class system
Mark Sanderson
At boarding school in the mid-1970s Matron – a grey-haired, sharp-beaked stick of a woman who put the fear of God into us – would often remark: “Remember, boys, always be polite to the lower orders.” She was referring to the army of cleaning and kitchen staff who kept the lino lethally polished and our stomachs full of stodge. It was as if the swinging Sixties had never happened. Even when the power was cut off during the winter of discontent there was always plenty of hired help to light the candles.Such archaic sentiment, even though the peasants have revolted, can still be found in leafy Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Do we really needed to hear more from Joe Lampton, the anti-hero of John Braine’s Room at the Top? His battle for social advancement and sexual self-expression has long since stopped holding up a mirror to society, you'd think. In fact we nearly didn’t hear more from him in this new BBC adaptation. Anyone turning on BBC Four one night in April last year expecting to watch would have been disappointed. Owing to a late-blooming rights dispute, the BBC decided on the day of broadcast not to go ahead. Now, 18 months later, with all legal ducks finally in a row, the first episode went out last Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Mid-September: the nights are drawing in and, to quote that well-known costume dramatist John Milton, the period detail is as “thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa”. Downton – praise be! – is back. However, before the third series even gets into its penguin-suited stride it seems that paradise is about to be lost all over again. Lord Grantham has blown most of his wife’s fortune: the Canadian Trunk Line Company has hit the buffers and gone bust. While the crusty aristo refuses to be a failure his dependents have far more important things on their tiny minds. Lady Read more ...
graeme.thomson
In the debating chambers and committee rooms of the Conservative Associations of Oxford and Cambridge lurk the Children of Cameron. The current cabinet is to a large extent an Oxbridge Old Boys club and succeeding generations are already being fattened up for the fray. Young, Bright and on the Right - and what an aimless title that was - picked two candidates and sharpened the knives.The film followed them as they negotiated the sharp end of student politics. Twenty-one-year-old Joe Cooke looked like a cross between Chris Evans and John Selwyn-Gummer and possessed a kind of dry charm and Read more ...
Carmel Doohan
Transferred from the Royal Court to the West End, this is a very tight staging of a very messy evening. Ten members of the Riot Club come together for a celebratory meal after “two terms out in the cold”. In a modest pub on the outskirts of Oxfordshire, they hang a bin bag on each chair, down their wine by the bottle and start on a 10-bird roast. The plan: to get “absolutely chateauxed” and trash the place in the traditional manner of their aristocratic ancestors.When Laura Wade’s play first opened, polling day for the 2010 General Election fell in the middle of its run, and reviews mused Read more ...
David Benedict
It's amazing what working on a masterpiece can do. Commissioned to write a companion piece to Terence Rattigan's magnificent one-act drama The Browning Version, David Hare has abandoned his journalistic tendencies and written a gently oblique play of controlled emotional eloquence. Beautifully directed by Jeremy Herrin and Angus Jackson, the engrossing pairing is a marvel of quiet restraint brimming with fear, love, pain and the whole damn thing."From the very beginning I realised that I didn't possess the knack of making myself liked." As desiccated classics teacher Andrew Crocker- Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Seeing Miss Julie played in-the-round would, I suspect, have delighted Strindberg. In his preface to the play, he was much exercised about the setting, presuming a proscenium stage: a single set, asymmetrical scenery, no clutter, no “tiresome” exits through doors, no footlights. And so on.I imagine that he didn’t envisage theatre-in-the-round, but he longed for some way of breaking the custom of formal staging (“nothing left to the imagination”) and tidy dialogue. He wanted actors playing “for the audience, not with it”, sometimes even having their backs to the audience whilst speaking. Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
“Everything’s so bloody uphill, isn’t it?” whined kitchen salesman Ted (Douglas Hodge) upon realising that he’d left the charcoal for the evening's barbeque at the supermarket. But the charcoal wasn’t really the problem. There was the girl from the estate over the road - “all big earrings and attitude” - dropping litter outside his house and then shouting abuse when he suggested she pick it up. There was the unspeakable package shoved through the letterbox shortly after he complained to the girl’s school and got her suspended. And there was the lucrative deal with developers that Ted may or Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Imagine my surprise when we weren't much more than halfway through this first episode, and the flipping thing hit the iceberg. But of course writer Julian Fellowes was way ahead of me, and his four-part series about RMS Unsinkable is evidently going to circle around the vessel's fate from various viewpoints in assorted time frames.Judging by the trailer at the end, next week's is going to home in on such prickly issues as whether the Titanic was going too fast or keeping an adequate look-out for floating hazards, and whether or not she was as safe as the designers claimed. In this opener, Read more ...
ash.smyth
In 1888, the extremely weird Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg, the radical lefty son of a shipping merchant and a housemaid, wrote a play called Miss Julie about the conflict between the classes, between love and lust, between obedience and servitude, and between all the possible variations on these knotty and tortu(r)ous themes. The seemingly perennial “relevance” of his story has since guaranteed endless theatrical re-runs (including productions set and/or performed in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Mississippi), a host of Miss Julie television dramas, films, a ballet, Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Lord count was perhaps surprisingly high in the first instalment of Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture. Among the talking heads I counted there was only one who wasn’t a life peer or a “proper” hereditary one, and there was only one who was neither Lord, Lady or Dame (though she did have a CBE). That hereditary baron Ferdinand Mount was not only squeezed into the minority corner but never actually uses his title was, I suppose, a telling comment in itself about contemporary Britain and our egalitarian self-image, but more so the fact that two of the lifers, Lord Bragg and Peter Hennessy, Read more ...
graham.rickson
You approach the theatre via a cobbled side street and you’re harangued by a Salvation Army officer, pleading with you not to go inside this house of ill-repute. The City Varieties is an under-appreciated jewel of a venue, a Victorian music hall recently reopened after an expensive refit. The carpets are no longer sticky underfoot and the seats are slightly comfier. Fortunately, not much else has changed. This is an extraordinary time capsule of a place.A two-minute walk from the garish delights of 21st-century Leeds, and it feels as if you’ve stepped back in time. Which is the point. Big Read more ...