England
Helen Hawkins
“Previously on Wolf Hall…” It’s been nine years since Claire Foy memorably trembled her way to the block as Anne Boleyn, recapped at the start of the second and final season of the BBC’s handsome Hilary Mantel adaptation. It’s a deathbound affair for all, though.The author herself is now dead; the original actor playing the Duke of Norfolk, Bernard Hill, as well, with Timothy Spall taking his place. Henry VIII’s pustulant leg has reduced his gait to an ominous slow limp; Jane Seymour – whom, the cross-cutting in Peter Straughan’s script suggests, he seems to be marrying concurrently with Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There’s a jolt or a surprise in almost every shot in Andrea Arnold’s Bird – her most impacted and energised depiction of underclass life yet. Photographed by Robbie Ryan, it’s a visual tour de force, one of the most exhilarating British films of 2024, but the affecting story it tells is undermined by its fleeting embrace of magical realism and the climactic swoop of a deus ex machina.Despite these caveats, Arnold remains British cinema’s most trenchant and influential portrayer of neglected, endangered girls and young women living in brutal or inhospitable environments. Claire Oakley’s Make Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
All three seasons of Industry are now on iPlayer, and after watching the most recent one and then backtracking for another look at the other two, I am still in two minds about it. With its forensic display of a toxic world where people are viewed as “capital” and anomie is the prevailing mode, is it masterly drama or an overheated mess? The pat answer would be, it’s both. Those two options become intertwined and indistinguishable the more you watch. Stylistically, it has a winning hand in its presentation of bouts of drink and drug-fuelled sex, wounding betrayals, vicious workplace Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Bloomsbury group’s habit of non-binary bed-hopping has frequently attracted more attention than the artworks they produced. But in their Vanessa Bell retrospective, the MK Gallery has steered blissfully clear of salacious tittle tattle. Thankfully, this allows one to focus on Bell’s paintings and designs rather than her complicated domestic life.The first picture you encounter was painted during a family holiday in Cornwall and dates back to 1900, the year before Bell became a student at the Royal Academy. Two thatched cottages cling to a steep slope by the sea. Punctuated only by the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The missing element is magic, the swooning sense of the romantic, spiritual and supernal which Michael Powell’s partnership with Emeric Pressburger found in the British and especially English soul, sharpened by Hungarian Pressburger’s fascinated love for his exile’s home.These five minor, pre-Archers films don’t fairly define Powell’s role – his elemental, important The Edge of the World (1937) also predates British cinema’s equivalent of Lennon meeting McCartney. Mostly made as subsidised, cheap native “quota quickies”, they show an apprentice director’s vigorous cinematic fluency and Read more ...
Tim Etchells
Forced Entertainment is a theatre company based in Sheffield, touring original performances around the world. The core group of 6 artists has been working together for 40 years, often inviting others to collaborate on particular projects. From the outset we wanted to make a different kind of theatre, incoporating influence from music, cinema, visual art, stand-up and performance art as well as from experimental theatre. The idea was to make theatre to speak about the times in which we were living, in a language born out of those times. The shows vary: lots of talking or none, loud music or Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I like laws and rules,” Steph (Jeany Spark), a jaded primary school teacher, tells a pet-shop employee – she’s adopting a cat, though that venture is doomed to failure - defensively. “They’re what separate us from the monkeys and chaos.”In Portraits of Dangerous Women, a quirky, small-scale movie directed by Swiss film-maker Pascal Bergamin and shot in Surrey and Sussex, rules are broken in a mild way. No one is very dangerous here, though the intimidating, boiler-suit-wearing Tina (Tara Fitzgerald), the school caretaker, went to prison for money-laundering, taking the rap for her ex.The Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As hurricanes rip into the American Gulf states with increasing ferocity, Eastern Europe disappears underwater and even the gentle British rain becomes a deluge, the arrival of Daisy Hall’s debut play Bellringers at Hampstead Theatre’s Downstairs space couldn’t be more timely,The scene throughout is a belfry, with bell-ringing ropes hanging overhead, where two men in monks’ habits have just arrived. Outside, rain is beating down. The two men, Aspinall (Paul Adeyefa) and Clement (Luke Rollason, pictured below), begin to argue about when they should ring the bells, whether they actually need to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Why should we not look back in anger? With the Oasis reunion tour in the news recently, the title of John Osborne’s seminal kitchen-sink drama – which kicked off the whole cultural phenomenon of the Angry Young Men on its first staging in 1956 – has again become familiar in its reminted version, to a new generation.Now packaged as Young and Angry, Look Back in Anger has been revived along with Arnold Wesker’s equally classic Roots (1958) at the Almeida Theatre in a mini-season with a shared cast led by Morfydd Clark and Billy Howle. But can these 1950s expressions of rage, whose verbal Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Old Man and the Land depicts a worn-out sheep farmer going about his dreary business as the seasons pass, darkly and dankly. He does it because he’s always done it, and because he doesn’t trust his 42-year-old daughter, Laura, despite her farming skills, or his 40-year-old son, David, the farm’s heir but an alcoholic and drug user who is unsuited to the work, to take it over.Played by the craggy non-professional actor Roger Marten, frequently shot in closeup, the farmer, a solitary widower, never speaks. Played by Emily Beecham and Rory Kinnear, Laura and David, each of whom covets the Read more ...
Jack Barron
Last year, Wendy Cope’s poem, "The Orange", went viral on TikTok. I’m not totally certain how a poem goes viral, but it did – and there’s nothing we can do about it.In fact, Faber & Faber actively did something about it and released a selection of Cope’s poems in a slim, transportable volume: perfect commuter fodder. It turns out that this was the beginning of a series, and we now have a similarly slim and comparably portable selection of Stevie Smith poems, gathered under the title of her most well-known work, Not Waving But Drowning.Of course, we only have two in the series so far, but Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Why do production companies think the world needs yet another reconstituted TV drama involving famous people in infamous situations? Newspapers and non fiction books already do a great job of telling these stories of intrigue and scandal: why is a TV adaptation a viable improvement?This is especially true when key moments of the action necessarily take place behind the closed doors of Fortress Firm and are effectively unknowable. All the production team can do is hire a decent writer to indulge in gifted speculation while they come up with a budget for securing the cream of the acting crop Read more ...