family relationships
David Nice
So many words, starting with the title - we're told we can call it iHo - and so many lines spoken by anything up to nine characters at once. But as this is the unique world of Tony Kushner, it's all matter from the heart, balancing big ideas and complex characters and leading them beyond the realms of any safe and simply effective new play, in this case towards a father-and-daughter scene as great as anything you'll see in the theatre today.This is a different sort of epic style to the freewheeling mastery of Angels in America. It's unusual to find a Kushner play where you can nominally Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What’s incest got to do with a town in North Yorkshire? At first this seems a reasonable question to ask of Al Smith’s brilliantly written, if a little bit tricksy, play, which begins somewhere nearer to Guilford than to Leeds. The central character is Patrick, the father of an under-aged teen daughter, and husband of a hardworking doctor. The daughter has a best friend called Carly, and an older boyfriend called Adam. At some point recently, she and Adam have gone to the northern town so that she can lose her virginity, so the title of the play is a wonderfully unlikely metaphor for an Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Q: How do you review a show that includes lines that ask “can my mouth swallow my mouth”? A: With difficulty, but I should be okay as long as I resist the temptation of being as surreal as Caryl Churchill is in this double bill of two short, but related one-act plays that were first staged in 1997. Collectively titled Blue Heart, each of the two has a separate name and each tackles a serious issue about family relationships with a breathtakingly confident imagination and thrilling theatrical panache. Each is experimental in form and unsettling in content.In Heart’s Desire, a family wait for Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Ambition trumps (if you'll forgive that verb) achievement in Ella Hickson's new play, a long-aborning exercise in time-travel whose audacity of vision can't override one's impression that the final result is an effortful slog. Tracing a mother-daughter relationship across several continents (not to mention 162 years), Oil doesn't so much conjoin the political and the personal as graft various musings on the topic of its title atop a distended family drama that only flickers into life in its final scene. Hickson bookends her action in Cornwall then (1889) and still to come (2051) while Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Existential realism” is a term, contradictory though it might sound, that comes to mind when describing the work of the great Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski. The films he made in the last five years of his life – The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and the Three Colours trilogy – may be his best-known, but the director had already been exploring the same fundamental concerns for a quarter of a century by then. Working in both documentary and short-film forms, some of those earlier works are as distinctive as anything that Kieślowski went on to create after the changes of the late 1980s Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The perception of Steven many-hats Berkoff as “one of the major minor contemporary dramatists in Britain” makes sense when you see this. Here are two chamber pieces, both two-handers, written 20 years apart, which gain hugely from being run together. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine either of them having much of a life as a single entity, since even combined they make a short evening at the theatre. But “minor” isn’t a term you’d normally reach for to describe a playwright whose name has become descriptive: Pinteresque, Beckettian, Berkoffian… Undeniably his is a style, an outlook, a poetic Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
American director Ira Sachs is becoming a master at telling the small stories of life, giving them a resonance that speaks beyond the immediate context in which they unfold. That context, for his three most recent films, has been New York, and he’s as acute as anyone filming that metropolis today in sensing how the city itself plays a role in the lives of those who make it their home.Or rather, as often as not, who struggle to do so. His last film, Love Is Strange, was about the tribulations involved in finding a new home for a long-established couple whose circumstances had changed (as had Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The family is a war zone. Bam, bam, bam. For some people, it can be the most dangerous place on earth. Its weapons include domination and betrayal, blackmail and abuse, and its frontline is memory – what really happened, and who is most to blame? In actor-playwright Nathaniel Martello-White’s new drama, this war zone is crossed and re-crossed with passionate vigour in a minimalist production that has some strong points and some frustrating aspects too.A young woman, Angel, has called a family meeting because she wants to discuss what happened to her when her mother swapped lovers, and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If you’re expecting family drama, the opening of Captain Fantastic will surprise. We’re following a hunter, greased-up so he’s invisible in the woods, stalking a deer. There’s an edginess to the scene, the atmosphere primal as the animal is killed. Other disguised forms emerge from the trees, and a ritual of smeared blood ensues – nature, red in tooth and claw.It feels a long way from civilisation; it transpires that we have been witnessing a rite of passage for eldest son Bodevan as he turns 18, orchestrated by his father Ben (Viggo Mortensen, bearded, back in The Road mode, on excellent Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Motherhood seems to be a thing for Sharon Horgan at the moment. First came Catastrophe, the Channel 4 comedy about unplanned parenthood she writes and co-stars in with Rob Delaney, and now Motherland, a pilot co-written with Graham and Helen Linehan and Holly Walsh for the BBC.Like Catastrophe, it's an acutely observed comedy, this time about middle-class mums in suburban London. Anna Maxwell Martin is superb as Julia, a time-stressed events organiser with two young children who has been relying on her mother for childcare. Julia's day starts out badly and unfolds into a series of disasters Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
“One of us is crying/ One of us is lying/ In her lonely bed/ Staring at the ceiling/ Wishing she was somewhere else instead…” Poor Juliet Stevenson must have wondered how she’d ended up like the girl in the Abba song – waiting for a call from her agent to apologise for getting her into this mess. It’s not Juliet’s fault. It’s the silly script.One of Us began last week on a dark and stormy night when a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds (but on recreational drugs) butchered a pair of newly-weds before car-jacking a Lexus and driving to a lonely Scottish glen where both sets of in-laws lived. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There are memorable appearances from two great actors playing close to the top of their game in Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love, but they’re almost upstaged by something else. Nothing human – though their reunion and interaction in the film is being “directed” by an absent third party – but rather the environment in which they find themselves: the stark desert beauty and almost unbearable temperature of California’s Death Valley.The fact that they are played by Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu, who play characters named Isabelle and Gérard, themselves two actors of a certain vintage Read more ...