teenage
James Saynor
Perhaps only in Japan might it be thought the height of delinquency for a bunch of schoolkids is to spend the night sneaking back to school, climbing in and hanging out in a music room. Happyend, a Japanese teen-rebellion story, shows its central posse of disaffected sixth-formers carrying out just such a wild and crazy stunt near the start.And then a couple of them – the facetious Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and the moodier Kou (Yukito Hidaka) – pull off a scallywag move that’s positively Dada-ist: they haul the principal’s prized marigold car onto its backside in the parking lot, like a “car Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Gibby Haynes is the wild-eyed crazy man who used to front the Butthole Surfers back in the 1980s and 1990s. At the time, there was none weirder or more out there than the Texan psychedelic punks – and even Ice-T was then prepared to step back and acknowledge their place in the pantheon of musical barbarians.Despite a recent avalanche of album re-issues, a new live disc and a forthcoming documentary film, the Butthole Surfers effectively came to an end 25 years ago. However, not being one to settle down and integrate into mainstream society, Haynes is presently back on the road with a group of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
I have two guilty secrets about the theatre – okay, two I’m prepared to own up to right here, right now. I quite enjoy some jukebox musicals and I often prefer schools-oriented, pared back, slightly simplified Shakespeare to the full-scale Folio versions. There – I’ve outed myself!So when I read that Joanna Bowman’s production of the rarely staged The Two Gentlemen of Verona was "a new 80-minute edit that’s the perfect introduction to Shakespeare for families" staged in The Other Place, where the history and iconography of Stratford Upon Avon hangs less heavy in the air, I was intrigued. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s a deal to be made when taking your seat for The Winter’s Tale. It’s one the title alone would have signalled to the groundlings as much as those invited to rattle their jewellery upstairs back in the 17th century – it’s a fairytale, a fantasy, a funny-peculiar play. Perhaps the only play outside pantomime in which a bear gets involved. The plot breaks into two halves and, whether you know that the sun will literally and metaphorically shine after the interval or not, the dark opening scenes can drag. Essentially we’re witness to what would, these days, be called a psychotic Read more ...
Gary Naylor
MOR. Twee. Unashamedly crowdpleasing. Are such descriptors indicative of a tedious night in the stalls? For your reviewer, who has become jaded very quickly with a myriad of searing examinations of mental health crises and wake up calls about the forthcoming environmental collapse, I often find comfort in material more suited to the large print section of the library. But the show still has to be good and that’s a big challenge when dealing with "smaller" subject matter.We open on a large scale doll’s house, and, to be fair, the allusions to Ibsen, Chekhov, Williams et al don’t ever fade away Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This concert was an effusion of pure joy. Billed as the German National Orchestra, the Bundesjugendorchester (Federal Youth Orchestra), all of whose players are aged from 14 to 19, make a glorious, powerful sound. Just over 100 teenage musicians packed the extended stage at Cadogan Hall last night, and played to a nearly full house.It was the orchestral players' smiles and their occasional unrestrained giggles which caught the attention, and told the story of quite how much they were all enjoying this concert and the whole experience of being on stage in London to make music. Their Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Pete Waterman, responsible (some might prefer the word guilty) for more than 100 Top 40 hits, said that a pop song is the hardest thing to write. Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back – all wrapped up in three minutes. Benedict Lombe’s Shifters takes longer – 33 Kylies longer – but it pulls off the same devilishly difficult trick and, as with the best earworms of the 1980s, it’s likely to stay in your head for years. Dre(am) is at his Nana’s wake when, late and unannounced, Des(tiny) is suddenly in the room, the impact of her arrival akin to his being hit in Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A visually dazzling, fiercely acted psychological drama with a manic comic edge, Hoard channels an 18-year-old South Londoner’s quest to lay the ghost – or reclaim the spirit – of her long dead mentally ill mother through her sexual pursuit of the 30-ish man she’s infatuated with. If the premise sounds like a recipe for a clichéd coming-of-age story, the film’s taboo imagery – magical but malodorous refuse, food muckily splattered on flesh during bouts of prolonged foreplay – imparts Freudian meanings to Luna Carmoon’s debut as writer-director. Originating in a story Carmoon wrote Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a too brightly tiled Gentlemen’s public convenience (Nitin Parmar’s beautifully realised set is as much a character as any of the men we meet), a lad is shaving his head. He’s halfway to the skinhead look of the early Seventies, but he hasn’t quite nailed it – he's too young to know the detail.Another walks in, older, confident to the point of arrogance, looking not just for another man, but for this particular man-child. Handing over a pair of oxblood DMs with the garish red laces, he doesn’t just complete the boy’s outfit, he inducts him into the two worlds that he will Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It is no surprise that the phrase “Witch Hunt” is Donald Trump’s favoured term to describe his legal travails. Leaving aside its connotations of a malevolent state going after an innocent victim whilst in the throes of a self-serving moral panic, it plays into a founding psychodrama of the USA - the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Arthur Miller’s play based on those events, The Crucible, is now embedded in the high school curriculum keeping the flame alive, so it makes sense for Talene Monahon to write a prequel from a feminist perspective and, after a run in New York, it has reached the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
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 did when presented with a ballot box in 2016 and 2019.Not that such weighty matters concern our two girls, out for a banging (in more senses than one) £1 Thursday night out, living for the sex and booze and rock’n’roll that get them from one week to the next. (Writer, Kat Rose-Martin, wisely keeps other temptations out of arm’s reach, one of many Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Molly Manning Walker surprised herself by winning the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes this year with her rites-of-passage feature, How to Have Sex. Why the surprise? It’s a compelling debut.For the first five minutes, you might decide you won’t stay the course without earplugs, or a lobotomy. Before we see anything, the soundtrack is of a landing announcement that’s struggling against the din of a plane-load of raucous young partygoers, ready for the off. Walker deployed a huge cast to populate the hotel pools and clubs of Malia in Crete, but we are trapped at first in a taxi with three Read more ...