England
Tom Baily
All is not well in Boston, Lincolnshire. Unemployment, immigration concerns, Brexit frustration, and the highest murder rate in the country. How do you solve the problems of contemporary Britain? Send in an American. And not just that. Bill Hixon (Rob Lowe) is the best: educated to Doctorate level, with the accolade of being America’s top Metropolitan police chief three years running. But Bill is also impatient, and lacks some basic people skills (not to mention he can’t grasp British irony and sarcasm). He’s also brought his teenage daughter Kelsey (Aloreia Spencer) with him. We gather that Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
If you go to a British country house opera to see a work about an addict and a cripple in a poverty-stricken Deep South tenement, you know the contrast between stage and garden marquee will be extreme. Seeing Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess at Grange Park Opera was never going to be a comfortable experience. But “no use complainin’ ” – it is a splendid show in surroundings that are almost too pretty to be true. Porgy and Bess is, at the best of times, an odd, hybrid drama with deep-seated problems of pacing and more. A heartbreaking story (by Edwin DuBose Heyward based on his 1925 Read more ...
Katherine Waters
It's the 2nd May 1997, the morning after the night that swept New Labour into power. We’re in the staffroom of a school somewhere in Britain and the teachers are jubilant. They've been glued to their TV sets for the results and have shagged and drunk through the night to crawl in with hangovers and pouchy eyes to face the day with a particular brand of frazzled optimism. But they're also anxious, because — according to the relentless logic of musical theatre which permits only extremes — today is the worst day to be a teacher. Today, of course, is muck up day.Between the ordinary mayhem Read more ...
graham.rickson
The British Transport Commission was created in 1948 by the Atlee government, an ambitious attempt to organise rail, road and water transport under a single unwieldy umbrella (for a time it was the world’s largest employer, with a staff of over 900,000). British Transport Films was set up a year later, the biggest industrial film unit in the UK. It was run by renowned documentary maker Edgar Anstey and survived until the late 1980s, its intention to promote the virtues of a newly nationalised transport network. The BTF’s output included travelogues and training materials, the more popular Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What could have been merely a cheap and cheesy piss-take registers as considerably more robust in The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson, journo-turned-playwright Jonathan Maitland's latest venture for his de facto home at north London's Park Theatre. While one foot is surely planted in Spitting Image, a top-rank alumnus from which can be found amongst the cast in Steve Nallon, Maitland's vision of Brexit-era Britain now and to come owes at least as much to something like King Charles III (minus the verse). The result is as funny as one might expect and chilling, too, in its portrait of a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The decades-long stage relationship between Judi Dench and Trevor Nunn translates to surprisingly little with Red Joan. This is veteran theatre director Nunn's first film since Twelfth Night in 1996. Top-billed in a supporting role, Dench brings her customary rigour and a continually fretful mien to this semi-fictionalised retelling of the plight of the so-called "granny spy", Melita Norwood, who was charged in 1999 with passing secrets to the Russians in their efforts to build an atomic bomb. (The film's actual source is Jennie Rooney's 2013 novel of the same name.) Caught unawares by Read more ...
Nick Hasted
No one was waiting for another Hellboy film, but here this rude, crude reboot is anyway, stomping all over Guillermo del Toro’s 2004 original with freewheeling energy. Based on Mike Mignola’s long-running comic about a grouchy demon summoned from Hell as a baby by Nazis, but raised to do monster-bashing good by adoptive dad Professor Bruttenholm (Ian McShane stepping into John Hurt’s ’04 shoes), this minor franchise has the advantage of existing outside Marvel and DC’s crowded universes.British genre specialist Neil Marshall draws deeply on Mignola’s stories. But where del Toro reverently Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Mary Quant first made her name in 1955 with the wildly fashionable King’s Road boutique Bazaar. Initially selling a “bouillabaisse” of stock it was not until a pair of pyjamas she made was bought by an American who said he’d copy and mass produce them that Quant began dedicating herself to her own designs. Fittingly then, the V&A’s exhibition is not so much about the clothes as the attitude – commerce topped Quant’s priorities, fashion was the means.The roughly chronological exhibition is spread over two floors. While the lower level deals with the early, post-war years when Quant’s Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Given that the life of Queen Victoria spanned the best part of a century, the first task for any biographer is to hack a path through the mountain of facts. It ought to help that the queen was a prolific diarist. Too bad for choreographer Cathy Marston that Victoria’s youngest daughter got there first. Princess Beatrice, claiming to be her mother’s appointed literary executor, devoted the latter half of her life to excising all the juicy bits and more besides. Not only did she re-write the diaries. She also destroyed the originals.This narrative two-acter for Northern Ballet, the third by Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
I am deeply jealous of Miles Jupp's dressing gown in The Life I Lead, the solo play at the Park Theatre. It's a silky-grey patterned number of exquisitely comfortable proportions, and just the sort of thing a chap should wear to tell the story of his life via some genial patter over an hour or two. The story told, though, is not of Jupp but of David Tomlinson, the British actor who died in 2000 and was famous for playing upper-class fumblers, in particular Mr Banks, the irritable banker father whose life is changed forever by Mary Poppins. Like that dressing gown, the play comes with Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Ray’s world has shrunk to a single room in a council flat. His life consists of drinking home-brew, smoking, gazing out of the window, listening to Radio 4 and sinking into an alcohol-induced stupour. There’s no need ever to leave his bedroom because his neighbour Sid does all the necessaries. A lone alcoholic asleep in a dingy room may not be the most gripping opening to a new British film Ray & Liz, but the scene is shot with such compelling attention to detail that a kind of squalid dignity is conferred on Ray’s solitary existence. The drama comes later when his estranged wife Liz Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Derek Jarman has always been described as irreverent, but, paradoxically, he is treated today with unreserved and probably excessive reverence. In the church of the avant-garde, and it’s perhaps not completely out of order to suggest that such an institution exists, he has been well and truly sanctified.Volume Two of the BFI’s monumental and impressive edition of Jarman’s video and film work will add to his status as genius and martyr. This lovingly assembled collection completes a remarkable account of the director’s work with the moving image, an extraordinary oeuvre as he was also writing Read more ...