family relationships
Amanda review - too-intense Gen Z-er seeks a friend, boyfriend, anythingSaturday, 03 June 2023
Needy, truculent, and aggressive, an in-your-face stick of intensity and guilt-inducing melancholy, privileged young Amanda in Carolina Cavalli’s downbeat comedy is the girl no one wants to end up talking to in the kitchen at parties. So... Read more... |
Aspects of Love, Lyric Theatre review - not much has actually changedFriday, 26 May 2023
Love may change everything, as we're reminded multiple times during Andrew Lloyd Webber's rabidly polyamorous Aspects of Love, but certain things about this 1989 London hit (and subsequent Broadway flop) are fixed.The sexual shenanigans tracked... Read more... |
Beau is Afraid review - life's ordeals in lengthy detailSaturday, 20 May 2023
Life's journey is a challenge, and then some, for Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix), the beleaguered Odysseus/Job (you choose!) equivalent figure at the savage heart of Ari Aster's new film Beau is Afraid. But imagine surviving unimaginable... Read more... |
A Brief List of Everyone Who Died, Finborough Theatre review - 86 years, punctuated by fun and funeralsSaturday, 20 May 2023
The family pet dies. It’s a problem many parents face, and when Gracie learns from her evasive father that her dog isn’t just gone, but gone forever, her five-year-old brain cannot process it and so begins a lifelong relationship with deaths,... Read more... |
The Circle, Orange Tree Theatre review - acerbic reflections on the price paid for loveFriday, 12 May 2023
Tom Littler opens his account as artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre with one of the more radical choices one can make in 2023 – directing a 102 year-old play pretty much how it would have been done in 1921.It’s all very period (... Read more... |
Return to Seoul review - lost in translationMonday, 08 May 2023
Freddie (Park Ji-min) is a social hand grenade, flinging herself into situations to see where the splinters fall. Born in Korea but adopted and raised by French parents, a seemingly impulsive, brief detour to Seoul sees her seek out her birth-... Read more... |
Dancing at Lughnasa, National Theatre review - largely ravishing Brian Friel revivalMonday, 24 April 2023
It's saying a lot when a production lives up to its gasp-inducing set. That's the happy case with Josie Rourke's loving revival of Dancing at Lughnasa, which returns Brian Friel's modern-day classic to the building, the National, where this Olivier... Read more... |
The Good Person of Szechwan, Lyric Hammersmith review - wild ride in hyperreality slides byMonday, 24 April 2023
As the UK undergoes yet another political convulsion, this time concerning the threshold for ministers being shitty to fellow workers, it is apt that Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the challenges of being good in a dysfunctional society hits London... Read more... |
A Thousand and One review - fighting the system in 1990s New YorkSaturday, 22 April 2023
AV Rockwell well deserved the Grand Jury award at Sundance in January for her debut feature film, A Thousand and One.It’s hard to believe that this subtle portrait of a troubled young woman trying to raise a child is the work of a first time... Read more... |
Lydia Sandgren: Collected Works review - the mysteries that surround us allTuesday, 18 April 2023
Lydia Sandgren’s debut novel, Collected Works, a bestseller in her native Sweden, has now been translated by Agnes Broomé into English, in all its 733-page glory. An epic family saga, it has flavours of the realism of her countryman, Karl Ove... Read more... |
One Fine Morning review - Léa Seydoux stars in Mia Hanson-Løve's poignant love storyFriday, 14 April 2023
In the first scene of Mia Hanson-Løve’s wonderful One Fine Morning, Sandra (Léa Seydoux in a minimal, nuanced performance), is trying to visit her father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), in his Paris flat. But, stuck on the other side, he can’t find the... Read more... |
Betty Blue Eyes, Union Theatre review - musical revival pigs out on nostalgiaFriday, 07 April 2023
People can’t find the food they want in the shops. Nobody has enough money. Public services are under pressure. And there’s a big Royal occasion to take our minds off things.England 2023? Nah, England 1947, as rationing applies to meat and fruit... Read more... |
