Reviews
aleks.sierz
Stories about slavery tend to be simplistic: white perpetrators are bad, black victims good. One of the more striking features of Winsome Pinnock’s new play, The Authenticator, is her insistence that reality is always more complicated. Staged in the Dorfman space of the National Theatre, this production signals the playwright’s return here after her success with Rockets and Blue Lights in 2021, and reunites her with its director Miranda Cromwell. But does the complexity of real life undermine the inherent drama of this fictional tale?Well, the situation is simple: Fenella Harford is an Read more ...
Nick Hasted
David Mackenzie’s second superbly marshalled thriller in a year makes an unexploded bomb the backdrop for a London heist and its chaotic aftermath. Like his Riz Ahmed/Lily James crime film Relay, Fuze’s multi-faceted narrative roots outrageous twists in character and professional process, found here in feuding squaddies, cops and thieves. An opening swoop towards London’s gleaming high-rise skyline ends at the building site where a Luftwaffe bomb is unearthed, snub nose shark-like in the soil. Initially disorienting, parallel tales follow. Police Superintendent Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sarah Millican is at an age where she is pausing to reflect and in Late Bloomer, her most recent show – shown as a special on Channel 4 and Netflix outside the UK and Ireland – she ruminates on what the teenage Sarah would have thought of middle-aged Sarah.The former was shy and bullied, the latter is super confident and a hugely successful comic. How did she get from there to here?To set the scene, Millican divides children into two categories: late bloomers and eager beavers, and she has a handy list that explains the differences so we can see where we are along the spectrum. Among her Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The opening track is Hoyt Axton’s “Evangelina.” After first appearing on the 1976 album Fearless it was re-recorded and issued as a flop UK single in July 1980. The new version had also been an OK-selling US single in 1980. The reason this deeply atmospheric, velvety, yearning country marvel had UK sales potential after it came out on minor-league British imprint Young Blood was due to radio play: radio play on the BBC’s Radio 2.“Evangelina” illustrates exactly what Wednesday Morning 6AM - Radio Hits From The Small Hours 1970-1983 is about: the musical continuum defined by a maverick aspect Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time is a terrifying force in Romeo & Juliet, and Robert Icke's headlong production never lets playgoers forget that fact. Returning to a tragedy he first directed for Headlong touring company 14 years ago, Icke reprises many of the conceits deployed first time round, this time wedded to a starry company headed by Sadie Sink and Noah Jupe that, in the first act at least, gives pride of place to his supporting players.Some may resist the apparent tricksiness of devices that include repetitions or reprises of scenes, as often as not accompanied by searing flashes of light separating out Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Just a year after the first series, Your Friends & Neighbours returns to titillate and amuse us with the escapades of the moneyed but never satisfied burghers of Westmont Village. This mythical community somewhere in New York’s Hudson Valley has everything that money can buy, and probably a bit more, but does this make the locals happy and well-adjusted? Well obviously not.Jon Hamm returns to reprise his role of Andrew “Coop” Cooper, the former Manhattan financier who was axed from his job and is now pursuing an imaginative new career in burglary, while trying to be a responsible father Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Science on stage is quite the thing at the moment with a revival of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen opening at Hampstead Theatre next week and Lifeline, a British musical, injected into Southwark Playhouse for a six-week residency.It’ll be interesting to track the difference between the reactions of audiences and the critics as too many journalists dismiss anything beyond a bunsen burner or a percentage calculation as a matter reserved for boffins. Being proudly ignorant of such subjects appears to be on the person spec for a job at the BBC, but the explosion of science-based podcasts and YouTube Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
If ever there was a piece that epitomised the view that villains are infinitely more fun than heroes, it would be Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses and its subsequent adaptations. The amorality at play is positively delicious, not least when the culprits feast on each other. But how does that appeal work, as entertainment, at a time when real-life morality is under more constant, and more rigid scrutiny? Will Christopher Hampton’s celebrated stage adaptation become darker, more powerful, or simply leave a bad taste? I’m not suggesting that this latest Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There was something incongruous about seeing Basement Jaxx in a venue best known for regularly playing host to the likes of Scotland’s national orchestra and the roots and trad music of the Celtic Connections festival. Admittedly a chunk of seating had been removed to create a dancefloor down the front, but a sweaty club it is not, and waiting for the arrival of one of the UK’s preeminent dance acts while gazing around at rows of seats still felt strange. Perhaps it was simply an acknowledgment of the passing of time, given Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe have been doing this for over Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
François Ozon’s film of Albert Camus's The Stranger, one of the most iconic works of French existential literature, is as well-paced and restrained as the minimalistic novella from which the director faithfully adapted it.Set in bustling 1940s Algiers, where escaping the fierce sunlight and oppressive heat is impossible, the movie was photographed by regular Ozon collaborator Manu Dacosse in gleaming black and white with dabs of chiaroscuro, but not to the extent that the atmospherics are fetishised.It becomes clear almost instantly how the story is going to end. It will be in the darker Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The baldness of the titles the writer-director Stefan Golaszewski gives his TV series — Him & Her, Mum, Marriage and now Babies — is a misleading guide to the subtlety of their contents. These are, admittedly, Marmite dramas; but for those who love them, they are also finely crafted forays into the everyday existence of most humans today.Marmite actually features in Babies, in a scene midway through its six hour-long episodes in which Stephen (Paapa Essiedu) is munching one of the many slices of toast he gets through, this one smeared with Marmite. Which his wife Lisa (Siobhàn Cullen) Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title doesn’t refer to a void into which detectives disappear, but to Harry Hole, the fictional Norwegian sleuth created by novelist Jo Nesbø. Netflix’s nine-part series is derived from his book The Devil’s Star, adapted by the author himself. Getting the casting of the tormented but insightful Hole right is crucial, and they’ve done themselves some favours here by picking Tobias Santelmann for the job.Grizzled but capable of empathy, and ruggedly single-minded enough to ignore the threats and scepticism of senior officers, Hole is a classic bloody-minded loner, and Santelmann Read more ...