The Wolf of Wall Street, 5-15 Sun Street review - energetic but to what end?
Jordan Belfort memoirs translate unpleasantly, even unnecessarily, to the stage
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.
The Lehman Trilogy, Piccadilly Theatre review - stunning chronicle of determination and dollars
A simultaneously sweeping and intimately human production
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.
Other People's Money, Southwark Playhouse review - onetime Off Broadway hit retains its sting
Greed is good or at least entertaining in feisty Off West End revival
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.
Sadie Jones: The Snakes review - lacking feeling
Nastiness and clichéd characters
Bea and Dan are a young married couple. They have a mortgage on their small flat in Holloway and met while out clubbing in Peckham. She’s a plain-looking, modest and hard-working psychotherapist; he’s putting in the hours as an estate agent having put his artistic aspirations on ice. Typical millennials. They’re in love. Or rather, we’re told they’re in love. In fact, we’re told rather a lot of things - it seems to be the book’s mode.
DVD: Generation Wealth
An intriguing documentary ramble through greed, money and vicarious displays of excess
“Psychopathologies come and go but they always tell us about the historical time period in which they’re produced.” So says the journalist and academic Chris Hedges in Lauren Greenfield’s documentary Generation Wealth. The idea the film plays with is that a psychopathology which currently dominates to a morbid degree is our obsession with being rich and, as much, with the public signifiers of wealth.
£¥€$ (LIES), Almeida Theatre review - financial frolics at the gaming table
Ontroerend Goed's latest offers a cunningly immersive take on capitalism
Theatre critics tend not to experience an 140 percent increase in their financial assets within 21 minutes. So on that remarkable front alone, the London premiere of the Belgian £¥€$ (LIES) is giddily immersive fun, at least up until such time as the Ontroerend Goed production shifts gears and sends the financial world, and our momentary prosperity, crashing down.
Dry Powder/Yous Two, Hampstead Theatre review - Hayley Atwell has competition
Back-to-back openings give pride of place to a dazzling debut
Sometimes it pays to come in under the radar.
Dessert, Southwark Playhouse review - undercooked and overwrought
Oliver Cotton's new play, directed by Trevor Nunn, begins well before succumbing to absurdity and hysteria
"What is this, Saving Private Ryan?" a character randomly queries well into the actor Oliver Cotton's new play, Dessert. Well, more like a modern-day An Inspector Calls on steroids, with the volume turned up so high in Trevor Nunn's production that you don't half believe the questioner's wife when she talks about a state of affairs that could be heard all the way to France. After a promising and prickly start, Cotton's hectoring satire of our recklessly self-absorbed, increasingly divisive age devolves into implausibility and hysteria in equal measure.
Gold
Matthew McConaughey's fable of untold riches is harder work than it ought to be
Matthew McConaughey has already had a go at hunting for gold (on film, at any rate) in 2008's Fool's Gold, where he and Kate Hudson were on the trail of a sunken Spanish galleon full of treasure. Critics were unsympathetic ("excruciatingly lame" was a fairly typical response).