Wales
Jill Chuah Masters
Netflix’s Sex Education has returned to our screens and streams. The show made waves last year for its refreshing take on the teen comedy-drama. It took on abortion, consent and female pleasure — subjects strikingly absent from our actual high school educations. The result was a show that was always bingeable, sometimes educative, and oozing with sex-positive delights. Not everyone liked it. But those of us who did — teenagers all over again — could not stop talking about it. These are high expectations for a show going into its sophomore season. But thank God and thank Laurie Nunn: this is a Read more ...
Owen Richards
Agnieszka Holland is one of Europe's leading filmmakers. Growing up in Poland under Soviet rule, her films have often tackled the continent's complex history, including the Academy Award-nominated Europa, Europa, In Darkness and Angry Harvest. In America, she's become a trusted hand for prestige television, with credits on The Wire, House of Cards and The Killing. Her latest film, Mr. Jones, starring James Norton, tells the true story of a Welsh journalist who exposed the terrible famines in Ukraine under Stalin. Holland spoke with theartsdesk about why she felt Gareth Jones's story was more Read more ...
graham.rickson
William Mathias: Choral Music St John’s Voices, The Gentlemen of St John’s, Graham Walker (director) (Naxos)I've a soft spot for neglected instruments, so any CD which includes a credit for chime bars is all right with me. Here they're deployed by percussionist David Ellis in William Mathias’s sublime A May Magnificat, scored for double chorus. Mathias requested that the choirs be of equal size and placed apart, and this Naxos recording really lets the antiphonal effects register. Feeling a little deflated this morning? Buy or download this disc now; it's kept me smiling for weeks. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sky Atlantic is usually where you go for big-hitting dramas, so this quartet of observational documentaries is an unexpected development. Each film follows a single family over three years, and each family faces particular challenges.In this opener, director Clare Richards went to Newport in south Wales to follow the progress of Tony Borg and his wife-to-be Emma, due to marry in May 2018. Both of them had a fair amount of baggage to bring to the party. Tony, an ex-boxer turned successful boxing coach, had eight children, and Emma had four. Indeed, by the end of the film, Tony had acknowledged Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What joy to be back with the Shipman and West families, created by writing team James Corden and Ruth Jones. It has been 10 years since sitcom Gavin & Stacey left our screens, and in this Christmas special there was some catching up to do as the two families, who alternate hosting Christmas in Billericay and Barry, were this year in South Wales.Gavin and Stacey (Mathew Horne and Joanna Page), who were expecting their first child when we last saw them, now have three children, and Nessa and Smithy's (Jones and Corden) boy is now 11, although still called Neil the Baby. Everyone was there, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
What Jenna (Tatiana Maslany, star of Orphan Black), likes doing is wrangling and coordinating, not creating – she hates that - which makes for a refreshing change in a heroine. Her new boyfriend Leon (Jay Duplass, pictured below, of the Duplass brothers), an ambition-free photographers’ assistant, tells her that, given her talents, what she must do is become a film producer and, in a lightbulb moment, her future is suddenly mapped out. They’ve just met while clubbing – he’s also a DJ - and there’s an instant attraction between them on the dance floor. But what will her ambition bring to their Read more ...
Heather Neill
This is the third Emlyn Williams piece to be presented here in a decade: The Druid's Rest in 2009 was followed by the enormous success of Accolade, directed by Blanche McIntyre, two years later.If it's a truism that neglected plays may well have been neglected for good reason, it is also true that forgotten work can chime unexpectedly with current taste or reveal new elements in the output of a writer previously dismissed as out-of-date. Terence Rattigan's reinstatement in the canon is the most obvious example, but the Finborough has made a reputation for rediscovering the work of writers no Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The Beggar’s Opera: does any piece of music theatre promise more fun and deliver more tedium? Yes, it was the satirical smash of 1728; yes, it inspired Brecht and Weill; yes, with its combination of popular melodies and a topical script it was effectively the world’s first jukebox musical. I get all that. I'm fortunate enough to live with an historian of 18th century theatre. Seriously: we talk about John Rich and Colley Cibber over breakfast. Yet time and again, as another thicket of Georgian slang gives way to another blink-and-you-miss-it musical number, I’ve found myself thinking of David Read more ...
David Nice
When Sean Mathias wrote A Prayer for Wings 35 years ago, the subject of young carers devoting their lives to parents with disabilities had just come as a revelation. That it's still very much a shame under another Tory government keeps this play topical, More important, it's eloquently written, with no false notes to the tedious daily grind of life for Mam and Rita in the disused Welsh church they're renting, and nothing too incredible about the dreams and hopes of the monologues they address to the audience.That helps to make the seemingly fantastical, the presence of angels and devils in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Memory involves places, people, things and words, especially words. This abstract proposition is given knotty life in Welsh playwright Ed Thomas's extraordinary new play, On Bear Ridge, which comes to the Royal Court after opening at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff last month. Over a compellingly Beckettian 85 minutes, conceived and staged as a rare example of metaphysical theatre, he shows how the decay of language eats away at memory, identity and life. Yes, it's a grim story of loss in a metaphorically resonant absurdist fable. And one in which Rhys Ifans performs a masterclass in Read more ...
stephen.walsh
One of the more harmless pastimes of us retired academics is rummaging around among the so-called minor contemporaries of great and famous composers. It often turns out that quite a few of them aren’t minor at all, or at least not minor enough to have to have retired academics dig them out. And two such composers made up nearly the whole of this fascinating opening concert of the annual Brecon Baroque Festival, an event well worth battling through floods, high winds and falling trees to be present at, as was necessary on this occasion.The 2019 festival is all about Bohemia, and the stars of Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
I wouldn’t want to live in Jack Thorne’s head. Nor Sarah Lancashire’s, for that matter. The Accident is Thorne’s latest four-part drama, and the final instalment in his grim and gripping trilogy of shows for Channel 4. The Accident’s predecessors were National Treasure (2016), about historical sexual abuse, and Kiri (2018), which starred Lancashire and centred on the murder of a young black girl. The Accident is shaping up to be just as compelling as its forerunners, while – if you can imagine – even bleaker in its outlook.The Accident focuses on the aftermath of a fatal explosion at a Read more ...