drama
aleks.sierz
Some theatre genres seem indestructible. One of these is the satirical city comedy, for which playwrights dip their pens in poison and spray their venom over the teeming mass of the shallow, the stupid and the successful. When they do this today, they inevitably recall all manner of past plays from Jacobean and Restoration times to Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, and beyond. In American Trade, a new play from the immensely talented American playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, which opened last night, we revisit this familiar territory.Things start well. Pharus, a gay Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Verbatim theatre has been the flavour of political theatre for the past two decades, and no theatre has done more to promote this style of public witnessing than the Tricycle in Kilburn, north London. Its artistic director, Nicolas Kent, has created a special style of verbatim drama called tribunal theatre, where the results of long-running public inquiries or trials are edited into an evening’s viewing. His latest venture, Tactical Questioning: Scenes from the Baha Mousa Inquiry, which opened last night, illustrates the pros and cons of this type of infotainment.First the facts: at the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Thanks to her evergreen bestseller Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson can call on an army of fans to buy her work whenever it appears in print. Its debut on screen is, perhaps, another matter. Will they buy the BBC’s rendition of Case Histories? Those who have not had the pleasure of reading it are less advantageously placed to grumble about hideous revisions, outrageous changes and all manner of infidelities. But even an Atkinson newbie might find it a bit rum that Scotland seems to be entirely populated by people with English accents.Welcome to the BBC casting department's Read more ...
howard.male
We all enjoy the moment when the detective loses his rag and lunges across the desk to grab the suspect by the lapels, but such scenes are in short supply in this new female crime-fighters series. Instead, the interrogative approach of “the new Cagney & Lacey” as it’s been called, is more slowly, slowly catchy monkey, but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying. Scott & Bailey was co-created by former detective inspector Diane Taylor, which is presumably why it seems to provide a more grounded, realistic look at the world of the Manchester murder squad.But whereas realism in the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Anya Reiss must be the most precocious playwright in London. Her 2010 debut, Spur of the Moment, written while she was just 17 and still studying for her A levels, won two Most Promising Playwright awards, from the London Evening Standard and the Critics’ Circle. Now her follow-up, The Acid Test, which opened last night at the Royal Court in this new-writing flagship’s upstairs studio, prompts me to ask whether she was just a one-hit wonder - and can she avoid the second-album syndrome?Three young women, barely out of their teens, share a messy London flat. Dana, Ruth and Jessica are nice Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Crikey, no gongs whatsoever for ITV1's Downton Abbey, but you can't grumble about Sherlock lifting the Best Drama Series award at last night's Baftas. Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss's ingenious update of Conan Doyle for BBC One was one of 2010's telly highlights, and you might have thought it would have earned the Leading Actor award for Benedict Cumberbatch. But no, that one went not to Cumberbatch, nor to Matt Smith for Doctor Who (BBC One) nor Jim Broadbent for Any Human Heart (Channel 4), but to Daniel Rigby (pictured below) for his portrayal of Eric Morecambe in BBC Two's Eric and Ernie. Read more ...
hilary.whitney
The Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre has always been one of London’s theatrical success stories, attracting luminaries from Flora Robson to Judi Dench, but over the past few years under the stewardship of artistic director Timothy Sheader, it has really come into its own. In 2010, its Olivier Award-winning production of Into the Woods became the highest-grossing production in the venue's history, whilst The Crucible by Arthur Miller attracted a whole new audience to the theatre – 72 per cent of those who attended the play had never visited the theatre before – and The Comedy of Errors became Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Serenity hangs by a fraying thread in the thrilling Almeida Theatre revival of A Delicate Balance, Edward Albee's 1966 Pulitzer Prize-winner about remembrance, fear, and somehow facing a new day. This particular playhouse has long been associated with Albee, from its (overrated) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? through to various UK and even world premieres. But James Macdonald's production of the play that follows Virginia Woolf in the Albee canon stands a league apart, perhaps in sympathy with the work itself. The audience last night laughed plenty, sometimes (if truth be told) strangely, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s got more derivations than a dictionary. The Wire has been mentioned in dispatches, as have British conspiracy dramas such as State of Play and Edge of Darkness (in which something is rotten etc). And talking of Denmark, it comes along with The Killing obsessives doing cold turkey. Even its creator has cited the guiding hand of cynical, labyrinthine Seventies crime thrillers – Flight of the Condor and The Parallax View. Put them all together and have you got a series which exists entirely in the long shadow cast by narratives which have passed this way before? Or can The Shadow Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It just worked. The rave reactions from critics and audiences, and the hail of Baftas, Oscars and Golden Globes which showered down on it, made it clear that The King's Speech wasn't just any old movie, but a rare moment in cinema history. It cost about $15 million to make, and has grossed $400 million worldwide so far. Now there's music to a producer's ears.Colin Firth's mesmerising portrayal of the stammering Duke of York, thrust traumatically into the imperial limelight by the abdication of his flaky Wallis Simpson-obsessed brother, has elevated him from mere greasepaint aristocracy to the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a week unfeasibly packed with new drama across the BBC and ITV, the three-part Exile may prove to be the one that lingers longest. It was a thriller and a detective story, but what gave it its formidable grip was the way the central mystery was intricately entwined with the painful personal story of Tom Ronstadt (John Simm) and his father Sam (Jim Broadbent).Simm's character was a burnt-out journalist from the fictional London-based Ransom magazine. Until he got the sack, he had specialised in high-octane sleaze, his dirt-digging zeal cranked to a frenzy by drink and drugs. His Read more ...
howard.male
I made the mistake of catching up with the darkly sumptuous The Crimson Petal and the White just before knuckling down to review this new two-part drama, and it was like moving from fine vintage wine to warm supermarket-brand lager. To begin with, I couldn’t dissociate Ashley Jensen from her perky but dim character in Extras, so the moment she found herself confronted with a game-show-from-hell scenario of committing a murder in return for five million quid, I expected Ricky Gervais to pop up in the next scene, giving her wisecrack-littered advice on what to do next.But unfortunately she was Read more ...