Interviews
Adam Sweeting
An Australian who emigrated to New Zealand in 1965, Roger Donaldson cut his teeth in documentaries and TV before launching into a career in feature films. His first feature, Sleeping Dogs (1976), on the unlikely theme of a New Zealand plunged into totalitarianism, immediately attracted attention, and after he made Smash Palace (1982) Hollywood came calling. Donaldson embarked on a string of high-profile projects which included The Bounty (with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins), No Way Out (an espionage drama starring Kevin Costner), The Getaway (with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger), the sci-fi Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No one ever went to the theatre for the sound design. Indeed, only the nerdiest theatregoers could name a single practitioner of the art. But imagine attending a production by Katie Mitchell or Robert Icke or Ivo van Hove – or any less overtly authorial theatremakers – with the sound design stripped out. The visual story would be immeasurably impoverished.Thus it is with Salomé. The National Theatre’s new production is the work of Yaël Farber: the visionary South African director has gone back beyond Strauss and Wilde to the sparse biblical sources to tell the story of the princess in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Jez Butterworth is back. Even before the critics have uttered a single word of praise The Ferryman, directed by Sam Mendes and set in rural Derry in 1981 at the height of the IRA hunger strikes, sold out its run at the Royal Court in hours. It transfers to the West End in June. That’s good news for British theatregoers. in 2012, the last time Butterworth had a new play at the Court, almost no one saw it: The River starring Dominic West ran for three weeks in the theatre’s tiny upstairs space. Two years later it turned up on Broadway with Hugh Jackman in the lead.Will The Ferryman match the Read more ...
David Nice
Traditional musical formats rarely suit the individual talent, but the highly-motivated player always finds a way. I first got to talk to Alec Frank-Gemmill in the very sociable surroundings of the Pärnu Festival in Estonia, a gathering most musicians describe as the highlight of their year, with the phenomenal Estonian Festival Orchestra brought together by Paavo Järvi as its core. Frank-Gemmill's secure base is the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, another army of unusual generals. His solo engagements take him to extraordinary places, and thanks to the long-term support of the Borletti-Buitoni Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The seizième arrondissement, the Paris equivalent of Kensington and Chelsea, or Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Haussmann’s Paris par excellence. Here, in a gated complex where American heiress Florence Gould hosted lavish wartime salons, indulging in conduct which, come the liberation, she was required to explain, lives Charlotte Rampling. The marble foyer is vast, the lift small and cranky, like something out of a movie. By the time I’ve completed the slow ascent, the actress is standing at her open front door, a glamorous version of Kate from 45 Years dressed in white shirt, black trousers Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Brighton Festival, which takes place every May, is renowned for its plethora of free events. The 2017 Festival is curated by Guest Director Kate Tempest, the poet, writer and performer, alongside Festival CEO Andrew Comben who’s been the event's overall manager since 2008 (also overseeing the Brighton Dome venues all year round). This year the Festival’s theme is “Everyday Epic”.“Kate has this sense of the arts being important through the everyday of our lives,” Comben explains, “at the same time as acknowledging that, for everyone, things can take on epic proportions, whether that’s Read more ...
Heather Neill
She was Lyra in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials at the National, she has shared the stage with Eileen Atkins (in Honour and The Female of the Species), played Isabella in Measure for Measure, Regan in King Lear and Sally Bowles in Cabaret. She has worn bonnets in Bleak House and North and South, a corset as Elizabeth Darcy in PD James's Death Comes to Pemberley (pictured below) and a prison officer’s uniform in Accused, a gritty Jimmy McGovern story on television. An enviably versatile actress, Anna Maxwell Martin has won two BAFTAs (for Esther Summerson in Bleak House and N in Poppy Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Storey, who has died at the age of 83, was the last of the Angry Young Men who, in fiction and drama, made a hero of the working-class Northerner. His father spent his life down a Yorkshire pit, and out of guilt that he belonged to an educated post-war generation which ducked the same fate, Storey would always see his career as a daily series of grinding shifts mining black stuff from the seam of his own soul.He remained resolutely best-known for This Sporting Life (1960), his debut novel set in the gritty world of rugby league which three years on was made into a groundbreaking film Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In Radcliffe, an early novel by David Storey, one character murders another with a telling blow from a hammer. The author was later advised that Kenneth Halliwell was reading Radcliffe on the night in 1967 before he killed his lover Joe Orton, also with a hammer. But however many Orton plays Storey indirectly lost, he pulped many more of his own.In the first part of this two-part interview the writer, who has died at the age of 83, talked about the forces which shaped him: the fact that he dodged a life down the pit to pursue his ambition to become an artist, a choice paid for by a reluctant Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Artist and curator Tyler Mallison has chosen the world’s most generic title for his current exhibition. It's called New Material, and the surprising thing one discovers is that the hackneyed "new" really can be quite fresh. Sculpture and painting comprise display units, work desks, gym equipment, packing tape and whitewash. Several films feature window dressing, cross-dressing and gallery furniture. Meanwhile the whole show is haunted by a Madonna lyric and broadly identifies with the concerns of Generation X.Mallison’s interesting background might lead one to expect a certain utility, or Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tommy Sissons is a 21-year-old poet, originally from Brighton, now based in London. He has won a number of poetry slam championships, and has performed across the UK at venues ranging from the Boomtown Festival to the Royal Albert Hall. His debut collection Goodnight Son was published last year. Sissons has taught classes and workshops as far afield as Germany and as close to home as the Victoria & Albert Museum. He was a regular presenter of Channel 4 music programme Four to the Floor and was commissioned by the BBC to write a Remembrance Day poem in 2015. He will be appearing at the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Olivier Assayas was born into French cinema, as the son of screenwriter Jacques Remy, but his three acclaimed decades as a director have followed a mazy course. His latest film, Personal Shopper, continues his potent collaboration with Kristen Stewart (pictured below), after her supporting role in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014). She plays Maureen, a medium with a day-job as a supermodel’s personal shopper, who’s awaiting a post-death sign from her recently deceased brother. Assayas observes her with a mix of cool detachment, queasy eeriness and hot bursts of horror which typifies his work’s Read more ...