England
Helen Hawkins
The BBC’s latest “cool” Agatha Christie adaptation has many hallmarks of the decidedly dark ones that were considered prestige Christmas treats until recently. But although it’s lovely to look at, it’s low on chills and thrills.The 1944 Agatha Christie novel it’s based on, later a play, has been given a makeover by Rachel Bennette, whose reworking winds back the clock to the mid-1930s. We get the usual moody coastal setting with raging seas and lowering skies, and gloomy interiors that are so underlit you can’t see what’s happening at crucial points. Sunny south Devon this is not. But the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Nick Payne, the writer of Constellations, has created another 90-minute zinger for two actors. This one is much simpler in structure but poses equally potent questions about the nature of love and how it’s moulded by the passage of time.In Park Theatre’s pocket Park90 space, the teeny stage area is just about able to accommodate a double bed; behind it is a curtained window. A radio broadcast tells us we are in the midst of the Second World War and the Japanese are taking over southeast Asia. In the bed are Leonard (Barney White) and Violet (Cassie Bradley). As the slowly unfolding dialogue Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Folk rock has long been one of Jethro Tull’s strongest suits. Ian Anderson’s integration of Anglo-Celtic folk influences goes all the way back to the band’s second LP, Stand Up (1969), which drew also on Eastern and Eastern European music to affirm Tull wasn’t going to be hidebound by the blues rock sound of This Was (1968). Curious Ruminant, their 24th studio album, is their folkiest since Stormwatch (1979), which followed Songs From the Wood (1977) and Heavy Horses (1978) to complete the band’s inspired and – given the era, counter-intuitive – folk-rock trilogy. Though the hard-rocking Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Screen stardom is generally anointed at the box office so it's a very real delight to find the fast-rising Jonathan Bailey taking time out from his ascendant celluloid career to return to his stage roots in Richard II.His director, Nicholas Hytner, provided an early Shakespearean platform for this performer more than two decades ago as Cassio in the National's Othello, and the screen's current Fiyero in Wicked, soon to be seen in the latest Jurassic reboot, here graduates to one of the most luxuriant roles in the canon: a part so fulsomely written that the language itself can move a listener Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The date, projected behind the stage before a word is spoken, is a clue - 14th April 1912. “Why so specific?” was my first thought. My second was, “Ah, yes”.Sure enough, Akhila Krishnan’s video and Adam Cork’s sound floats us on a sea of troubles, as Denmark’s ship of state is battered by storms, literal and metaphorical, in a roiling Atlantic. After a fortnight in which that ocean has never looked wider nor choppier, a three hour examination of how a psychologically unstable man could eviscerate a polity seemed both timely and scarily portentous. But that, 425 years on, is why the play Read more ...
Lauren Mooney
It started with a Guardian long-read. I’m ashamed to admit it since so many shows could say the same, but that was the beginning.It was the summer of 2022, and James [Yeatman] and I had just finished making two shows back-to-back with our company, Kandinsky. It was a pretty brutal return to making work after the doldrums of lockdown, with first The Winston Machine at New Diorama Theatre (NDT), then SHTF at the Schauspielhaus in Vienna, beset by the Omicron wave of Covid. We’d had two rehearsal processes blown apart by illness, were totally exhausted, and felt like maybe we’d never have Read more ...
Justine Elias
There are no white-sheeted ghosts in this year’s A Ghost Story for Christmas. The BBC’s annual adaptations of MR James’s best-known stories have been a holiday favourite since the 1970s.More recently, in the hands of writer-director Mark Gatiss (pictured below), the series has been mining dread from the work of authors less well known for horror: Arthur Conan Doyle, for last year’s Lot 249, and Edith Nesbit (author of The Railway Children and Five Children and It) for this year’s tale, which is based on Man-Size in Marble. In the new adaptation, titled Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It is not just Twelfth Night, it’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will in The Folio, a signpost of the choices the inhabitants, old and new, of Illyria must make. Perhaps it’s also an allusion to Will’s own choices as an actor/playwright in the all-male company who cross-dressed (and maybe more) as women and girls without batting an eyelid. As is so often the case with the comedies, the great entertainer doesn’t hesitate to smuggle in a soupçon of transgressive psychology under cover of farce.We open on a young woman clambering out of the sea, shipwrecked but unbowed, soon seeking employment Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There's a tension in Alfred Hitchcock’s early films between misogyny and condemnation of the patriarchal suppression of women. The suppression was inherent in the original sources from which The Pleasure Garden (1926), Easy Virtue (1927), Champagne (1928), The Manxman (1929), Blackmail (1929), Juno and the Paycock (1930), and The Skin Game (1931) were adapted. Unconscious or not, the gynophobia that also flickers in these films is shared by The Lodger (1926), Downhill (1927), and Rich and Strange (1931). That it's intensified in Hitchcock's mature work, culminating in Psycho (1960) Read more ...
Justine Elias
From James I’s campaign to wipe out witchery to the feuding sister sorceresses of The Wizard of Oz and the new film musical Wicked, spellcasting by supposedly wayward women has never been able to avoid persecution and misunderstanding.British filmmaker Elizabeth Sankey, who admits a childhood fascination with TV's “good witches”, like Bewitched's Samantha Stephens (Elizabeth Montgomery), recently found a deeper, more disturbing kinship with such figures. After the birth of her son, now three years old, Sankey suffered depression so severe that she spent months in a mother-baby Read more ...
Justine Elias
Marie Curie excepted, movies about female scientists remain scarce, not just because STEM careers and Nobel Prizes still favour men. Now comes the British-made Joy, which explores women’s contributions to a decades-long quest to cure infertility.This cozy historical drama traces the leadup to the birth of so-called “test-tube baby” Louise Brown, the first person conceived outside the womb, with an emphasis on the behind-the-scenes work of a woman who helped make it happen. Along with Dr. Robert Edwards, an embryologist, and Dr James Steptoe, an ob-gyn, Jean Purdy, a nurse and laboratory Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Oblong Box is a phantom 1969 follow-up to Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General, sharing star Vincent Price and much cast and crew, after the brilliant young British director’s OD forced his dismissal days before shooting. It also began replacement Gordon Hessler and co-writer Christopher Wicking’s own Price-starring horror sequence, notably the bizarre, Mod anti-fascist Scream and Scream Again (1970), placing this obscure film at a packed cult crossroads.Witchfinder General’s savage account of Matthew Hopkins’ 17th century East Anglian rampage had been dragooned into AIP’s Poe-Price cycle Read more ...