adultery
fisun.guner
This is a play that begins after the end of an affair, and threads its precise, forensic way back to the very beginning of it. As the lovers are awkwardly reunited after two years, the theme of deceit as a web of competing and ambiguous claims is firmly established. Jerry, a literary agent, has learned that Emma, the wife of his oldest and dearest friend, with whom he had an affair for seven years, may now be having an adulterous relationship with one of his writers. Emma, played superbly by the mistress of sexy sang-froid Kristin Scott Thomas, casually but unconvincingly dismisses his Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
What would opera do without the postwar British sitcom? Garsington Opera's new production of Rossini's Il Turco in Italia at Wormsley last night saw yet another opera buffa being sold to 21st-century man using the gestural language of 'Allo 'Allo and Fawlty Towers. It was as easy and enjoyable as a night in with UK Gold - but much nicer, for we were surrounded by fields and forests.
Chief comic attention-seeker was the brilliantly pitiable comb-overed cuckold Don Geronio (Geoffrey Dalton). You could trace the whole history of physical comedy in his anxious twists and turns, from Laurel and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
"There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature,” preaches the Gospel according to Richard Brinsley Sheridan. What the playwright omits to mention, however, is that it is possible to be ill-natured without in fact being terribly witty, a flaw that proves almost fatal for Warner’s acerbic, alienated new production of The School for Scandal. Overstyling Sheridan’s most stylised of comedies, Warner turns what Hazlitt described as the most “finished and faultless” play into a mass of tensions, exaggerations and contradictions. The result can be exhilarating in the moment, but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The protagonist in a coming-of-age movie is usually an adolescent, but in Cedar Rapids it's a fully-grown adult. The hapless ingénu in question is goofy and naive Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), dedicated 34-year-old salesman for the Brown Star Insurance company of Brown Valley, Wisconsin. In Lippe (pronounced Lippy) world, insurance isn't another name for dirty sales tricks and finding ingenious ways to weasel out of paying claims, but more like a kind of social service. Indeed, Brown Star's boss, Bill Krogstad (Stephen Root), prides himself on the firm's Christian values.When the action moves to the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's unlikely that this soap-esque miniseries about America's most notorious political clan will stir up the kind of furore in Britain that has engulfed it in the States. Over there, merely to mention the Kennedys seems to conjure up visions of a lost Eden (well, Camelot) in which America stood square-jawed against the Russians, won the race to the moon and policed the planet with its colossal Arsenal of Democracy. Add in the horrific assassinations of JFK and his brother Bobby and the obliteration of all that glamour and promise, and it's a great shining myth that even Hollywood has never Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Playing a prostitute on film has been big career business for some very famous actresses, not least Jane Fonda, Elizabeth Taylor and Julia Roberts, but it hasn't worked quite the same way on TV. Unless you count Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Or Moll Flanders. Or The Devil's Whore. Though maybe not Five's brothel sitcom, Respectable.Now here's Romola Garai taking aim at the enigmatic Sugar, the hooker with a keen intellect but possibly not a heart of gold from Michel Faber's novel, The Crimson Petal and the White. Faber's 800-odd pages have been boiled down into four parts by screenwriter Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“Love is no solution to life,” declares a line from Clifford Odets’s 1938 drama; and in straitened times, then and now, it’s a sentiment that carries considerable doleful weight. And yet every character here is in desperate search of that elusive something to elevate the banal business of day-to-day existence – a personal rocket to the moon. Without it, they are trapped in endless Monday mornings, soul-destroying work that doesn’t bring in enough to pay the bills, and relationships in which they turn into “two machines, counting up the petty cash”.The piece is rarely performed, and it’s not Read more ...
Ismene Brown
UPDATE 2015: Four years ago, in January 2011, I wrote this article about the music critic and biographer Michael Kennedy's search for the missing portion of Elgar's life. It identified a Mrs Dora Nelson as the composer's mistress and mother of a lovechild, who might have influenced some legendarily enigmatic aspects of Elgar's compositional output. A new development opened when an Arts Desk reader contacted me, who had taken up Kennedy's and my requests for others to pick up this unsolved mystery. Andrew Baker's work has since identified - unlikely as it may seem - a second Mrs Nelson, who is Read more ...
neil.smith
Canadian writer Mordecai Richler’s eclectic contribution to film includes uncredited work on Room at the Top, the screenplay for Fun with Dick and Jane and the original book behind Richard Dreyfuss’s early success The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Like that 1959 novel, his final tome, Barney’s Version, dealt with the colourful history of a Montreal Jew. Where Richler was alive to see the 1974 film of Kravitz, however, his 2001 death makes this adaptation of Barney something of a memorial to an author one suspects would be better known had he been born on the other side of the world’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Adultery has had a good press recently. Websites such as meet-to-cheat.com, illicitencounters.com and lovinglinks.co.uk have been in the news, and statistics suggest that more of us are being unfaithful than ever before. But although adultery is a staple of farce and mainstream drama, there are few plays that deal with the subject with quite the unsettling ambiguity and disturbing depth that characterise Martin Crimp’s modernistic play, first performed in 2000 and now beautifully revived by the up-and-coming Amelia Nicholson.Crimp’s love triangle is composed of a fortysomething couple, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Middle-class family angst is this season’s theme at the Royal Court Theatre. And, in his new play about sex and intimacy, which opened last night, playwright Nick Payne puts the lust in Wanderlust and creates a contemporary tale of wandering hands and wandering affections. We are in a nice suburban part of England, and the mix of pain and pleasure will be all too familiar to most audiences, whether they are teenagers who can squirm at the antics of the youngsters, or middle-aged couples who might find the more mature characters shockingly recognisable.Alan and Joy are a professional couple Read more ...
fisun.guner
Apart from a few nips and tucks, age has not withered Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Anyone who can remember the original steamy adaptation of Andrea Newman’s fine novel will recognise the changes. Prue, no longer the manipulative cow who graced our screens back in 1976, has been made-over as an unworldly innocent, while husband Gavin – still a deeply unpleasant wife-beater - is now a chippy, working-class Yorkshireman rather than a chippy American. And Peter, the daughter-obsessed patriarch, appears to be an altogether more anguished soul - though one suspects this has more to do with Trevor Eve’s Read more ...