Reviews
Graham Fuller
Blitz, set on a vast CGI canvas in September 1941, is an improbable boy’s adventure tale that depicts the misery and terror that was inflicted on East Londoners by Germany’s eight-month bombardment. The enemy in the movie is not airborne, however. Writer-director Steve McQueen made it to educate audiences about contemporaneous white racism in Britain – proof that not all the British pulled together during the time of total war.It's a timely film given the race riots and hate crimes stoked by far-right agitators this summer – when would it not be timely? It gets its vital message across, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia begins like this: “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost”. Almost. Yes, that's good. We are in 1970s south-east London, and this immediately introduces, despite its tentative tone, the protagonist as a young man trying to define his identity.Like the original book, this stage adaptation — by director Emma Rice with help from Kureishi — explores the tensions between East and West, Buddhism and Islam, suburb and city, glam rock and punk, gay and straight, with some of the characters adopting fake identities as well Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There’s much to note and commend about Small Things Like These, a sensitive, gorgeously shot and moving adaptation of Claire Keegan’s acclaimed novel, about one man’s stand against the evils of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene laundries. But, for me, what is most striking about the film is the reminder it offers of the mystery of acting, and in particular its malleability; call it a gift, or a craft, but we too often underestimate the best of it, how extraordinary it can be for an actor to completely embody a character, real or fictional, so convincingly that an audience believes, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How we used to mock those stuck-in-the-mud opera houses that wheeled out the same moth-eaten production of some box-office favourite decade after decade. Well, Jonathan Miller’s 1950s New York mafiosi version of Verdi’s Rigoletto first arrived on stage in 1982, after The Godfather (Parts I and II) but well before The Sopranos. For ENO at the Coliseum, Elaine Tyler-Hall has now directed its 14th revival. ENO has lately borne the brunt of drive-by funding massacres by the ruthless (and opera-loathing) capi who control the UK arts-subsidy game. We get the appeal of guaranteed crowd-pleasers and Read more ...
How To Survive Your Mother, King's Head Theatre review - mummy issues drive autobiographical dramedy
Gary Naylor
It is unsurprising to learn in the post-show Q&A that each audience receives Jonathan Maitland’s new play based on his 2006 memoir differently. My house laughed a lot (me especially) but some see the tragic overwhelming the comic, and the laughs dry up. When it comes to humour, as is the case with mothers, it’s each to their own.It’s an unusual production right from the off when the playwright, who is also a main character, is also acting himself too – but not entirely, as there’s a pre-teen and post-teen version of him too, played by different actors. Got all that? When you add his Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
All three seasons of Industry are now on iPlayer, and after watching the most recent one and then backtracking for another look at the other two, I am still in two minds about it. With its forensic display of a toxic world where people are viewed as “capital” and anomie is the prevailing mode, is it masterly drama or an overheated mess? The pat answer would be, it’s both. Those two options become intertwined and indistinguishable the more you watch. Stylistically, it has a winning hand in its presentation of bouts of drink and drug-fuelled sex, wounding betrayals, vicious workplace Read more ...
David Nice
Name three operas framing dramas within, and you’d probably come up with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges. You might be harder pressed to come up with three more, but Wexford Festival Opera has done just that, theming this year’s triptych of rarities in the shape of never less than interesting, if often dramatically flawed, comedies by Donizetti, Mascagni and Stanford as “Theatre Within Theatre”.Nothing sinks to the dud level of Halévy’s La tempesta in 2022 or Erlanger's L’aube rouge last year. And nothing in the state-of-the-art Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Even by Stanley Kubrick’s standards, Dr Strangelove went through an extraordinary evolutionary process. After starting it off as a serious film about nuclear war based on the 1958 novel Two Hours to Doom, he decided to turn it into a comedy with the help of porn-obsessed satirist Terry Southern.The distinctive result – as remarkable for its futuristic War Room design as its weapons-grade humour – brazenly evoked the madness of a world on the brink. It’s not hard to see why – when human self-destructivity is breaking records on the Doomsday Clock – Sean Foley and Armando Iannucci thought this Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Anyone who has been on a British train in the last ten years will have been irritated to distraction by the inane and ubiquitous “See it, say it, sorted” announcement that punctuates every journey, but only Jonathan Coe has channelled that annoyance into literary form.A satire on contemporary Britain, an analysis of the political tectonics of the last 40 years, a thoughtful meditation on why writers write – The Proof of My Innocence is all these things, but its starting point is a howl of rage about the fact we can’t just enjoy a quiet train journey any more.Coe operates partly through Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Towards the end of the last century, the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar made a run of screwball comedies, starting with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989), and ending with All About My Mother (1999), that were full of life, language and the aberrant behaviour of strong female characters.In his new movie, The Room Next Door, his first full-length feature in English – adapted from the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez – the two main characters are once again a pair of indomitable women facing up to a crisis, but somehow both Read more ...
Robert Beale
Kahchun Wong’s third Bridgewater Hall concert with the Hallé in his inaugural season as principal conductor consisted of just one work: Bruckner’s Symphony no. 9 – but not in the incomplete three-movement version that until quite recently has been the norm in Manchester (and elsewhere).The story that only three of four planned movements were completed, with mere sketches for the last one being found at the composer’s death, was widely accepted, and when Cristian Mandeal performed and recorded it with the Hallé in 2007, and Ryan Wigglesworth played it with them in 2017, that was the version we Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kiri Pritchard-McLean has spoken on stage before about her interest in helping young people – including in her 2017 show, Appropriate Adult, in which she talked about being a mentor to a vulnerable youngster. In Peacock, her latest touring show which I saw as part of the inaugural Brighton Dome Comedy Festival, she talks about how she and her partner, Dan, came to be foster carers.There are, the comic informs us, more than 100,000 children in the care system in the UK. It's a subject that in less assured hands could be dull, preachy or an exercise in virtue-signalling – she Read more ...