Donmar Warehouse
james.woodall
A play featuring false imprisonment, family members losing and re-finding each other, fathers and sons, forgiveness and reconciliation: it sounds like late Shakespeare. Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Life Is a Dream is indeed just post-Shakespeare - from 1635 - and hails from a culture, Golden Age Spain, which determinedly pushed drama on from where Shakespeare left it, producing over decades a torrent of story-rich plays at a time when England seemed to have given up the dramatic ghost.Life Is a Dream is by far Calderón's best-known work, outside the Hispanic world at any rate, and in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Away We Go is the name of Sam Mendes's fifth film, released in Britain this week. But the title could also serve as the buccaneering mantra of a Cambridge-educated Englishman whose career continues to shed any whiff of his home country. On stage or screen, the director is continually drawn to stories culled from across the Atlantic, where he now lives. And why not? If you had directed a first film called American Beauty that would lead to five Oscars and America eating out of your hand, you, too, might well return for more. Mendes's output isn't merely a reflection of his taste, although that Read more ...