Harry Potter
Gary Naylor
Your response to Barney Norris’s one-man play, based on David Foenkinos’s bestselling novel as translated by Megan Jones, probably depends on which of the Gens is yours. The Gen Zs might turn a nose up, Joanne Rowling something of a discredited figure in their eyes. Millennials will identify straight away with Martin, the protagonist, whose life is "stalked" by Harry Potter. Gen Xs will catch the peculiar and unexpected impact of parenthood on a complicated, if hitherto stable, middle-class life. And, Okay Boomers, what about us? I was reminded of Kenneth Williams, Bernard Cribbins and, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Alexei Sayle, in his angry young man phase, once said that you can always tell when you’re watching a Shakespeare comedy, because NOBODY'S LAUGHING. That’s not entirely true, of course, but sometimes a director has to go looking for the LOLs and make a few sacrifices along the way in their pursuit. And, boy, oh boy, does Sean Holmes go looking for the laughs in this production of The Tempest – and don’t we suffer a few sacrifices as a consequence.The storm itself is a bit of water sprayed on The Globe’s famous groundlings, with our aristocrats boozing and partying like superannuated Club 18- Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Two years after the release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, we return to the Wizarding World once again for the next, somewhat convoluted, chapter in the five planned prequel instalments, with Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. Eddie Redmayne reprises his role as the bashful but brilliant Magizoologist, Newt Scamander (pictured below), joined by muggle-baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), and witches Tina (Katherine Waterston) and Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudol). Leaving New York, the quartet from the first film travel to a jazz-age Paris on the hunt for the troubled Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
London’s Palace Theatre this week celebrated the thousandth performance of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which opened there back in 2016. Like everything else JK Rowing puts her hand to, it’s been an outrageous success, taking the post-Hogwarts wizarding world further into the future than any other part of the franchise. At least that’s what I understand: I’ve only watched four of the films and read none of the books. However, the music from the production, in and of its own right, assuredly has something.Imogen Heap has been many times around the music biz block, never quite making it Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Imagine an orchestral concert made up exclusively of contemporary works by living composers: a programme in which every note was written within the last two decades. Imagine not only that this concert is sufficiently popular to fill a 2,000-seat hall with a noticeably youthful and diverse crowd, but that its format is already being replicated regularly by pretty much every major UK symphony orchestra. Now ask yourself how much critical attention such a concert would receive? You wouldn’t be able to pick up the Sunday review supplements for sheer weight of coverage, would you?Well, apparently Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Harry Potter has a lot to answer for. The phenomenal success of JK Rowling’s books, and of their film versions, and of the stage play (now set to remain in the West End for all eternity), has created a template of extravagant cultural impact that must still be bewitching prospective authors of the next big thing, as well as their prospective publishers and prospective readers. The HP phenomenon also provides plenty of material for satire. Step forward Thomas Eccleshare, whose short but fascinating new two-hander opened at the Bush Theatre tonight.Although it’s only 55 minutes long, Heather Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Harry Potter has a track record of trickery. He miraculously persuaded a generation of screen addicts to get stuck into hardbacks. Lately he has been luring multiplex junkies into the theatre to see live wizards on stage. Can Harry Potter make it a hat trick by coaxing his fans into a gallery? Harry Potter: A History of Magic is at the British Library. “I’ve got to get to the library!” says Hermione Grainger on the inside flap of the exhibition book. Is a trip to this library obligatory?The show is astutely pitched at younger gallery-goers. For one and a half days a week, you won’t be able to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a new ‘tec in town. Cormoran Strike may look like one of life’s losers – he’s on the edge of bankruptcy, sleeps in the office, and what passes for a personal life is a right mess – but in Tom Burke’s portrayal I suspect he’s going to be winning audiences in a big way. He’s the creation, of course, of JK Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith – the author’s chosen anonymity lasted barely three months – and her debut in crime writing is now a satisfyingly stylish BBC adaptation. Following on directly from these three episodes of The Cuckoo’s Calling come two based on its sequel, The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Name seven students in Ravenclaw. Which 14 subjects are on the syllabus at Hogwarts? Create a shopping list of 20 different types of magical sweet. In her Harry Potter stories JK Rowling conjured up an almanack of wizarding facts and figures which, for parents, proved extremely useful during long car journeys or steep mountain climbs (even if this parent didn’t know all the answers). A handy staple was “List 16 magical creatures”. It would keep them going for hours because, if memory serves, Rowling created only 14 of them. That all changes in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Yates is not the best-known film director in the world, but he has been at the helm of four of the most successful. All of them had “Harry Potter and the” in the title. After the last Potter movie he took a break among the computer-generated jungle foliage of The Legend of Tarzan, but he’s now back working in the service of JK Rowling’s imagination with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.His fantastic beasts, under the protection of magizoologist Newt Scaramander, can be found on the cinema from this weekend. Four more outings for Newt have been announced, so the world had better Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Harry Potter lives to see another day. The Hogwarts wizard has made his stage debut in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a two-part play that pushes JK Rowling’s world-beating franchise beyond the realm of fiction and film to embrace live action: the bespectacled boy has become an angsty grown-up, and London theatre is much the richer for it.But are these characters really three-dimensional? The answer is a resounding yes, if a moist-eyed audience following Sunday’s final curtain is any gauge. Indeed, the resounding irony across the marathon of more than five hours is that a production so Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Richard Griffiths, who has died at the age of 65 from complications during heart surgery, will be remembered above all for three performances, two on screen and one onstage. In Withnail & I (1987), he embodied in Uncle Monty a predatory homosexual who, according to the film’s director Bruce Robinson, was based on Franco Zeffirelli. Many years later Griffiths found himself playing a character parked on the same spectrum in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2005). As Hector, the teacher with a roving mind and wandering hands, he bagged a notable brace of awards in the form of an Olivier and Read more ...