childhood
Hanna Weibye
The first Royal Opera House production to transfer to the West End stage, and Tony Robinson’s first theatre role in 16 years, is a dance-drama version of a children’s book about animals and features a man in a car costume being chased by comedy coppers during the interval. Dumbing down, do I hear you cry? Not a bit of it.Personally, I think one of the best things about the Christmas season is the effort made by purveyors of “high” culture to be more accessible to children: see The Nutcracker, Britten’s St Nicolas, Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. Like these august efforts, Will Tuckett’s Read more ...
David Nice
For seasonal fare that’s also profound, few pre-Christmas weekends in London can ever have been richer than this one. Hearts battered by John Adams’ nativity oratorio El Niño last night, one hoped for more soothing medicine this afternoon in the naïve and sentimental music of Berlioz’s sacred trilogy, first performed some 145 years earlier. With similarly perfect casting of soloists, an even more remarkable chorus and a guiding hand that was both firm and tender from the versatile François-Xavier Roth, superlative standards continued – making me wonder what on earth’s the point of compiling a Read more ...
Katie Colombus
With the current nostalgia for all things Dr Seuss, now is surely a good time to treat your little ones to the zany nonsense-rhyme stories as they are bought to life on stage. Kirk Jameson’s production has arrived, courtesy of Sell a Door Theatre Company, at the small West End venue of the Arts Theatre, a quaint, quirky place befitting of a uniquely looney show.The plot is primarily a telling of Horton Hears A Who, narrated by the Cat in the Hat, with other story elements woven in. Horton the elephant races to save a speck of dust upon which lives a whole microscopic community, and thanks to Read more ...
David Nice
“Translated Daughter, come down and startle/Composing mortals with immortal fire.” So W H Auden invokes heavenly Cecilia, patron saint of music, and it seems she did just that with Benjamin Britten, who set Auden’s text for unaccompanied choir and happened to be born on the saint’s day 100 years ago.On the day itself, this Hymn to St Cecilia was the one piece that cried out to be heard, so last night I headed up to Islington to hear The Sixteen – in this case The Twenty-Two plus harp and piano - in the atmospheric surroundings of the spooky Union Chapel, commandeered as part of the Barbican Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Former video artist Clio Barnard's second feature - which took Cannes 2013 by storm with its stark and striking humanity - takes inspiration and its title from the Oscar Wilde fairytale. However that's not the film's only, or most significant, influence: The Selfish Giant is, by its director's own admission, a response to the continuing, corrosive impact of Thatcherism, an ideology that put selfishness ahead of societal needs and pushed millions to the margins. And perhaps even more importantly than that, whilst making her first film, the ingenious documentary The Arbor, Barnard encountered Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A mine haunted by spriguns, an orphan menaced by a stranger who vanishes at will and the shadow cast over a village by the Black Death. Each is the backbone for the three films gathered on Scary Stories, the BFI’s fourth collection drawn from the archives of the Children’s Film Foundation (CFF). Although aimed at children, around an hour long and made with limited budgets, these subtle, well-crafted films sold no one short. All three are packed with shocks – and still pack punches for children of all ages.The Man From Nowhere (1976) is Victorian-set gothic of the highest order. On arriving to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The notion of childhood as any sort of state of grace gets exploded big-time in What Maisie Knew, a largely blistering celluloid updating of the 1897 Henry James novel from The Deep End team of co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel. True (for the most part) to the spirit of its literary source if by no means to the letter, the movie on its own terms captures the terror that adults can inflict on children, a bequest that a brilliant cast makes painfully plain. Suffice it to say that by the time Julianne Moore, playing the toxic mother of the eponymous Maisie (Onata Aprile), tells her six Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s rather gratifying that, in an area dominated by Americans (with the exception of the Moshi Monsters phenomenon) Bin Weevils is a very British success story. The pop-eyed cartoon insects first came into existence a decade ago as animations for Nickelodeon UK but in 2010 their creators split with the parent company and developed an online social world for children that’s proved massively popular, branching into magazines, trading cards and toys. Around half Britain’s under-10s have interacted with Bin Weevils - 20 million have registered and two million remain active users.This, of course Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is no formula for creating a hit musical. If there were, the history of the West End and Broadway would not be haunted by the many ghosts of bygone disasters. Let us not list them here. The lack of a roadmap notwithstanding, the long-awaited version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is ticking all the right boxes.For a start, there’s the belt-and-braces title itself, much loved as a book but perhaps as widely known via two film versions from 1971 and 2005. It has a big-shot director in the form of Sam Mendes, and in David Greig a book-writer who knows how to entertain childen, having Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Losing your pet mouse would be distressing enough. But misplacing the white rodent on a school trip to the Tower of London is beyond careless. It’s downright irresponsible. But that’s routine compared with turning yellow and then encountering a man who travels via the electric current he feeds from. Obviously, the errant school kid ends up set for a beheading in the Tower. All of which happens to John in The Boy Who Turned Yellow, a 1972 Children’s Film Foundation (CFF) production that’s bizarre, even by their eccentric standards.The captivating Boy Who Turned Yellow is one of the three CFF Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The latest film from acclaimed Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda (Still Walking) tells the story of two young brothers who are separated when their parents divorce and who attempt to bring their family together again. While its prosaic subject matter might sound far from must-view material, I Wish is absolutely a film to savour, one whose considerable folksy charm, humour and authentic spirit will take you hurtling back to your own childhood adventures.12-year-old Koichi (Koki Maeda) lives in Kagoshima with his mother (Nene Ohtsuka) and grandparents, under the threat of an active volcano. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Early on in Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene, John le Carré remembers Greene telling him that childhood provides “the bank balance of the writer”. Greene remained in credit on that inspiration front throughout his life, even while he struggled financially in his early writing days with a young family; later in life, too, he lost everything to a swindling financial adviser – the move to France was to avoid the Revenue.Greene went to Berkhamstead School, where his father was headmaster, and was bullied, not least for the assumption that he was a spy for paternal authority (the spy Read more ...