family relationships
Nick Hasted
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 Monkey is a resolutely minor, down and dirty B-movie, relishing cartoon gore and comic excess.Stephen King’s 1980 short story “The Monkey” combined his observation of scary streetcorner wind-up toy monkeys with the bad luck charm of WW Jacobs’ classic “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902), in a story really about protagonist Hal’s fraught family Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The date, projected behind the stage before a word is spoken, is a clue - 14th April 1912. “Why so specific?” was my first thought. My second was, “Ah, yes”.Sure enough, Akhila Krishnan’s video and Adam Cork’s sound floats us on a sea of troubles, as Denmark’s ship of state is battered by storms, literal and metaphorical, in a roiling Atlantic. After a fortnight in which that ocean has never looked wider nor choppier, a three hour examination of how a psychologically unstable man could eviscerate a polity seemed both timely and scarily portentous. But that, 425 years on, is why the play Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Russia.It’s impossible to be ambivalent towards that word, that country, indeed that idea, one so very similar to our own, yet so very different. You feel it in Moscow, where I spent a week exactly 40 years ago. Like London, it is a vast city, imperial in ambition, a true believer in its past and present, but then, as now, uncertain of its future. It is also not like London at all, crowded with strange buildings, cold beyond description, peopled by frightened men and women. There’s an irony in the fact that I learned more about my own home in seven days spent 1800 miles away than I did in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is now an Oscar-nominated refugee, in a bittersweet harvest for his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.The 52-year-old has previously probed the moral cost of his country’s dictatorship in Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013), A Man of Integrity (2017) and There Is No Evil (2020), work where characters suffer and snap, or refuse to participate in repression at great cost. Routinely banned at home, work right up to Sacred Fig was shot in secret, brave guerilla cinema now necessarily common in Iran.Faced with eight years’ jail, flogging and seizure of property for Read more ...
Matt Wolf
We live in tragic times given over to cataclysmic events that require outsized emotions in return. That may be one reason to account for the uptick, therefore, in Greek drama, which includes not one but two Oedipi, various adaptations of Antigone, and the arrival on the commercial West End of the obvious companion piece to Oedipus, namely Elektra – the K in the title perhaps nodding to a landscape in which people exist to kill. The star attraction is Oscar winner Brie Larson, who certainly deserves credit for taking on this part in the harsh glare of the commercial theatre, not least in Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“You know what they say: where there’s livestock, there’s dead stock,” says Jack (a brilliant Barry Keoghan). Never a truer word. There’s an awful lot of dead and maimed stock – sheep, to be precise – in Christopher Andrews’ gory, gloom-ridden directorial debut. Animal lovers will want to avert their eyes. The film is undeniably powerful, with fine performances, but the unremitting violence ends up feeling cartoonish and empty.Set in the west of Ireland, the mountainous landscape is magnificent. Its sheep-farming inhabitants, not so much. In the first scene, a flashback, Michael ( Read more ...
Gary Naylor
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 figure in their eyes. Millennials will identify straight away with Martin, the protagonist, whose life is "stalked" by Harry Potter. Gen Xs will catch the peculiar and unexpected impact of parenthood on a complicated, if hitherto stable, middle-class life. And, Okay Boomers, what about us? I was reminded of Kenneth Williams, Bernard Cribbins and, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The phenomenal global success of Six began when two young writers decided to give voices to the wives of a powerful man, bringing them out of their silent tombs and energising them and, by extension, doing the same for the women of today. Its extraordinary popularity is a siren call to find forgotten women and reclaim their personalities, to give a theatrical second life to those to whom the historical record has denied a first. Indeed, Oh! Mary, also about President Lincoln's wife, is proving that point in New York now. Something of that desire lies behind painter, writer, playwright, Read more ...
India Lewis
Anglo-Irish author Catherine Airey’s first novel, Confessions, is a puzzle, a game of family secrets played through the generations. Set partly in New York and partly in a small town in Donegal, the book moves back and forth through time and space becoming, in the process, a compulsive read: a fascinating Russian nesting doll of family trauma.There are obvious cliches in the familial "saga" genre, which at times can make the book feel a little artificial, but it’s nonetheless a fascinating, often heartbreaking tale. We open with the traumatic loss of the Cora’s father in the chaos of 9/11. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s 35th feature, waiting in a vacant house for its buyers, ambitious Rebecca (Lucy Liu, pictured bottom), her favoured teenage son Tyler (Eddy Maday), cowed husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) and troubled daughter Chloe (Callina Liang, pictured below). Presence is a ghost story from the ghost’s point of view, piecing together who and why it’s haunting as it eavesdrops on the fractured family.Soderbergh’s elliptical editing proffers a gradual, jigsaw portrait in scenes of parental boozing, rival siblings and Rebecca’s legal laxity. Chloe is meanwhile Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s not much point in having three hours worth of Shakespearean text to craft and the gorgeous Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as a canvas if you merely intend to go through the motions, ticking off one of the canon’s less performed works. The question for Jennifer Tang, making her Globe directorial debut, is what to do with this beautifully wrapped gift. The question for us is does it work. Not for the first time down by the Thames, genders are flipped, Cymbeline the Queen of a matriarchal Britain, resisting the demands for tribute from a machismo-sodden Italy. Her daughter, Innogen, is Read more ...
Gary Naylor
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 couple of miles east, Sam Selvon’s seminal book, The Lonely Londoners, focuses more specifically on Caribbean immigrants’ experience of a metropolis emerging from post-war austerity, of the cold, of the racism, of the possibilities always just out of reach.Roy Williams’ adaptation of Selvon’s dazzling narrative was a big hit at the intimate Jermyn Read more ...