new writing
Tom Baily
Watching Milestone, a new Netflix original directed by Ivan Ayr, I was reminded of the films of the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. This story about an aging truck driver facing redundancy whilst grieving for his wife attempts the still mood and loneliness that Kiarostami favoured in his quiet epics. Milestone borrows a lot from existing filmmakers – no problem in itself – but does Ayr offer a unique style? Is Milestone just another Netflix original that isn’t really all that original?Suvinder Vicky plays Ghalib, the withdrawn driver (the echoes to Ramin Bahrani’s films are Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It wasn’t Jane Austen’s subtlest move, naming her roguish soldier George Wickham. As countless GCSE English teachers have patiently read in generations of essays, his surname sounds a lot like "wicked" – and wicked he is. Adrian Lukis, who played him in Andrew Davies’ 1995 TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, reprises the role in the perfectly pleasant Being Mr Wickham, livestreamed this past weekend from the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds by the Original Theatre Company. It’s Wickham’s less-than-successful attempt to clear his name of the mud Austen dragged it through in her novel. Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“The crocus of hope is, er, poking through the frost.” When he uttered that dodgy metaphor back in February, Boris Johnson probably didn’t predict that it would become the opening number of the third edition of Living Newspaper, the Royal Court’s anarchic, hyper-current series of new writing. Then again, there’s little BoJo does that the Living Newspaper writers can’t tear to pieces accompanied by a jazzy saxophone riff. There’s a new group of writers this time, providing short scenes stitched together into one big "newspaper", all set in different spaces within the Royal Court building Read more ...
Charlie Stone
If it weren’t for the warning on the blurb, the first chapter of Double Blind would have you wondering whether you’d ordered something from the science section by mistake. It's a novel that throws its reader in at the deep end, where that end is made of "streaks of bacteria" and "vigorous mycorrhizal networks" that would take a biology degree (or a browser) to decipher. As is often the case, though, it’s worth it once you’re in. Double Blind is one of those rare books that does everything the blurb claims it will do. Humorous, philosophical, gripping and – yes – scientific in turn, this is a Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
I’ll admit, I’ve never been a fan of murder mysteries. Patience is not one of my virtues; if I can’t work something out in 30 seconds, I’m liable to give up, and whodunnits tend to need a bit longer than that. Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Hung Parliament was, therefore, a lovely surprise: well-paced and earnest without taking itself too seriously, it’s a new interactive experience from Les Enfants Terribles, the company known for madcap, immersive work like their 2016 Olivier-nominated Alice’s Adventures Underground (which returned the following year). Don’t be fooled by Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Contact without touch: among the many readjustments that the pandemic has brought to theatre, its demands that restrict direct contact almost to nothing must be among the most testing. We have learnt much about how rigorously any new production – for now, only live-streamed – must be prepared: the regular testing in rehearsals, the two-metre distancing, the repeated cleaning of props. But what can it actually be like, once the process is finally rolling, to be performing without some of the most elemental physical resources of theatre, like embracing?There are moments in Lolita Chakrabarti’s Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
You go out for a walk and leave your devices at home; your head feels a little bit clearer. But when you get back and plonk yourself in front of a screen, has anything really changed? Our unhealthy, deliberately engineered dependence on technology, together with the corresponding virtualisation of our bodies, form the crux of Julia Bell’s concise essay Radical Attention. But the book left me doubting whether there is any true escape from the “meatspace” of split minds.Radical Attention gives us some poignant examples of the impact of technology – consequences we are probably aware Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Edition 2 of Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative, an experimental new piece of online theatre from the Royal Court, doesn’t mess around. Within minutes, a cry of "Tory scum" is echoing around the Jerwood Theatre – the refrain of an anarchic musical number presided over by a mannequin painted blue, wearing a shaggy blond wig. “Kids cant eat but They’re tryna tell/You its the statues that need saving?” raps grime producer Jammz, setting out exactly where the 27 creators of Living Newspaper stand. Those seeking apolitical escapism should look away now. But everything is political, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Travis Alabanza is black, trans, queer and proud. And they’ve got a lot to be proud about. In 2016, they were the youngest recipient of the artist in residence post on the Tate workshop programme, and two years later starred in Chris Goode’s wildly overblown adaptation of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. On Alabanza’s website, they boast that they are “known for increasingly paving much of the UK conversation around trans politics”, and certainly they’ve made an impact. If you want to know about safe spaces and communities for gender non-conforming and transgender people, this is the go-to activist. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A 35-year-old gay man has to figure out which way to turn in GHBoy, the Paul Harvard play whose connection to the chemsex world is embedded in its title. Will Robert (Jimmy Essex) settle into a relationship with Catalan university student Sergi (Marc Bosch) 15 years his junior, or will he succumb to the frequently unclad presence of Sylvester Akinrolabu, who plays the various tempters he meets along the way? What about the undertow of danger that has seen numerous men in Robert's stimulant-ready East London midst murdered of late? The grim spectre of serial killer Stephen Port has been Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard, somewhere deep into the 865 pages of Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee's capacious (to put it mildly) biography of the British theatre's leading wordsmith. As a literary artefact, Lee's exhaustive chronicle is a lot of words, and it's tempting to see her achievement as the non-fiction equivalent of, say, The Coast of Utopia, Stoppard's grandly conceived, three-part epic about political and intellectual life in 19th-century Russia.The difference here is that Read more ...
Matt Wolf
In normal times, Edinburgh Festival audiences would now be packing into the city’s invaluable Traverse Theatre, home to some of the most vibrant new writing in the country. Instead, the Traverse has created a new online venue, Traverse 3, that exists to extend its festival programme throughout the year and can point to an immediate success in a new 30-minute online film, Declan, adapted from a recent stage hit at this same address.The source material for the actor Lorn Macdonald’s directorial debut is Mouthpiece, the 90-minute play by Kieran Hurley in which Macdonald Read more ...