satire
David Nice
Men playing boys playing girls, women and men, all female parts convincingly falsettoed and high musical standards as backbone: Sasha Regan's single-sex Gilbert and Sullivan has worked a special magic on Iolanthe and The Pirates of Penzance, HMS Pinafore and now The Mikado, not so much. Energetic song and dance are still in evidence. But this time a hard-worked scout-camp setting – located, as advance publicity tells us to expect, some time in the heyday of Enid Blyton – brings very little to highlight Gilbert's immortal preoccupations with class and hypothetical sadism.Familiar Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Catfights can be entertaining, till the blood starts to flow – or, as in Onur Tukel’s brutal social comedy, you take turns putting your opponent in a coma. During three increasingly ritualised donnybrooks, Anne Heche and Sandra Oh batter past the title’s fetishising of female fights. In a way unlike any other film I’ve seen, they also lose the requirement to be likeable which can make standard female characters so insipid. As they pummel each other to the ground, they’re finally saying what they really think.Writer-director Tukel sets up former college friends Ashley (Heche) and Veronica (Oh Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It’s a bigly Trump-fest over at the Donmar, with adaptor Bruce Norris determined to make Brecht great again – or at least pointedly contemporary. Despite a legal disclaimer in the knowing prologue, the current tangerine regime looms large, replacing (or indeed merging with) Hitler as the main target in this parable of emerging demagoguery, set in Thirties gangland Chicago.All the Trump greatest hits are here, covered by Lenny Henry (pictured below with Simon Holland Roberts and Philip Cumbus) in the title role, from “nasty woman”, “losers”, “paid protestors” and “I have all the best words” to Read more ...
Richard Bratby
How well do you know your bad Victorian poetry? “When through the purple corridors the screaming scarlet Ibis flew/In terror, and a horrid dew dripped from the moaning Mandragores.” Go on, guess the author. Or how about this? “What time the poet hath hymned/The writhing maid, lithe-limbed,/Quivering on amaranthine asphodel". Got it yet? The first is Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, from 1881. The second, WS Gilbert’s libretto for Patience – written in the same year, and skewering Wilde with gleeful relish and lethal precision.If Liam Steel’s new production of Patience for English Touring Read more ...
Alistair Beaton
If you’d asked me five years ago whether I might one day write a comedy about fracking, I’d have wondered whether you were entirely in possession of your faculties. Not because fracking sounds dull and boring (although let’s be honest, it does), but because the business of fracking had never really caught my attention.That changed when I stumbled on some photographs of the effect of fracking on the landscapes of Pennsylvania, Texas, and North Dakota. From the air, some areas of those States resembled the surface of the moon. Astonishing then that dozens more states were giving the go-ahead to Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Like many first novels, Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall has a strong whiff of autobiography. It is a revenge comedy in which Waugh – like Kingsley Amis after him in Lucky Jim – transmutes his miserable experiences of teaching in Wales into savage farce.BBC One's dramatisation begins in Oxford, 1928. Paul Pennyfeather (Jack Whitehall), a milk-and-water theology scholar, is sent down from Scone College (full of fruitcakes), for “indecent behaviour”. His crime? To run into braying members of the Bollinger Club who, having already defenestrated a pig’s head (Oink! Oink!), proceed to debag him. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may be having a moment of déjà vu, as Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s new play (which lands in the West End after a UK tour) was previously a BBC film (shown in 2013), and a very fine one too, covering as it does a true story from the First World War. Now, with added music by Nick Green, they have turned The Wipers Times into an intimate stage piece.In the mud and mayhem of Flanders, in a bombed-out building in the Belgian town of Ypres (mis-pronounced Wipers by British Tommies), two officers – Captain Fred Roberts (James Dutton) and Lieutenant Jack Pearson (George Kemp) – discover an Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Residents' famous fusion of Fred Astaire’s most dapper top hat’n’tails look with a giant eyeball head is a masterpiece of surreal imagery. The subversive California outfit, who’ve been going for over 40 years, have regularly veered into other visual identities, but it’s their classic monocular showman who appears on the front of the latest album.However, if their image is well-known, The Residents’ music is less loved. Even alternative sorts tend to enjoy their conceptual direction more than the sounds. Much of The Residents’ appeal lies in their talent for anarchic satire and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's an irony to be found in the fact that America's 45th president is already abolishing any and all things to do with the arts even as his ascendancy looks set to provide catnip to artists to a degree not seen since the heyday of Margaret Thatcher. By way of proof, consider the smart, savvy theatrical pop-up that is Top Trumps, in which a dozen playwrights provide a kaleidoscopic range of responses to recent events that offers empathy and reason for alarm in equal measure.Battersea's 63-seat Theatre 503 is to be commended on a four-performance-only venture that surely deserves a broader Read more ...
David Nice
They dreamed the impossible dream in 1970, turning aspects of Cervantes' Don Quixote into the musical Man of La Mancha. But Purcell, Eccles and the lively dramatist Thomas D'Urfey - anyone know his hit song "The Fart"? - got there first nearly 300 years earlier when the Knight of the Woeful Countenance trod the boards at Drury Lane's Theatre Royal in a seven-hour entertainment.Harry Bicket and The English Concert devised a clever programme of joyous early showbusiness homaging the 400th anniversary of Cervantes' death - in the same month as Shakespeare's, astonishingly - by interweaving the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (****) hit cinemas in summer 1970, it is a pivotal Sixties film as it depicts the era in terminal crash-and-burn mode. Cashing in on but not a sequel to Valley of the Dolls, it caught the female pop-group trio the Kelly Affair’s assimilation into and corruption by Hollywood. Renamed the Carrie Nations, they consume drugs, have ill-advised sexual liaisons and sell records by the bucketful. Good-natured singer Kelly MacNamara (Dolly Read) side-lines her boyfriend – their manager – to purse an affair with a money grubbing beefcake.Characters vampirically Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Shamed and reviled, Richard Nixon had the misfortune (albeit self-authored) to be the star of one of the murkiest chapters in American Presidential history. It's not much compensation for him now, but he has become something of a goldmine for film-makers.Anthony Hopkins went to town on him in Nixon. Zack Snyder brought us a grotesque, parallel-universe Nixon in Watchmen. Frank Langella revelled in the wily, devious President in Frost / Nixon. Now here's Kevin Spacey with what could be the best Nixon yet, in Liza Johnson's delicious fantasy-satire about the day when the President met the King. Read more ...