Reviews
Gary Naylor
Hedda Gabler is a Hollywood star of The Golden Age – or rather, she was. She walked off the set of two movies into a five-film deal and didn’t come back. Millions watched her, but only a very select few saw her, and that paradox became insupportable. Those in the know were privy to a secret that would, in 1948 under the USA's racist Hays Code and its British mimicking, ruin her, professionally and personally. She knows that her Sword of Damocles swung closer every day, even behind drawn curtains.Tanika Gupta’s spectacularly successful reimagining of Ibsen’s classic is more than an "After…" Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Irish diaspora in London were out in force for Emma Doran’s appearance at Leicester Square Theatre. Her online work and her appearance on Amazon Prime Video's LOL: Last One Laughing Ireland has gained her a huge fanbase in Ireland and beyond – although she did ask if the English in the room had been dragged along by an Irish pal. In truth, they were probably fans anyway – and would surely have been at the gig’s end.Doran is energetic and warm-hearted, but there’s a steeliness about her, too, and occasionally some of her very frank material pushes the envelope, taste-wise. Mostly Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s a line in the late Richard Greenberg’s 2013 play that refers to a recently elected showbiz type turned politician who sports puffed up hair – but it’s not the current incumbent of what’s left of the White House but Ronald Reagan. For the first half of this well-made play, we are in 1980, the election has just returned the former governor of California, and the Bascov tribe is gathering for Christmas lunch (these are liberal Jews) at the vast Upper West Side apartment of Ben (Daniel Abelson) and Julie (American actress Jennifer Westveldt, in her UK debut). An outsize Christmas Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The problem with making TV dramas about unsolved real-life murder mysteries is that they’re still unsolved, unless the film-makers decide to invent a fictional denouement. This might well trigger an avalanche of legal and ethical objections.Thus, director Stefano Sollima’s four-part examination of Italy’s notorious “Mostro di Firenze” murders, which left a trail of 16 dead bodies between 1968 and 1985, can only hint strongly at the identity of the perpetrator (the individual in question vanished in 1988, and no further murders subsequently took place). But Sollima’s ambitions reach beyond the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A curious mind, indeed. Outer space, and what may be there. Communicating with those in the hereafter. Spooks, vampires and other horror film perennials. The wild west. Deceased rock ’n’ rollers Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly.Joe Meek’s preoccupations weren’t hidden. The records he produced and the songs he wrote reflected them. Much of his output was a form of musical autoportrait: auditory reportage expressing personal fixations. When he was at his commercial and creative peak in the early to mid Sixties, anyone could latch onto Meek’s obsessions via, say, a hit single like John Leyton’s “ Read more ...
Guy Oddy
As the Poppies’ set at Birmingham’s O2 Academy drew to an end on Friday night, co-vocalist Mary Byker barked into his microphone: “Reform is on the rise? Why is that? We shouldn’t be singing this song anymore”. The song in question had their home crowd pogoing like lunatics and howling back at the stage, “Ich bin ein Auslander auch!” at the top of their lungs.Strangely, Pop Will Eat Itself aren’t really thought of as one of the most political bands around, even if they did also play a rerub of their 1994 collaboration with the Prodigy, “Their Law” during the evening. Early in their career the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Write about what you know, they say. And just as her previous show was about imminent motherhood (she performed the show while heavily pregnant) now Janine Harouni brings us This Is What You Waited For, which is about – you’ve guessed it – being a parent.The American comic, however, doesn’t deliver a mushy paean to her toddler son, although he certainly provides a lot of comedy, not least about his big head and the bragging rights she gets for having birthed him.Rather, she digs into what it means to be a parent, how we all regress to our childhood selves when we're with our parents, and what Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The clatter of cool jazz on the soundtrack announces writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s latest project, the kind of score that back in the day would have announced a film by a maverick new talent. The film, her ninth, has been given a faded and vintage look, tricked out in shades of greige and tan that you see in ageing photos of the 1970s, as if it too was shot then.The setting is leafy Framingham, Massachusetts; the date some time at the start of the 1970s. But it’s a film about the American Sixties as much as anything, a turbulent era that has left a legacy of war, draft-dodging and growing Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra punches well above its weight when it comes to guest artists, and it was a big thing for them to have someone of the status of Alina Ibragimova as both soloist and guest director for this concert.She directed Haydn’s Drumroll Symphony (No. 103) from the leader’s chair, and wisely adopted a less-is-more approach, letting the opening drumroll (terrifically assertive from timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin) and wind theme unfold without her observably moving a muscle. This then spilt over into a main allegro that was as bright as a button, which nonetheless allowed for Read more ...
James Saynor
There’s something about hauntingly performed songs written in the first person that can draw us in like nothing else. As songs from Robert Johnson to Leonard Cohen remind us, they can take us into the mental recesses of their subjects – for instance, malcontents and killers – better even than a novel or a movie. We’re kidnapped by the voice.Bruce Springsteen seemed to insist on this more than anyone with his rough and unready 1982 album Nebraska – an echoing prairie lament for lost sanity – and ended up kidnapping himself, to judge by this new biopic that painstakingly traces Read more ...
Matt Wolf
I came late to the Old Vic's shimmering production of Mary Page Marlowe, Tracy Letts's Off Broadway play from 2018 which has arrived in London with Andrea Riseborough and Susan Sarandon leading a sizable and uniformly excellent cast. And I hope theatregoers will catch this too-short run while they can. Amidst ongoing chat – sometimes justified – about screen stars not being able to hold their own stage, Matthew Warchus's keenly attuned staging proves that just as often they very much can.Sarandon (pictured below with Hugh Quarshie), the Oscar winner an agelessly commanding 79, has Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Niall is unwell. Very unwell. Very, very. There’s a lot going on in his head. He can’t really hold things together. Evidence? Well, he’s lost his job and his girlfriend Natalie has left him. So, as desperation increases, he decides to phone his big sister Brigid – the trouble is, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning.When he wakes her up he’s a bit tongue-tied, and things go badly. Very badly. He’s not very good at small talk and she’s upset about being disturbed (someone is staying the night with her). They hang up, and the next thing he does is set fire to his hand. The consequences of this Read more ...