love
Sam Marlowe
A night when a fresh fall of snow was fluttering from the heavens could hardly have felt more fitting for the opening of this Shakespearean romance – particularly since David Farr’s production for the RSC, first seen in Stratford in 2009, so felicitously counters fire with ice. Cruelty and rage, the willful closing off of the heart, the reawakening of hope and the resurrection of enduring love: passion both kills and sustains in the worlds of Sicilia and Bohemia; and if the staging sometimes seems slightly ponderous, it delivers moments of arresting intensity.Sicilia, under the chilly rule of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's not easy these days to stay the course on stage, with one leading female character after another of late failing to make it to the final curtain. I'm thinking of such otherwise diverse heroines as Shakespeare's Juliet and Andrew Lloyd Webber's haunted soprano, Christine, as well as the fraught Fosca of Stephen Sondheim's Passion, who may just remain the last word in women snatched prematurely from the men in their midst. To that list can now be added Jenny Cavilleri, the music-minded 25-year-old at the eternally doomy heart of Love Story, a show whose subtitle could, in fact, be Love Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can you go home again? That's the question that will be hanging over the Royal Shakespeare Company's first residency at the Roundhouse since their "History Play" cycle stormed north London over two years ago, reminding those lucky enough to catch it of the loss to the capital ever since the RSC opted out of a London base of operations. Now that they have one - this current 10-week season of eight plays initials an ongoing collaboration with the Camden Town venue - the more pressing interest pertains to the work, especially given the frequency with which the Donmar and National (not to mention Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Let's face it, the rom-com has an image problem. Too often, this genre is tainted by either sugar-sweet sentimentality or crashing cliché, or both. Often, there’s something more than a little oppressive about the whole idea of romance, as if love’s natural idealism is too weak to withstand a cold dose of reality. But there are exceptions. And this show is one of them. It’s great to be able to welcome D C Jackson’s new play, which he calls a “non-rom-com”, and which arrives in London having first enjoyed a successful outing at the Edinburgh Festival in August.We start off in the land of the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Those teenage lovers Romeo and Juliet will be dying nightly on a stage near you in various guises for much of the autumn - not as Shakespeare’s play, but as ballets and operas based on it. Next week both Birmingham Royal Ballet and English National Ballet field two of the more famous versions on their autumn tours, while at the end of the month the Royal Opera stages a rare revival of Gounod’s opera.Shakespeare’s play was premiered in 1596 - not until 1776 did the first opera on it emerge, Romeo und Julie by Georg Benda, a near-contemporary of Haydn and Kapelmeister to the Duke of Gotha who Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On the set of Downton Abbey I recently put some questions to Maggie Smith. She was reflecting on the end of her incarceration in Hogwarts. “Alan Rickman and I ran out of reaction shots,” she said, in exactly that mock-baffled tone you’d expect of her. “We couldn’t think what sort of faces we would pull. I remember him saying he’d got up to about 360-something and there weren’t any left.” On the glorious evidence of The Song of Lunch, Rickman was keeping some back.This was as audacious a piece of thinking outside the box as the BBC drama department has committed in years. You wonder whether it Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A vital theatrical partnership gets renewed, and then some, in Jamie Lloyd's revival of Passion, a transforming production that not only marks the start of various Donmar-related tributes to Stephen Sondheim in his 80th birthday year but also reminds us that this theatre reopened its doors in 1992 with the UK premiere of Assassins, since which time it has staged five further Sondheim shows; Passion, to speak as openly as this musical's heroine does of the entire spectrum from ecstasy to pain, is one of the very best.A vital theatrical partnership gets renewed, and then some, in Jamie Lloyd's Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Welcome to Charlestown, a Boston neighbourhood of just one square mile that has produced more bank robbers than anywhere else in America. Here crime is a “trade” passed down from father to son, and the height of ambition is to serve your inevitable jail time “like a man”. It’s a setting grubbily familiar from the cinematic likes of Mystic River and The Departed, as well as Ben Affleck’s own directorial debut Gone Baby Gone; now it plays host to his sophomore effort The Town, a heist drama with a heart.Sadly, for all its macho posturing and gun-toting promise, The Town turns out to be as Read more ...
neil.smith
Julia Roberts takes a long time to find her centre in Eat Pray Love, a glossy adaptation of the Elizabeth Gilbert memoir that, while offering a respite from the usual cinematic diet of reboots, remakes and comic-book blockbusters, ends up being just as simplistic and facile as its box-office competition.Female audiences are traditionally starved of gender-targeted product, so some might regard Ryan Murphy’s gentle travelogue a welcome corrective to the prevailing trend. After nearly two-and-a-half hours of soporific navel-gazing, however, even the most ardent fan of Gilbert’s 2006 bestseller Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Middle-class family angst is this season’s theme at the Royal Court Theatre. And, in his new play about sex and intimacy, which opened last night, playwright Nick Payne puts the lust in Wanderlust and creates a contemporary tale of wandering hands and wandering affections. We are in a nice suburban part of England, and the mix of pain and pleasure will be all too familiar to most audiences, whether they are teenagers who can squirm at the antics of the youngsters, or middle-aged couples who might find the more mature characters shockingly recognisable.Alan and Joy are a professional couple Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Step aside Prince Charming – there’s a new fairy tale in town, and your only substantive contribution fits into a small plastic sample pot. At some point in the last few years the Shangri-La, the unattainable dream of romantic comedies, shifted from man to baby. Hollywood started asking itself what happened after Happily Ever After, and the answer – they started trying for a baby, went through several painful, unsuccessful courses of IVF before he cheated with a work colleague – wasn’t pretty. With Jennifer Lopez’s The Back-up Plan and lesbian artificial insemination drama The Kids are Read more ...
graeme.thomson
This quirky, compelling little Cutting Edge film never really worked out what it wanted us to think about what we were seeing, which in the end played to its advantage. Because it avoided the sorry fate – namely, shoehorning its participants into an ironic cul de sac then pointing at them and sniggering loudly - of TV programmes whose entire raison d’être begins and ends with the creation of a cynically arresting title, the results ended up being opaque, neatly observed and even rather moving.The premise, at least, was simple: to follow two teenagers from East Anglia who worked as undertakers Read more ...