalists and cutting their copy, while penning pun-heavy headlines and writing captions to pictures. Yet, as R J Purdey’s play - which was a sellout hit at this venue last year and now returns for another run - makes clear, there is some comic juice to be squeezed out of the dreams and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Sofia Coppola proved, with Lost in Translation from seven years ago, that there’s hardly a better location for showing the nuances of emotional dysfunction than the anonymity of an international hotel. No surprise then that much of her new film Somewhere, winner of the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, is set in the characterless corridors and rooms of the celebrity hang-out Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, though her investigation here of a central father-daughter relationship delivers a stronger emotional reflection than in the earlier film. Understatement remains the key in a Read more ...
simon.mcburney
For anyone who grew up in the former Soviet Union, Heart of a Dog is a seminal text. But it’s also in the great tradition of Gogol and all the Russian satirists. It springs out into absolutely delicious flights of fantasy, but really sharp-edged. The mixture is there in Ostrovsky too: both very dark and very funny and also suddenly beautifully poetic. The theme of the piece is the manipulation of people, about the way that in 1926, after the new economic miracle, Stalin has come into power and a lot of people realise that something is turning sour. It’s like when we got New Labour and people Read more ...