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£1 Thursdays, Finborough Theatre review - dazzling new play is as funny and smart as its two heroinesMonday, 04 December 2023
It’s 2012 and the London Olympics might as well be happening on the Moon for Jen and Stacey. In fact, you could say the same for everyone else scrabbling a living in Bradford – or anywhere north of Watford – and we know what those left-behind places... Read more... |
Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen, Bush Theatre review - charismatic stand-up routineFriday, 17 November 2023
The Comedian runs, bounces even, onto the stage. The audience immediately applauds. He seizes the mic and makes self-deprecatory gestures. Then he rubs the mic stand suggestively. We laugh. When he turns around we can see a laughing mouth printed on... Read more... |
Saltburn review - an uneven gothic rompFriday, 17 November 2023
This seems to be a season for films majoring on bisexuality, with the awards round encompassing Ira Sachs’s Passages, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, a story of high-class high jinks in a modern twist on Evelyn’s Waugh’s... Read more... |
Backstairs Billy, Duke of York's Theatre review - starry and gently subversive, tooWednesday, 08 November 2023
Rarely has a play's opening been so opportune. Just when it looked as if the West End was slipping into decline, along comes the smart, shrewd Backstairs Billy to allay mounting fears of late that the commercial theatre had lost all sense of quality... Read more... |
Fellow Travellers, Paramount+ review - four-decade saga of power, politics and gay loveSaturday, 28 October 2023
Derived from the similarly-titled novel by Thomas Mallon and directed by Ron Nyswaner, Fellow Travellers tracks the course of its protagonists through several decades of 20th Century American history. It’s also an account of changing attitudes to... Read more... |
Manic Street Creature, Southwark Playhouse review - songs in the key of a traumatised lifeFriday, 27 October 2023
There’s an old-fashioned feel to the story at its outset: Young woman, guitar in hand, Northern accent announcing as much as it always did, who makes a new life in London, all the money going on a room in Camden. One recalls Georgy Girl or Darling,... Read more... |
Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed review - the closeted life of a Hollywood greatFriday, 20 October 2023
Rock Hudson was built up as a silver screen archetype of heterosexual manhood, with his 6ft 5in frame and muscular physique, but his story has subsequently come to epitomise a Hollywood system built on illusions and delusions. Supposedly the kind of... Read more... |
The Flea, The Yard Theatre review - biting satire fails to stingThursday, 19 October 2023
A flea bites a rat which spooks a horse which kicks a man and… an empire falls?James Fritz has won writing awards already in his developing career, but he has set himself quite the challenge to weave a thread that can bear that narrative weight. Two... Read more... |
The Changeling, Southwark Playhouse review - wild ride proves too bumpy to land all its pointsThursday, 12 October 2023
Writing about the upcoming 60th anniversary of the founding of the National Theatre in The Guardian recently, the usually reliable Michael Billington made a rare misstep. He called for the successor to Rufus Norris, the departing artistic director,... Read more... |
Imposter 22, Royal Court Theatre review - ace on representation, less so on structureWednesday, 04 October 2023
The Royal Court’s collaboration with Access All Areas (AAA) may not be theatre’s first explicit embrace of the neurodiverse community on stage: Chickenshed has five decades of extraordinary inclusive work behind them and Jellyfish, starring Sarah... Read more... |
Wilderness, Prime Video review - twisty thriller that leaves a nasty aftertasteMonday, 18 September 2023
Jenna Coleman has had a mostly upbeat acting CV to date, notably playing Clara in Doctor Who and the young Queen in ITV’s Victoria. The mood darkened with her excellent turn as the French-Canadian girlfriend of the mass murderer in The Serpent; now... Read more... |
Makeshifts and Realities, Finborough Theatre review - Edwardian dramas with a pinch of ChekhovFriday, 18 August 2023
We’re in (pretty much literally so in this most intimate of venues) an Edwardian sitting room, time hanging heavily in the air, gentility almost visibly fading before our eyes. Two sisters (young, educated, attractive) bicker with each other. But... Read more... |
