money
Anya Ryan
Food is the centrepiece of Gareth Farr’s chilling new play Biscuits for Breakfast. Meals are described so delicately that the rich steams of them cooking are almost scented. But though they are prepared, shared and savoured with fondness, crucially, they are never physically there.Instead, budding lovers Paul and Joanne dine with food suggested but never shown. Paul, a trainee chef, woos the spiky Joanne with a perfectly made fish pie. Both work at the local hotel, with Paul dreaming of breaking away from the Cornish seaside for a future of bestselling cookbooks and lavish restaurants. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Life is full of coincidences and contradictions. As I was walking to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was on his feet in the House of Commons delivering yet another rebalancing of individual and collective resources. On reading a couple of fine essays in the excellent programme, I saw the acknowledgement of the production’s sponsor, Pragnell.The first item that appears on the jeweller’s website is a pair of earrings retailing at an eye-watering £71,500. Which is to say that the inequalities that fired Charles Dickens’ anger in the 1840s are still with us in the Read more ...
John Carvill
Thomas Pynchon’s saturnine '70s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) begins with “[a] screaming [that] comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” In contrast, on 10 March 2019, when a Boeing 737 MAX operated by Ethiopian Airlines took off from Addis Abada and, six minutes later, plunged into a field near the town of Bishoftu and killed 157 people, there very much was something to compare it to. Less than six months earlier, a MAX belonging to Indonesia’s Lion Air had crashed into the Java Sea thirteen minutes after takeoff, killing all 189 passengers Read more ...
Mert Dilek
"You need to get better at communicating", says one character to another in Isley Lynn’s albatross. Indeed, the same advice would fare well with many of those in the Anglo-American Lynn’s new play, where miscommunication plagues a range of relationships and chance encountersStructured as a loosely connected sequence of mostly two-handers, albatross. offers a panoramic look at the power dynamics coursing through everyday conversations among strangers and intimates alike.This production is brought to the Playground Theatre by represent., a repertory company dedicated to working with Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
There just isn’t enough there, with ANNA X. Daniel Raggett’s production is the third and final of the RE:EMERGE season at the Harold Pinter Theatre, with Emma Corrin of Lady Di fame in the lead. The graphic design – the brightly-striped faces of Corrin and her co-star, Nabhaan Rizwan, on a dark background – is impeccable. Joseph Charlton’s writing, not so much.Based on “true events”, ANNA X is about a young Russian woman with an art degree who cons people into believing she’s rich, and a tech entrepreneur who falls for it. They’re both living in New York, which in Charlton’s nightmare vision Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
A lot’s changed since Kiln Theatre boss Indhu Rubasingham directed The Invisible Hand’s first UK outing in 2016, not least the theatre’s name (it was known as the Tricycle back then). But in Rubasingham’s capable hands, American Ayad Akhtar’s taut exploration of greed and blame still hits like a punch to the chest, ratcheting up the tension over two hours to an almost unbearable level.The premise is relatively simple. American banker Nick Bright (Daniel Lapaine, pictured below) has been kidnapped by accident – the unnamed organisation keeping him prisoner in rural Pakistan wanted his boss Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Michelle Pfeiffer all but purrs her way through French Exit, as befits a splendid actress who cut a memorable Catwoman onscreen nearly thirty years ago. Playing a New York grande dame who deals with bankruptcy by decamping with her son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) to Paris, Pfeiffer informs the character of the mortality-obsessed Frances Price with an implicit "meow", as if forever finding fault with a world in which, short of funds, she is now surplus to requirements.Pfeiffer is the star attraction of Azazel Jacobs's film, which she powers her way through as if playing a longlost Tennessee Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A fun film about finance – really? From the very first frame I was hooked on this can-do documentary; it’s that good. A young family – parents, Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell, two kids and two dogs – gather at the front door of their Victorian terraced house in Walthamstow and grin sheepishly to camera. “This is what acting is”, Dan tells his daughter Esme, “it’s cold, it’s embarrassing… Hello, we’re the Edelstyn family.”Esme might not get the hang of it, but her parents are naturals. Wearing a cricket jumper and deerstalker hat, Dan looks like an ad for the local charity shop. He’s a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To accept or not accept a donation: that’s certainly the burning political question of the moment. So Isla van Tricht’s play Money – specially designed for Zoom – has proven more timely than even perhaps she suspected, though the question is made infinitely more complex by the fact that the target of the donation is not curtains but charity.This is the inaugural production of represent., a new company whose stated mission is "to increase access to the [theatre] industry for those from lower socio-economic backgrounds". Importantly and practically, this means it acts as a professional Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Of all the groups you probably wouldn’t want to be part of, surely the hyper-adrenalised, hardscrabble populace of The Wolf of Wall Street, the Jordan Belfort memoir made into an amphetamine rush of a film by Martin Scorsese, must rank near the very top. And yet here, against expectation, is an immersive theatre adaptation of the non-fiction memoirs that spawned the 2013 movie. What’s more, it is being staged in a capacious address located a coke-fuelled trot away from London’s City equivalent of the do-or-die New York milieu from which Belfort has since emerged post-imprisonment as some Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Mammon and Yahweh are the presiding deities over an epic enterprise that tells the story not just of three brothers who founded a bank but of modern America. Virgil asked his Muse to sing of ‘arms and the man’, yet here the theme becomes that of ‘markets and the man’: a tale of daring, determination and dollars that chronicles capitalist endeavour from the cottonfields of Alabama to the crash of 2008.The Italian playwright Stefano Massini first released what started as his five-hour long play on the world in 2013, consciously using the rhythmic verse and formulaic techniques of epic to Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
Deft and funny and nicely cast, what's not to like about Other People's Money, the era-defining Jerry Sterner play in revival at Southwark Playhouse? The play's 1989 premiere Off Broadway allowed for a contemporary skewering of the roaring, rapacious, uncaring 1980s. Now it's a period piece, where Amy Burke, playing a pumped-up and pugnacious Manhattan lawyer, sports a swishing pale-grey pantsuit that would have done Paul Smith proud: her hair is as big as her ego.Under Katharine Farmer's direction, the stage is framed by offices at either end, two worlds apart. One desk belongs to Andrew Read more ...