fri 29/03/2024

Cornwall

Rebecca review - mishap at Manderley

When it was announced that Ben Wheatley would be directing a new version of Rebecca, his fans must have wondered what kind of exciting damage he would do to the neo-Gothic template of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel – and how he might spin the...

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Make Up review – coming of age in creepy Cornwall

Minutes into Make Up, Claire Oakley’s auspicious first feature as writer-director, unearthly sounds welcome unwitting Ruth (Molly Windsor) to her intimidating baptismal adventure as an 18-year-old who's not so much bi-curious as bi-phobic. A nail-...

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DVD/Blu-ray: Bait

Mark Jenkin’s black and white masterpiece about clashes between incomers and locals in a Cornish fishing village was made on a 1976 clockwork Bolex camera that doesn’t record sound – all that’s added later, including the actors’ voices – and hand-...

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CD: Gwenno - Le Kov

There was a hint of what was to come in Gwenno Saunders’ debut, Y Dydd Olaf. It was, for the most part, a Welsh-language affair, save for the closing track “Amser”, a song sung in Cornish and the album’s dizzying slow dazzle. For her follow-up, Le...

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Booby's Bay, Finborough Theatre review - a bit fishy

Carry on out of London past the Finborough Theatre and you hit the A4. Follow it east as it becomes the M4, take a southern turn at Bristol for the M5 and you’re in the West Country. Bude and Bodmin, Liskeard, St Austell, Padstow, Mousehole, Newquay...

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Alan Hollinghurst: The Sparsholt Affair - pictures at an exhibition, with telling gaps

Television has paid its dues to the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act - rather feebly, with some rotten acting, in Man in an Orange Shirt; brilliantly, with mostly superb performances, in the monologue sequence Queers, surely due a second...

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Tristan & Yseult, Shakespeare's Globe review - terrific visual and musical élan

This show feels like an end-of-the-exams party, and in a way that’s exactly what it is. If the fruits of Emma Rice’s short tenure as Artistic Director at the Globe were a series of tests that she is deemed to have failed, then Tristan & Yseult,...

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Poldark, Series 3, BBC One review - tempestuous passions and pantomime villains ride again

Is it always the same bit of Cornish clifftop they gallop along in Poldark? Anyway here it was again, raising the curtain on the third series. As the camera flew in over a gaggle of squawking seagulls spiralling above the foaming surf crashing on...

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Tristan und Isolde, Longborough Festival

The Longborough Festival was started, essentially, to perform Wagner, and Wagner is still what it does best. This revival of Carmen Jakobi’s production of Tristan und Isolde is the strongest argument imaginable for small-theatre Wagner. For once the...

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My Cousin Rachel review - du Maurier remake too florid by half

From the breathless questions posed at the beginning onwards, My Cousin Rachel charges forward like one of leading man Sam Claflin's fast-galloping steeds. Presumably eager not to let this period potboiler become staid, director Roger Michell swoops...

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Jam review – obsession and resentment in the classroom

When TV drama tackles Britain’s class divide, the go-to working-class type is the northerner: gritty, blunt of vowel and partial to a deep-fried Mars bar. The first and perhaps only pleasant surprise in Matt Parvin’s debut play Jam, produced by the...

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Tristan & Yseult, Brighton Festival review - playful and inventive storytelling

Tristan & Yseult has become something of a calling card for Kneehigh, which was founded in 1980 and is now the unofficial National Theatre of Cornwall. Emma Rice, currently artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe in London, created this...

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