family relationships
Tom Birchenough
Carla Simón’s debut feature Summer 1993 is a gem of a film by any standards, but when you learn that its story is based closely on the thirtysomething Catalan director’s own early life, its intimacy becomes almost overwhelming. It has at its heart a simply terrific performance from Laia Artigas as Simón’s six-year-old heroine Frida, the intonations of her face conveying variations of emotion that are powerful beyond anything words could achieve.Following in the tradition of cinema about childhood, we experience events as much through Frida’s eyes as we do from any knowing, adult perspective. Read more ...
Owen Richards
On the surface, Pin Cushion is a whimsical British indie, packed with imagination and charm. But debuting director Deborah Haywood builds this on a foundation of bullying and prejudice, creating a surprisingly bleak yet effective film.Teenager Iona and her mother Lyn (Lily Newmark and Joanna Scanlan, main picture) are a pair of social outcasts, recently moved to Swadlincote in Derbyshire. They’re constantly festooned in bright woolly layers and surrounded by ornamental tat and misplaced furniture (including a toilet at the head of their shared double bed). Iona boasts about her new school Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It seems only too fitting that David Lan’s luminous reign at the Young Vic should draw to a close with this bold, creatively thrilling international import. Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s Tony-winning musical, which premiered Off-Broadway in 2013, is an exquisite adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic-novel memoir – a heartfelt detective story that traipses through memory in order to decode our loved ones, and ourselves.We meet Alison at three different ages: as a child in small-town Pennsylvania, where her father runs the funeral – or “fun” – home; as a college student coming out as a Read more ...
Owen Richards
The Ciambra is a wonderful and subtle piece of filmmaking. Director/writer Jonas Carpignano captures the genuine heart and fire of family relationships with an amateur cast of relatives, led by the magnetic young Pio Amato. By trusting the audience to find the subtext themselves, they create touching and persuasive cinema over two hours.Pio is 14-years-old, living with his large family in the Romani community known as the Ciambra, in south Italy. Life here is tough – the electricity is stolen, and money is made by hijacking cars for ransom. Age works differently here, with establishing shots Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Forget about dark alleys, deserted parks and slippery slopes: the most dangerous place in the world is likely to be your family. That’s where the traps are, the minefields and the surprise betrayals. As its title suggests, Torben Betts’s new comedy is all about failing marriages and imploding families. The focus is on a celebrity chef, but does Betts have anything new to say about the state of our emotional nation, or is this just another rehash of the same old ingredients? After a national tour, Monogamy comes to the Park Theatre – and boasts Janie Dee and Charlie Brooks in its cast.The Read more ...
David Benedict
In Harold Pinter’s memory play Old Times, one of the women declares, “There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.” Elizabeth Strout’s heroine in My Name Is Lucy Barton is in the reverse position. When it comes to the difficult childhood she has long since escaped, she’s uncertain of what she can – or wants to – remember, yet she is anything but the standard issue unreliable narrator. In Richard Eyre’s flawless production at the Bridge Theatre, Strout’s writing, as adapted by Rona Munro and performed by a luminous Laura Linney, pulls off the considerable trick Read more ...
David Nice
You can always be sure of impeccable casting and spirited playing as Ian Page takes his Classical Opera through Mozart year by year. Just don't expect more than the glimmer of genius to come in 1768, though. It doesn't matter in those admirable showcase programmes highlighting the young Amadeus alongside more mature voices of the year in question. A three-act opera is rather more a vexation to the spirit, though. If the composer had no more than a few flashes of genius in his pre- and early teens, the libretto for La finta semplice could have been written by an average 10 year old ( Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lily Allen has long been an unlikely inhabitant of the tabloid sphere. She was born into it and her pop career sealed the deal, rendering her a recalcitrant victim of paparazzi fishbowl idiocy, ugly magazines and online sidebars. She is, however, one of the few to undermine this process, offering gritty, poetic response in song. “The Fear”, for instance, was a huge hit that also 100 percent nailed vapid celeb aspiration. Her fourth album is, at its best, her rawest and most revealing.Allen’s last outing, 2014’s Sheezus, saw her less focused. Lyrically sharp as ever, it was hampered by lesser Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Two dynamite lead performances and the chance to savour an underappreciated score give genuine charge to The Rink, a decades-old Broadway flop that feels reborn for Southwark Playhouse. A short-lived star vehicle for Chita Rivera (who won a 1984 Tony for it) and Liza Minnelli, the musical more than survives the scaled-back if entirely impassioned approach of director Adam Lenson. It's also a great showcase for an inspired creative team - choreographer Fabian Aloise and a punchy powerhouse of a band led by musical director Joe Bunker. Stripped ot its starry sheen, one Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Right from the beginning of Simon Evans’s production of Tracy Letts's 1993 play, it’s clear we’re in for an intense, raw experience. A storm of almost symphonic musical accompaniment roars, lightning flashing over the claustrophobic trailer interior where the tight two hours-plus run of Killer Joe will play out.Star billing here, of course, goes to Orlando Bloom, who's back on the West End stage after a decade away, in the title role as the corrupt cop who doubles as a hitman. But Grace Smart’s set deserves no less of a round of applause (main picture): it takes over the compact space of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Masculinity, whether toxic or in crisis (but never ever problem-free), is a hardy perennial subject for British new writing, and this new piece from playwright Simon Stephens, Frantic Assembly director Scott Graham and Underworld musician Karl Hyde is a verbatim drama made up of interviews with men, which the trio conducted in their home towns of Stockport, Corby and Kidderminster. The overall theme is fatherhood, men’s relationships with their Dads. Given that this is such well-trodden ground, does Fatherland, which was first seen as part of the Manchester International Festival in 2017, Read more ...
David Benedict
Question: is Consent, transferred from the National to the West End, a sharp-tongued comedy or an acute reinvention of a revenge drama? There are more than enough smartly placed laughs throughout the tart, increasingly taut first act, to make you think you’re watching an amusingly balanced, if increasingly vicious, exposé of the divide between the private and professional lives of lawyers. But at the top of the second act, playwright Nina Raine triggers a perfectly timed dramatic explosion blowing the niceties of legal language out of the water. As everything turns frighteningly personal, the Read more ...