horror
Gary Naylor
In Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin wrote,"So life was never better than In nineteen sixty-three (Though just too late for me) – Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban And the Beatles' first LP."That might be the only point on which he and Joan Littlewood, a fellow poet, might agree, because she caught the zeitgeist and was doing iconoclastic work of her own in Stratford (emphatically not "upon Avon") with her revolutionary musical Oh What A Lovely War. Though it feels now to be something of an artefact in theatre’s archaeology, it has not lost its sting nor its Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The day after I saw the show, as went about the mundanities of domestic life, I wondered how long it would take to come across a reference to 1984. My best bet was listening to an LBC phone-in concerning next week’s conference at Bletchley Park on Artificial Intelligence, but the advertising break intervened, so I switched to Times Radio. Sure enough, at 12.11pm in a report on an apology issued by the Cabinet Office to journalist, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Big Brother Watch was mentioned as the organisation that animated the complaint. It was not felt necessary to explain much about its purpose Read more ...
David Kettle
An all-female production of Bram Stoker’s Dracula – well, kind of – that transplants the novel’s more local action to the northeast of Scotland, and finds a bloody new calling for one of its less ostentatious characters? Elgin-born writer Morna Pearson is asking a lot from Stoker purists in her bold reimagining of the iconic, endlessly retold tale for the National Theatre of Scotland.For some, truth be told, Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning might push their patience and credulity a bit too far. But ultimately, this is an ambitious, highly effective and gleefully provocative rethink of the classic Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Writing about the upcoming 60th anniversary of the founding of the National Theatre in The Guardian recently, the usually reliable Michael Billington made a rare misstep. He called for the successor to Rufus Norris, the departing artistic director, to stage neglected classics: “I would also argue that the National, given its resources, has a civic duty to revive the drama of the past that, Shakespeare aside, is in danger of being consigned to the dustbin.” But does it need to? Whilst it is obvious that an NT production would be a very different beast to a fringe show, Lazarus Theatre Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are times when it’s best to know as little as possible before taking one’s seat for a show – this new production of Rebecca would be a perfect such example.It was once talked up as the new Phantom, the next smash hit musical that would do on Broadway in the 2010s what it had done in Europe in the 2000s. Mysterious backers sent emails from dubious addresses, one bearing news of the death of a key investor and, while real sets were built and real actors rehearsed, the money, like the deceased investor, was never real at all. More than a decade on, Rebecca, adapted from the 2006 Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Mercy Falls isn’t the only Scottish film of the past year in which a young woman is haunted by childhood memories of a last summer holiday with her troubled father. And while Ryan Hendrick’s low-budget horror is unlikely to garner as much critical acclaim as Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, at least it’s more eventful.A flashback shows eight-year-old Rhona accompanying her dad (Gilly Gilchrist) on a trip to a remote cabin in the Highlands. In the middle of nowhere they come across a dying horse and Rhona watches in horror as Dad cuts its throat to put the animal out of its misery.Twenty years Read more ...
Justine Elias
At first, eight-year-old Peter tries to wish away the strange midnight noises as bad dreams, but the persistent knocking against his attic bedroom wall keeps him awake. His querulous mother (Lizzy Caplan, pictured below), assures him that he’s got a “beautiful imagination”, and “that there are bound to be bumps in the night.”It’s hard to tell if the boy (Woody Norman) is more frightened of being in school, where he dodges bullies twice his size, or going home, where he cowers under the glare of his controlling father (Anthony Starr, fairly vibrating with menace). Peter’s house, like the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Let’s face it, well over 50 years into Alice Cooper’s career, you probably already know whether his umpteen-billionth album is for you. Over the last decade, he’s revitalised things by taking a meta look at himself, but, whether harking back to his proto-punk Detroit roots or creating sequels to classic albums, his genial schlock-rock has settled to a calculable pattern.Nothing wrong with that. Worked for Motörhead and The Ramones. As with the later career of those bands, if the listener is inclined, Road has its moments. It's a concept album about being on tour. This is an environment where Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A Disney theme park ride adaptation remake is a challenging place to make your mark, and the dumping of Guillermo del Toro for promising real, supposedly child-freaking scares dampens hopes further. Replacement director Justin Simien (Dear White People) at least professes himself a fan of the titular attraction, and with screenwriter Katie Dippold (Parks and Recreation, Paul Feig’s female Ghostbusters) slips humanity into the corporate shilling.Simien personalises and improves on the original 2003 Eddie Murphy vehicle via casting and character detail. Protagonist Ben (LaKeith Stanfield) Read more ...
David Kettle
Casting the Runes, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ A viciously critical review gets its unfortunate writer driven mad and sent to an untimely death in this adaptation of a macabre MR James chiller. In that case, I’d better be careful what I say about British movement and puppetry company Box Tale Soup’s fluent two-hand staging. Though to call their Casting the Runes a two-hander isn’t strictly correct: actors Noel Byrne and Antonia Christophers (who also adapted the tale for the stage, adding in a few choice elements from elsewhere in James’s output) are joined by three puppets in Read more ...
Gary Naylor
That Shakespeare speaks to his audiences anew with every production is a cliché, but, like so many such, the glib blandness of the assertion conceals an insistent truth. The Thane of Glamis has had some success in life, gains preferment from those who really should have seen through his shallowness and vaulting ambition – he even says the phrase himself – and achieves power without really knowing what to do with it. The crown not only justifies the means of his ascension up the slippery pole, but its preservation becomes the sole object of his every deed. History does not record if Read more ...
James Saynor
The vogue for star ratings fixed to film reviews arrived after the heyday of exploitation movies, which is perhaps just as well because the whole point of such films is that they’re good and terrible at the same time.Like Schrödinger’s cat in quantum physics – dead and alive simultaneously – they’re both five stars and one star. Or at least that’s how many cineastes saw slasher movies in the romping, anything-goes era of postmodernism 40 years ago, when Quentin Tarantino was gleefully slinging work by Dario Argento or Abel Ferrara across a video-store counter somewhere.From that perspective, Read more ...