fri 25/04/2025

adaptation

The Ugly Stepsister review - gleeful Grimm revamp

Although both of the Brothers Grimm died around 1860, they still insist on getting dozens of film and TV credits in each decade of our present age. They might be seen, in a sense, as inventing the modern horror movie far more than Poe or...

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Ghosts, Lyric Hammersmith Theatre - turns out, they do fuck you up

A single sofa is all we have on stage to attract our eye - the signifier of intimate family evenings, chummy breakfast TV and, more recently, Graham Norton’s bonhomie. Until you catch proper sight of the room’s walls that is, which are not, as you...

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Midnight Cowboy, Southwark Playhouse - new musical cannot escape the movie's long shadow

It seems a bizarre idea. Take a pivotal film in American culture that reset the perception of The Great American Dream at this, obviously, pivotal moment in American culture in which The Great American Dream, for millions, is being literally swiped...

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Sad Book, Hackney Empire review - What we feel, what we show, and the many ways we deal with sadness

Who goes to the theatre to feel sad? That is, knowing full well that they won’t be going home with a skip in their step. Many people, it would appear, given the success of a small touring dance show based on a book by the poet and broadcaster...

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Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Musical, Theatre Royal Bath review - not a screaming success

In Italy, they did it differently. Their pulp fiction tales of suburban transgression appeared between yellow covers on new stands and spawned the influential Giallo movies of the Sixties and Seventies, gory exercises in an offbeat, highly stylised...

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Edward II, RSC, Swan Theatre, Stratford review - monarchs, murder and mayhem from Marlowe

“Don’t put your co-artistic director on the stage, Mrs Harvey,” as Noel Coward once (almost) sang. Tamara Harvey took no heed and Edward II sees her RSC compadre, Daniel Evans (pictured below, kneeling centre), back on stage after 14 years and...

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The Monkey review - a grisly wind-up

Longlegs’ trapdoor ending snapped tight on its clammy Lynchian mood, reconfiguring its Silence of the Lambs serial-killer yarn into a more slyly awful tale. Osgood Perkins’ hit fourth horror film seemed sure to elevate his career, but follow-up The...

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The Years, Harold Pinter Theatre review - a bravura, joyous feat of storytelling

Annie Ernaux’s semi-autobiographical book Les Années charts a woman’s life across time and space, history and memory, through what the author describes as a collective consciousness. Perhaps the most satisfying thing about Eline Arbo’s...

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Second Best, Riverside Studios review - Asa Butterfield brings the magic

Your response to Barney Norris’s one-man play, based on David Foenkinos’s bestselling novel as translated by Megan Jones, probably depends on which of the Gens is yours. The Gen Zs might turn a nose up, Joanne Rowling something of a discredited...

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Onegin, Royal Ballet review - a poignant lesson about the perils of youth

It would be hard to find an antihero more anti than Eugene Onegin. The protagonist of Alexander Pushkin’s long verse novel of 1833 is a wrecker of lives. Charismatically handsome yet arrogant, cynical and bored, his effect on those who fall under...

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Play On!, Lyric Hammersmith review - and give me excess of it!

If you saw Upstart Crow on television or on stage in the West End, you’ll know the schtick of Sheldon Epps’ dazzling show Play On! Take a Shakespearean play’s underlying plot and characters and relocate them for wit and giggles. “Make it a musical...

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The Lonely Londoners, Kiln Theatre review - Windrush Generation arrive in a London full of opportunities, but not for them

As something of an immigrant to the capital myself in the long hot summer of 1984, I gobbled up Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes’s novel of an outsider embracing the temptations and dangers of London.Written a couple of years earlier and set a...

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