France
David Nice
Not the musical then, worst luck. How timely it would have been to mark Jerry Herman's passing with a celebration of a great achievement. Just how brilliantly the pathos and panache of his score lift Jean Poiret's long-running 1970s farce about a gay couple and their St Tropez drag club having to "straighten up" for family values is only emphasised by this ultimately threadbare adaptation by Simon Callow. Was the French-Italian film as good as those of us who saw it in the early 1980s remember? Having been surprised by the hilarity of another humanising attempt, The Birdcage, with a laugh- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Do you hear the people sing? In recent months, you're more likely to have heard news stories about the longest running West End musical than the actual music. Stephen Sondheim – who celebrates his 90th birthday in March – missed the gala opening of the venue which has been renamed after him (formerly the Queen's), due to a fall – and some Les Mis singers have been pulling out as rapidly as champagne corks. At one point, Matt Lucas stepped in as a substitute, only to fall sick himself. Celebrity gossip aside, producer Cameron Mackintosh dumped the legendary Trevor Nunn and John Caird Read more ...
Charlie Stone
Nathalie Léger’s superbly original Exposition is a biographical novel meditating on the nature of biography itself. Its plot – if indeed its 150 pages of intense reflection bordering continuously on stream of consciousness can be called a plot – is an account of the life of Virginia Oldoïni, better known as the Countess of Castiglione. Specifically, the narrator (a half-fictional version of Léger herself) is fascinated by the visits Castiglione made to be photographed in the same Paris studio over four decades – turbulent years which saw her reach the height of power and influence and Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“How many times have you heard the conductor sing?” asked William Christie after the final number, but before the two encores, of Sunday night’s 40th birthday celebration for his ensemble Les Arts Florissants. Well, lovers of old recordings know that you sometimes get plenty of impromptu vocalisation from the likes of Bernstein and Barbirolli. But what the august founder of the Baroque super-group (and super-chorus) meant on this occasion was the bravura performance of his co-conductor, and assistant director, Paul Agnew. In several of the pieces he led at the Barbican, Agnew would turn round Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There’s slight (White Christmas, to name but one) and then there’s The Boy Friend, a period musical so unabashedly vaporous that if you sneeze, it might blow away. All credit then to the Menier Chocolate Factory for anchoring Sandy Wilson’s onetime theatrical mainstay in a sustainedly nostalgic billow of song and dance to draw attention away from the fact that comparatively little of consequence happens across three acts. Matthew White's production would seem to be predicated on the assumption that nature abhors a vacuum, in which case, when in doubt, dance – and why not? Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In one of Dora Maar’s best known images, a fashion photograph from 1935 (pictured below), a woman wearing a backless, sparkly evening gown appears to be making her way backstage through a proscenium’s drapes. The star of the show exits the limelight, cheekily concealing her face behind a six-pointed star snatched, maybe, from the star-spangled scenery. Though she’s bracing herself against the wings her posture is also suggestive of abandon, the kind of arms-up relief that comes with finishing a race or dancing late at night when no-one cares. She flirts with the lens and the lens flirts back Read more ...
Sarah Collins
“Chauvinism is the worst form of ignorance” is the maxim of Dr Pozzi, the hero of Julian Barnes’s latest book, The Man in the Red Coat. This historical biography follows the life of a renowned gynaecologist during the Parisian Belle Époque, the “locus classicus of peace and pleasure, with more than a flush of decadence”. Once described by the Princess of Monaco as “disgustingly handsome”, Pozzi is a fascinating subject for Barnes’s obsessive attention; an exceptional doctor and rational thinker, embedded in the most fashionable Parisian social circles. From 1885 to 1916, we travel through Read more ...
India Lewis
My Mother Laughs was first published in Chantal Ackerman’s native French in 2013. This year it has been translated into English for the first time, twice. Silver Press’ elegant version is framed by a foreword by the poet, Eileen Myles (who also has a poem on the back flyleaf) and an afterword by the academic, Frances Morgan. These women’s voices are sympathetic, and naturally turn the book as a whole into a kind of conversation.The book, which loosely records the decline of Ackerman’s mother, reads like a diary or monologue, its confessions interspersed with family photos and stills from her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is a departure in every sense for François Ozon. The prolific French director has established himself as a master of ludic style in past dramas played out by predominantly female casts, the exceptions, among them his sad black-and-white period romance Frantz from two years ago, largely proving the rule. In By the Grace of God – its French title, Grâce à Dieu, is drawn directly from the story and freighted with a macabre irony revealed in a late scene – he achieves something very different: male roles dominate in a film that follows documentary lines in its investigation of a real-life Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This edition of Peter Culshaw’s periodic global music radio show features guest special guest Anne Pigalle. A flâneuse and doyenne of the urban demi-monde, she came to our attention recording for ZTT Records in the 1980s and ran Soho nights at the Café de Paris, did Japanese commercials for Jean-Paul Gaultier, and a series of innovative albums including Madame Sex. She recently won the best art film award for the multi-media project Ecstase at the Portobello Film Festival 2019, the film based on her recent and probably best album of the same name. Her numerous Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
While recent motor racing movies have been built around superstar names like Ayrton Senna and James Hunt, the protagonists of Le Mans ’66 (shown at London Film Festival) will be barely recognisable to a wider audience. They are Carroll Shelby, the former American racing driver turned car designer, and Ken Miles, a British driver transplanted to American sports car racing. In a bid for some all-American racing prestige, their task was to help the Ford Motor Company to beat Ferrari at the Le Mans 24 Hour race in 1966.In James Mangold’s film (with a screenplay by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Are first ladies second-class citizens? Do they always have to stand behind their husbands? What are they really like as people? Questions such as these have inspired Irish playwright Nancy Harris to explore the relationship between two fictional first ladies, each of which bears an uncanny resemblance to a real-life figure. One is clearly based on Melania Trump, the other on Brigitte Trogneux, better known as Mrs Macron. As usual at the Bridge Theatre, the show is impeccably cast, with national treasure Zoë Wanamaker making her Bridge debut, and Zrinka Cvitešić, who returns to the London Read more ...