drama
Kieron Tyler
Although the Ealing Studios’ melodrama Pink String and Sealing Wax was set in the 1880s and based on a play first performed in 1943, the film hit cinemas in late 1945 when World War II was barely over. The war saw a fundamental shift in the role of women in British society and the film’s scenario reflected this in how it revealed a devastating female reaction to an abusive relationship. After the empowered Pearl Bond takes matters into her own hands, it was clear that her husband Joe will not come out of it well.Pink String and Sealing Wax is also a drama of class as well as gender. Pearl is Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Alan Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves – first performed in 1969, in the round at the Library Theatre in Scarborough – was only his second play. Already, though, it has a few Ayckbourn tropes – warring couples and interconnecting sets – and concerns infidelity and the lies that couples tell each other (and themselves) to keep marriages alive.The play is set ingeniously in Fiona and Frank Foster's and Teresa and Bob Phillips's living rooms, melded into one and differentiated by furniture and furnishings. This also being a play about class, it's obvious which bits are the former's and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Halfway through its 10-week run, The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story appears to be running in real time as it slowly, painstakingly tells the story of how one of the US's biggest sports stars was accused of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman in 1994. But moving at what is – by modern television drama standards, at least – a glacial pace allows the creators to burrow deep into the American psyche and, more pertinently, examine the deep-rooted racism lurking in parts of US society.Writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski have set out their stall Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Three and a half years ago the writer Robert Jones and producer Kath Mattock came at the crime genre from an unusual angle. Instead of having characters in a murder case talk to one another, they all addressed the camera directly, each offering their own apparently unmediated viewpoint. The title took its cue from the direct style: Murder. Murder: Joint Enterprise won a Bafta. It has taken a while, but the single experimental film has given birth to a short series of three new cases.The first, The Third Voice, is set in small-town Scotland. Two brothers-in-law go fishing, but only one of them Read more ...
Barney Harsent
You can almost hear the words ringing out in the dramatic pauses. “We should call it Vinyl. Like, y’know... when you could hold music in your hand... touch it... FEEL it. When it was really WORTH something. The Seventies – that was when music had real value, when you had an album and it was like a book – something to treasure...” I’m not sure whether it would have been Martin Scorsese or Mick Jagger who said it, but at some point during the supposed 20-year genesis of this New York-based music biz drama, one of them did. Definitely.Vinyl, however, as the show’s near two-hour pilot ably Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Martin Rauch-stroke-Moritz Stamm, the reluctant spy who by the end of the final, double episode of this eight-parter had achieved more than most in that profession, managed the ultimate last night: he came in from the cold. In a series whose refrain could almost have been “You can’t go home again”, there he was back at the domestic hearth as if nothing had happened (except that his mother Ingrid was healed). Idyllic ending? The irony heavy in the air, of course, was that five years or so later the home he had come back to – East Germany – would itself cease to exist.If we became absorbed in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“It’s routine, it’s procedure.” “It’s wank, it’s toss.” As you can tell, Happy Valley is back. If Sally Wainwright made bespoke ironmongery or dry stone walls or exceedingly good cakes, her work would come by royal appointment. Instead you can tell she’s good because she accumulates awards, including most recently a couple of BAFTAs for series one, and attracts actors from the farthest-flung corners of northern drama such as Cucumber and Downton’s downstairs, all gagging to speak her pearly dialogue.The BBC iPlayer has been running a five-minute recap of where we’re up to pending this second Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“Warning: this show is not a ‘comedy,’” wrote comedian Louis CK in an email alerting fans to the impending arrival of the second episode of his new show, Horace and Pete. “I dunno what it is. It can be funny. And also not. Both. I believe that ‘funny’ works best in its natural habitat. Right in the jungle along with ‘awful’, ‘sad’, ‘confusing’ and ‘nothing.’”Just over a week ago, without any prior warning, American stand-up and writer Louis CK launched a brand new show, the first episode available to download from his site for $5. It’s a distribution model that has worked well for his stand- Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s 2016, and The X-Files is the most popular TV show in the world. The very idea that over 20 million people in the US would tune in to a new episode of the pioneering sci-fi drama 14 years after the last one might seem as preposterous as the conspiracy theories the show put forward in its later years, but it was probably more likely than fans in the UK hanging on for the fortnight it took for the new episodes to show up on Channel 5.The problem, though, is how to re-introduce a show that managed to combine being a genuine pop culture phenomenon with the sort of convoluted mythology that, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The opening scene of Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes plunges us into the darker depths of American society, post-2008 financial crisis. We’re in the world of home repossessions, and the blood spattered around the bathroom of one property by an ex-owner who wouldn’t go quietly speaks chillingly for what is in store.Bahrani’s title hints at wider issues, principally the 99/1 wealth distribution inequality that was a slogan of the Occupy movement, and his film shows how that process is consolidated in practice. We first encounter single father Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) as he attends a court hearing Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Every incarnation of totalitarianism has its own specific mythology, which exists in different forms as it is believed at home and “translated” abroad (or not, in both cases). North Korea surely occupies a special place in any such hierarchy, possibly because we’ve entered the late phase of totalitarian statehood (which seems doubtful), or because the incarnations of third generation dynastic Communism have become so peculiar that they stand out even by the standards of the genre.Either way, it's a risky business when an outsider tries to take us inside such worlds: it can involve a step of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Tobias Lindholm is something of a specialist in exploring the fate of enclosed groups under stress, charting how the dynamics of behaviour between men develop in crisis. I say men, though the Danish director’s name may still be better known in some quarters as a writer on Borgen, the outstanding political series set in another closely defined world where crisis followed crisis, though it's surely the female characters from there who endure more in the memory.Lindholm has obviously kept the loyalty of the Borgen cast, most of all Pilou Asbaek, who played its conflicted spin doctor, Kasper. Read more ...