England
Graham Fuller
Forty years later, they have haggard faces, grey hair if any, and sorrowful expressions tinged with incredulity at the outrages perpetrated against them. At one point, the burliest of them cries. One who struggled with drink and drugs says four of his colleagues committed suicide.To different degrees these British men, interviewees in the latest documentary by Hillsborough director Daniel Gordon, are suffering from PTSD. Most were born into the generation that fought in the Falklands War – one, in fact, served in Northern Ireland. It’s not as ex-servicemen that they tell their stories to the Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
A number of films in recent years have added a distinctly local flavour to the folk-horror genre. Mark Jenkin was inspired by Cornish superstitions in the ghostly Enys Men and Kate Dolan’s underrated You Are Not My Mother was ripe with Irish pagan practices and folk tales. The Moor, the directorial debut of Yorkshire-native Chris Cronin, continues in this lineage of imagining local folklore through the eyes of genre cinema. Moorland is a distinctly British habitat and has been the swampy canvas we have projected fears onto for millenia. It’s the home of Grendel-like creatures, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Imagine you’ve inherited a castle in West Sussex plus five square miles of farmland. You continue the family tradition of mixed arable and dairy farming, but the soil is so depleted that yields decrease, year on year. Even with the help of government subsidies, after 17 years you are £1.5 million in debt. So what to do?In 2000, faced with these dire circumstances, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell took a risky decision. Inspired by the nature reserve set up in Flevoland, Holland by Dutch ecologist Franz Vera, they abandoned farming, tore down the fences, introduced herds of Exmoor ponies, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One of Shakespeare's longest plays gets gets served up fast and filleted courtesy the director of the moment Jamie Lloyd, who is second to none when it comes to revealing the hidden performance strengths of various (and very varied) stars.Last year, his shivery Doll's House on Broadway brought Jessica Chastain a deserved Tony nod (she should have won), and his furiously dystopian Sunset Boulevard, starring an entirely revelatory Nicole Scherzinger, rightly swept the Olivier Awards last month, and will hit New York in the autumn. If Lloyd's alchemy doesn't work quite the same magic on the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a fierce, dark energy to the Globe’s new Richard III that I don’t recall at that venue for a fair while. The drilled cast dances seemed more frenzied, and there are more of them, and for once let’s start with a shout-out for James Maloney’s musical score. It’s a thing of some wonder, ranging from jazz palpitations and wiry strings to the throbbing beats of intrigue that riff on the rapid action of the “troublous world” unfolding beneath the musicians’ balcony.Elle While’s production fair speeds along, too, cutting a play that comes in the top five for length in the Shakespeare Read more ...
mark.kidel
It’s been a long while since Beth Gibbons released an album. Portishead’s Third was out in 2008. She has lived through so many changes since, and, even though her signature is still very much in glorious evidence, Lives Outgrown represents a step forward and deeper than the moody indie pop of Out of Season her last solo outing, made with with Rustin Man (Paul Webb) of Talk Talk.This is a brave mid-life album from a woman who doesn’t shrink from darkness. Beth Gibbons sang vocals for Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No.3 (“Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”) in 2019, as if that still and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This long, fascinating documentary was apparently intended as the centrepiece of last autumn’s BFI celebration of the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. But Made in England was delayed while Martin Scorsese (executive producer, presenter, and narrator) and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker (Powell’s widow, who also gets a credit as an executive producer) put the finishing touches on Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s a shame in some ways that the expectation of screening Made in England meant that the BFI season didn’t include the excellent BBC Arena Read more ...
An Actor Convalescing in Devon, Hampstead Theatre review - old school actor tells old school stories
Gary Naylor
One can often be made to feel old in the theatre. A hot take in a snappy 90 minutes (with video!) on the latest Gen Z obsession (is it even Gen Z, or were they last year, Daddio?) can leave one baffled or wondering whose gripe is it anyway. Sometimes the new blood feels like an exotic Type AB negative, when we’re boring old O positive and the transfusion is rejected.But, occasionally, we bus pass holders can be made to feel old in a nice, slippers and no pipe any more (doctor’s orders), way, the subjects familiar, the atmosphere warm, the themes washing over the fourth wall and not fired into Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
History is very present in Philippa Gregory’s new play about Richard III. Literally - History is a character, played by Tom Kanji. He strides around in a pale trenchcoat, at first rather too glib and pleased with himself, but quickly sucked into the action as Richard’s life plays out in front of him. If only Katie Posner’s production, which started at Shakespeare North Playhouse and is now at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmund’s, could draw us in so powerfully.The blurb describes “an explosion of tarmac” as Richard III bursts into the modern day in a Leicester car park, but Kyle Rowe’s entrance Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Shakespeare’s plays have ever been meat for masher-uppers, from the bowdlerising Victorians to the modern filmed-theatre cycles of Ivo Van Hove. And Sir John Falstaff, as Orson Welles proved in Chimes at Midnight, can be the star of his very own remix, bestriding three plays and dying offstage in a fourth. Inventive director Robert Icke has now created Player Kings out of the two Henry IV plays for this indelible character. It showcases Falstaff’s relationship with Prince Hal but leaves intact the frame of the play – Hal’s relationship with his father, Henry Bolingbroke, now Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Sam Taylor-Johnson has fashioned her biopic of Amy Winehouse with great care and affection, but sometimes, as she shows her subject discovering, love isn’t quite enough. The superb jazz-inflected singer from north London, who in 2011 joined the sad club of pop-culture luminaries who died at the age of 27, has already been given the documentary treatment by award-winning film-maker Asif Kapadia. Documentarists can expose their subject both visually and forensically, but a feature film has the tougher challenge of telling some of the same basic story without the mesmerising presence of the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Many an Edinburgh Fringe transfer has struggled when it moves to the big city, but the Dirty Hare company’s Gunter, sensibly embedded in the Royal Court’s intimate Upstairs space, has settled in nicely, thanks.Originally staged at the best Fringe venue for new theatre-making, Summerhall, where it won a Fringe First award last year, Gunter was devised by Lydia Higman (who also plays drums and Fender lead guitar and serves as narrator), Rachel Lemon (who directs) and Julia Grogan (who performs, main picture). Along with the other two women in the cast, Grogan plays the usual multiple roles Read more ...