family relationships
Gary Naylor
Like all great art, Samuel Beckett's works find a way to speak to you as an individual, stretching from page to stage and on, on, on into our psyches. This happens not through sentimental manipulation or cheap sensationalism, but through the accrual of impressions, the gathering of memories, the painstaking construction of meaning. Rarely far from view on the London stage, Beckett has two seminal one acts on view briefly in London before touring to Bath. Upon hearing the shoes of May (Charlotte Emmerson) in his 1976 Footfalls pace out the nine steps back and forth as we learn of the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Tuesday, 8 November 2016. Vera is in a New York hospital room giving birth to a son. On anxiously checked phones, the votes are piling up for Hillary, but the states are piling up for Trump. Vera’s world will never be the same again.Mathilde Dratwa’s new play, Milk and Gall (directed by Lisa Spirling, Theatre 503's Artistic Director), takes a searingly unsentimental look at 21st century parenting in the big city, mining plenty of laughs along the way. Speaking from experience, I can vouch that it’s all true – except, perhaps, that the reality is even worse!In her mid-thirties, Vera ( Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The independent filmmaker Alexandre Rockwell has flown under the radar since he made his name with the Cassavetes-vibed 1992 New York comedy In the Soup. He recently explained that his career was sabotaged by Harvey Weinstein, who was jealous, Rockwell suspects, of his close friendship with Quentin Tarantino. The intervening years haven’t been fallow, but Rockwell’s 10th feature, the lyrical childhood mini-odyssey Sweet Thing (2020), represents a major comeback.Rockwell's revival began with 2013’s hour-long Little Feet, made for $11,000 and starring his kids Lana (b. 2003) and Nico Read more ...
Mert Dilek
The complex history of capital punishment in Australia may not be familiar to many Londoners, but the Finborough Theatre turns out to be a good place to find one’s bearings around the subject. Set against this historical backdrop, playwright Alana Valentine’s The Sugar House presents a family drama spanning several generations, each haunted by the country’s legal system in different ways.The play opens in Pyrmont, Sydney in 2007, with lawyer Narelle (Jessica Zerlina Leafe) suspiciously checking out a luxury apartment at a site that used to be a sugar refinery. We then plunge, for the Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
This show has been a long time coming. Neil Gaiman had the first inklings of The Ocean at the End of the Lane when he was seven years old and living near a farm recorded in the Domesday Book. Several decades later, he wrote a short story for his wife, Amanda Palmer, “to tell her where I lived and who I was as a boy”, as he puts it in his programme notes.That short story was developed into an award-winning novel; Joel Horwood’s adaptation opened at the Dorfman Theatre in late 2019, and was meant to transfer to the West End in early 2020. Now it’s back, and the spellbinding beauty of Katy Rudd’ Read more ...
CP Hunter
“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Ruth Ozeki’s latest novel takes its name from a Buddhist heart sutra that meditates on reality and questions of human existence. It’s a big question for a big book. A Zen priest as well as a teacher, writer, and filmmaker, Ozeki tackles her subject on a series of meta-levels, which make this 500-pager fascinatingly complex, if also at times a bit overwhelming.The story begins with the death of Kenji Oh, a tragicomic accident that leaves his widow, Annabelle, and their son, Benny, stunned. Kenji leaves behind him a trail of trauma, which manifests in Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“We haven’t started yet!” Hannah-Jarrett Scott, dressed in Doc Martens under a 19th-century shift, reassures us as she attempts to dislodge a yellow rubber glove from a chandelier in the middle of the set of Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of). So begins this rollicking all-female adaptation of the timeless Jane Austen romcom, in which the servants recreate their famous mistresses’ and masters’ turbulent love lives.Written by Isobel McArthur, the play originated in Scotland in 2018 and has gone through several versions before pitching up in the heart of the West End. Directed here by Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
‘Night, Mother remains a play of piercing pessimism, something that’s not necessarily the same as tragedy, though the two often run congruently. The inexorability of the development of Marsha Norman’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize winner certainly recalls the tragic arc of drama, but its sense of catharsis remains somehow limited.The cathartic impact for the audience is incremental, and it is absolutely felt in the closing minutes of Roxana Silbert’s production for the Hampstead Theatre – ‘Night, Mother received its British premiere there back in 1985, and it’s revived now as part of the theatre’s 60th Read more ...
Liz Thomson
A “sonic photograph” is how Tori Amos describes her sixteenth album, recorded at her home in Cornwall during the spring and summer of Britain’s third lockdown, when, travel, her usual mode of coping with “troubling things”, was not an option. Living in Bude, with her English husband Mark Hawley, their daughter and her partner, she had no option but to “sit with myself and accept where I was”. “Swim to New York State” is her song of escape, a languorous opening with beautiful sonorities.For some musicians, a break from the gypsy life was, at least for a time, a novelty. For Amos, the third Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“Careful, there’s a hole in the floor.” The warning’s an unusual one, passed along conscientiously by the stewards at the door of the tiny Orange Tree Theatre.The hole in question is long and angular and will soon be filled with water, stretching around one side of the pristine white set of Rice, a new play by Australian-Hmong writer Michele Lee. It’s an intimate two-hander about immigration and belonging, directed ably by Matthew Xia – but, like its characters, it’s suffering an identity crisis.Our heroines are two women of colour: Nisha (Zainab Hasan, pictured below), a young executive at Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
“You can’t kick a cow in Leenane without some bastard holding a grudge for 20 years,” sighs Pato Dooley (Adam Best) prophetically; he has already started making his escape from that particular Galway village, doing lonely stints on London building sites. For 40-year-old unmarried Maureen Folan (Orla Fitzgerald), the woman Pato had dubbed "the beauty queen of Leenane" in her youth, departure is a national pastime: Ireland, in this 25th anniversary revival of Martin McDonagh's breakout play, means “always someone leaving”, she suggests. For her conniving mother Mag (Ingrid Craigie), Read more ...
Rachel O'Riordan
The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a vicious, sad and extraordinary play.On the surface, Martin McDonagh's play, first seen 25 years ago and revived now in a collaboration between Chichester Festival Theatre and my home base, the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, is about a toxic, dysfunctional relationship between a mother and daughter in a lonely rural setting [pictured below: director Rachel O'Riordan]. Painfully funny and savage in its treatment of family dynamics, it pillories small town Ireland, while moving with supreme skill from comedy to violence and back again. It is romantic, acerbic Read more ...