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Apart from a few nips and tucks, age has not withered Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Anyone who can remember the original steamy adaptation of Andrea Newman’s fine novel will recognise the changes. Prue, no longer the manipulative cow who graced our screens back in 1976, has been made-over as an unworldly innocent, while husband Gavin – still a deeply unpleasant wife-beater - is now a chippy, working-class Yorkshireman rather than a chippy American. And Peter, the daughter-obsessed patriarch, appears to be an altogether more anguished soul - though one suspects this has more to do with Trevor Eve’s ability to play complex, nuanced characters far better than the stiff, granite-faced Frank Finlay.
Is it an example of our cultural insularity that no one I know has ever heard of Wajdi Mouawad? Born in Lebanon, he’s the most performed contemporary French-language playwright and his 2003 masterpiece, Scorched, has been staged all over the world. You’d think that the National Theatre would be begging to produce it, but no, that honour has fallen to Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic. Not for the first time, a state-funded venue has been trumped by a commercial one. In a bold production by Dialogue theatre company, which opened last night at the Old Vic Tunnels, a performance space under Waterloo station, Mouawad emerges as a highly intelligent and powerful chronicler of war.
What sound does a screaming foetus make? It’s not the kind of question that most theatre plays provoke you to ask, but Mike Bartlett’s new piece about climate change is not a normal play. At the end of the first half of this rollercoasting epic, dazzlingly directed by Enron maestro Rupert Goold and which opened last night, the image of a foetus crying out in the womb seems perfectly reasonable. It’s that kind of show; fuelled by a wildly imaginative vision, when it ignites it burns like phosphorous. And, believe me, that changes your perceptions.
Patagonia’s Welshness was a nagging issue for Gruff Rhys, mainman of Welsh psych-nauts Super Furry Animals. His distant cousin, the folk singer René Griffiths, was born in the desert-filled southern reaches of Argentina, but visited Wales and appeared there on TV in the mid-Seventies. Remembering those appearances, Rhys decided to visit Patagonia to search for Griffiths amongst the region’s Welsh-speaking community. Given a Rhys-hosted outing at the BFI, the resulting film Separado! was billed as being followed by a live set with Brazilian Furry Freak Brother-lookalike Tony da Gatorra.
Rupert Everett knows who he is: he is English, he’s a toff and he’s a poof, thank you very much. And that’s just about all you need to know to tell you that, as a breed, they’re pretty damned sure of themselves, these English toffs, poofs or not. But he’s also a pretty memorable actor. Yes, really. Let me try to convince you. I once saw him – and this must have been just before Another Country hit the big screen, for his name didn’t mean much to me then – on stage in Webster’s The White Devil. He looked cute enough in his period costume, but his energy was a thunderbolt. Not only did he bound and skid across the small stage of the Greenwich Theatre while declaiming his lines with convincing flourish, but he was also given to the odd rock star knee-slide. I wouldn’t say I’m susceptible to such a manoeuvre, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him. The boy had presence.
The Martin McDonagh phenomenon is a curious one. He burst upon the world in 1996, aged 26, born in Camberwell, the son of Irish parents. The quirk of fate that placed him in south east London may or may not have been the making of him. But by pure accident, and whether he actually knew the people involved or not, it aligned him with what was to become the abiding zeitgeist of the mid-Nineties: BritArt and Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. This may seem a red herring as an introduction to a review of the Young Vic’s revival of McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the play that set him on the path to fame and fortune in 1996. But if Hirst, Emin and co. have been notorious for one thing in common, it has been their brilliant exploitation of shock tactics.
No-nonsense Hayley Taylor is to the terminally unemployed what Jo Frost, aka Supernanny, is to the attention-seeking, tantrum-prone pre-schooler – but without the naughty step. In this reality three-parter she attempts to do what whole governments have so far failed to: to get members of the long-term, unskilled unemployed (what some might unkindly term the "Jeremy Kyle generation" – aka the underclass) back into the labour market. This she attempts to do, not by sprinkling magic Fairy Jobmother dust over the British economy, but by addressing the “negativity” of those she’s come to rescue from the jaws of the “The System” – aka the benefits system. And yesterday, in Part Two of the series – which, despite all we’ve come to expect from the format, is surprisingly low on trash and high on genuine insight – it was pretty clear that even benefits-busting Taylor had her work cut out.
"Oh! My Daddy, my Daddy!" It’s a cry that has echoed through the childhood of generations of English children, reducing all but the very staunchest to tears. Whether encountered through Edith Nesbit’s book or the classic 1970 film, The Railway Children is a national touchstone, sitting alongside Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland at the core of a proper English upbringing. With the film celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, what better time to don your knitted tam o’ shanter and climb aboard the latest theatrical adaptation, currently hissing and chugging its way into the disused Eurostar Terminal at Waterloo Station.
Kristin Scott Thomas possesses an altogether singular beauty: classical yet faintly wistful, intimidating at times but equally capable of enormous warmth. And because this English rose has professionally blossomed not just in the Anglo-American cinema (and theatre) but also in France, there's something faintly "other" about her. That, in turn, has been useful to this actress's stage turns in Chekhov and Pirandello and accounts for her infinite variety on screen. After all, not everyone could move with ease from John Lennon's Liverpudlian aunt to her latest film role as a French doctor's almost psychotically disaffected wife in Leaving. Now if only an enterprising theatre producer would cast Scott Thomas in Betrayal, and soon: that sense of mystery - of actions unexplained and thoughts withheld - is to the Pinter manner born.
Joe, Sam and Bruce may be three callow teenagers from southern Utah but they’re still smart enough to realise that the only world they have ever known is wrong, deeply wrong. So wrong, in fact, that they make the hardest decision of their lives by leaving their family, friends and community behind forever, as this is the only way to escape the madness. Directors Tyler Measom and Jennilyn Merton deserve credit for being such invisible presences in a film which simply bears witness to the lives of the boys once they have escaped the sinister-sounding “crick”, a Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints community fronted by "Prophet" Warren Jeffs - a man who is now serving 10 years to life for being an accomplice to rape, incest and sexual conduct with minors.
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Mad Men, Series 4, BBC Four
That sobbing musical theme resumes, so does that hospital-white dreamlike cartoon of a male figure tumbling in a Hitchcockian fall from grace past huge ads of poster girls. Actually it’s almost as much Milton as it is Hitchcock. I say that to be deliberately pretentious, because the secret of Mad Men’s addictive draw is the human profundity you try to…
Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 01:33
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Janelle Monáe, KOKO
The video for this Kansas fantasist’s new single shows Monáe in harshly lit close-up singing the adrenalin-charged “Cold War” directly to camera. But then halfway through the song her concentration goes and she starts laughing and then crying, leaving one wondering what the thinking was behind its release. Perhaps this “artist and business woman” (as she describes herself) deduced that…
Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 01:33
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What I'm Reading: Conductor Peter Phillips
Next to choose some favourite books is conductor Peter Phillips, whose touring lifestyle can make "summer reading" something of a year-round phenomenon. When Phillips founded the vocal ensemble the Tallis Scholars in 1973 it was a hobby among university friends – a “haphazard” group, as the director himself describes it. Decades later, with more than 1,000 concerts and 50 disks…
Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 00:20
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Raphael: Cartoons and Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel, Victoria & Albert Museum
To mark Pope Benedict’s controversial visit to Britain next week, the V&A have mounted an exhibition devoted to four of the 10 tapestries Raphael designed for the Sistine Chapel – the first time they’ve ever been seen in this country. Depicting the Acts of St Peter and St Paul, these bright, vivid works were made to hang on the lower…
Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 00:00
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