America
The Fear of 13, Donmar Warehouse review - powerful analysis of a gross injusticeFriday, 18 October 2024
There is star casting, and there is casting the right star – not the same thing. The Donmar’s new production, The Fear of 13, succeeds in the latter category, in spades. The star in question is Adrien Brody, a child actor who left stage work... Read more... |
The Apprentice review - from chump to TrumpFriday, 18 October 2024
It’s common to say that Shakespeare would have liked such-and-such a modern story, but I think he actually might have gone for this one. The Bard’s eye was drawn to cruelty at every turn, and bad-to-the-bone cruelty seeps from each scene of The... Read more... |
Land of the Free, Southwark Playhouse review - John Wilkes Booth portrayed in play that resonates across 160 yearsFriday, 18 October 2024
Straddling the USA Presidential elections, Simple8’s run of Land of the Free could not be better timed, teaching us an old lesson that wants continual learning – the more things change, the more they stay the same.We open on the Booth family kids... Read more... |
Woman of the Hour, Netflix review - gripping drama follows a true-life Seventies serial killerThursday, 17 October 2024
“I knew he was risky, but like fuck it, everyone’s risky.” A young woman (Kelley Jakle) poses for pictures on a deserted mountain road in Wyoming in 1977, telling Rodney, a charming, award-winning photographer (Daniel Zovatto), about the boyfriend... Read more... |
Salem’s Lot review - listless King remakeSunday, 13 October 2024
A boy’s dead friend scratching at his first-floor window, Nosferatu-like vampire Barlow rearing up with heart attack shock…The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV take on Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot scared a teen generation out of... Read more... |
Trouble in Tahiti/A Quiet Place, Linbury Theatre review - top cast plays unhappy familiesSaturday, 12 October 2024
Most of us have been there: an impasse in a marriage, a bereavement in a dysfunctional family. Leonard Bernstein certainly had when he composed Trouble in Tahiti in 1952, basing the unhappy couple on his own parents and even the incipient problems... Read more... |
First Person: Lindsey Ferrentino on the play that has led Adrien Brody to the London stageFriday, 11 October 2024
I turn 36 this year, while living in London and rehearsing my new play The Fear of 13 at the Donmar Warehouse. The cast places a cake on my desk, covered in script pages and 10 pairs of handcuffs. I video the cake, the handcuffs, the singing actors... Read more... |
The Lehman Trilogy, Gillian Lynne Theatre review - three brothers, two crashes, one American DreamFriday, 11 October 2024
Merchant bankers then eh? It’s not a slang term of abuse for nothing, as the middlemen collecting the crumbs off the cake (in Sherman McCoy’’s analogy from The Bonfire of the Vanities) have a reputation for living high on the hog off the ideas and... Read more... |
Album: Immanuel Wilkins - Blues BloodFriday, 11 October 2024
Immanuel Wilkins’s third Blue Note Album – Blues Blood – has a big concept behind it. According to the album blurb, we are offered “a multimedia performance about the legacies of our ancestors and the bloodlines connecting us...”. It... Read more... |
Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit, Tate Modern review - adolescent angst indefinitely extendedWednesday, 09 October 2024
Like an angry teenager rejecting everything his parents stand for, American artist Mike Kelley embraced everything most despised by the art world – from popular culture to crafts, and occultism to catholicism – to create what he ironically called “... Read more... |
Things Will Be Different review - lost in the pastSunday, 06 October 2024
Time-travel is a trap in debutante Michael Felker’s tender sf two-hander, whose title’s grim irony becomes gradually apparent.There’s golden American promise in the sun and shadow of the diner where Joseph (Adam David Thompson) meets sister Sidney (... Read more... |
Joker: Folie à Deux review - supervillainy laid lowFriday, 04 October 2024
“Psychopaths sell like hotcakes,” William Holden observed in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, and those individuals have been doing good business for Hollywood before and since.We root for them and we don’t root for them at the same time, which is perhaps... Read more... |
