school
James Saynor
Perhaps only in Japan might it be thought the height of delinquency for a bunch of schoolkids is to spend the night sneaking back to school, climbing in and hanging out in a music room. Happyend, a Japanese teen-rebellion story, shows its central posse of disaffected sixth-formers carrying out just such a wild and crazy stunt near the start.And then a couple of them – the facetious Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and the moodier Kou (Yukito Hidaka) – pull off a scallywag move that’s positively Dada-ist: they haul the principal’s prized marigold car onto its backside in the parking lot, like a “car Read more ...
Saskia Baron
As if penguins didn’t have enough to fret about with impending tariffs on exporting guano to America, here comes Steve Coogan to ruffle their feathers. The Penguin Lessons is a pretty loose adaptation of a memoir by Tom Michell, about his stint as a young English teacher in an ersatz British boarding school in Argentina.Casting middle-aged Coogan as Michell meant giving him a cursory backstory of a personal family tragedy to explain why his alternately louche and curmudgeonly character has sought employment abroad. Set against the backdrop of the 1976 military coup that led to the murders and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It’s 2012 and the London Olympics might as well be happening on the Moon for Jen and Stacey. In fact, you could say the same for everyone else scrabbling a living in Bradford – or anywhere north of Watford – and we know what those left-behind places did when presented with a ballot box in 2016 and 2019.Not that such weighty matters concern our two girls, out for a banging (in more senses than one) £1 Thursday night out, living for the sex and booze and rock’n’roll that get them from one week to the next. (Writer, Kat Rose-Martin, wisely keeps other temptations out of arm’s reach, one of many Read more ...
David Kettle
Adults, Traverse Theatre ★★★Outside the festival madness of August, Edinburgh is a bit of a village. So it’s no surprise if you keep bumping into people you know. For entrepreneurial Zara, however, it nonetheless comes as a shock that the latest client at her fair-pay sex-work collective is her former teacher Iain, there to try things out with a guy for the first time. The awkwardness levels crank up even further, though, with the arrival of Jay, Iain’s partner for his allotted 45 minutes, as well as Jay’s crying baby, and a mobile phone that can record the whole affair.There are Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Margaret Simon (a brilliant Abby Ryder Fortson) is 11. What she wants above all is to be “normal and regular like everyone else”. This means getting her period at the right time – “I’d die if I didn’t get it till I was 16,” she tells her mother (Rachel McAdams) – and filling out her Gro-Bra. An only child, she makes God her confidant and asks him to help.Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s charming, atmospheric movie is mainly faithful to Judy Blume’s iconic novel, fans will be relieved to know, though transferring such an interior life on to the screen is by definition problematic. It Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“We all make history, one way or another.” But some of us make more history than others, and a group of 27 English schoolboys who got lost in Southern Germany in 1936 haven’t made much, unfortunately. Scottish playwright Pamela Carter has brushed the cobwebs from this strange corner of Anglo-German relations and spun an irreverent new play about what it means to be English. Our narrators are three pupils of the Strand School in South London: rambunctious Eaton (Vinnie Heaven), clean-cut Harrison (Hubert Burton), and earnest Lyons (Matthew Tennyson), the youngest. They’re on a walking Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Do you happily binge four hours of mind-candy TV in one sitting? Alecky Blythe’s latest verbatim play, Our Generation – which runs for 3hr 45min at the Dorfman space of the National Theatre – might take almost as long but will probably be much more rewarding.Blythe made her name in 2011 with the excellent London Road, another NT production (staged by its current artistic director, Rufus Norris and subsequently filmed), which used as its script statements by people involved in events in Ipswich while a serial killer was on the loose. Most of the actors’ words were sung to simple tunes, almost Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“You could read at home,” says Bettina (Anoushka Chadha), Year 10, her school uniform perfectly pressed, hair neatly styled. “You could be an annoying little shit at home,” retorts her sister Asha (Safiyya Ingar), Year 13, all fire and fury in Doc Martens and rainbow headphones. Two Billion Beats, Sonali Bhattacharyya’s new play for the Orange Tree, draws us in with snappy lines and raucous energy before delivering an emotional wallop.Asha is waiting to go home until their mum has left for work so she doesn’t have to talk about her history essay. She got 85%, but her mum only cares about the Read more ...
Izzy Smith
Mieko Kawakami sits firmly amongst the Japanese literati for her sharp and pensive depictions of life in contemporary Japan. Since the translation of Breasts and Eggs (2020), she has also become somewhat of an indie fiction icon in the UK, with her books receiving praise from Naoise Dolan, An Yu and Olivia Sudjic.
Her latest novel, Heaven (2021), translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, follows a 14-year-old student who is subjected to relentless bullying. He resigns himself to the severe and twisted forms of abuse inflicted by his classmates, only finding solace in the company of Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
The website of the National Crime Agency offers the following definition of County Lines: “[it is] where illegal drugs are transported from one area to another, often across police and local authority boundaries (although not exclusively), usually by children or vulnerable people who are coerced into it by gangs. The ‘County Line’ is the mobile phone line used to take the orders of drugs.” This definition does not feature in County Lines (2019), Henry Blake’s first film of feature-length, newly released on Blu-ray and DVD. Nevertheless, it does hold a conceptual relevance for this Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“They always try to break you down when you’re 17,” says queen bee Selah (Lovie Simone) in Tayarisha Poe’s impressive directorial debut. As leader of the Spades, one of the five Mafia-style ruling factions in the exclusive Haldwell boarding-school in Pennsylvania, Selah, with her waist-long braids and inscrutably cool managerial style, seems unbreakable. But not so fast. Here comes new girl Paloma (Celeste O’Connor), her sweet-faced nemesis.As a high-school movie, this is some way from Lady Bird, Waves or Mean Girls, though perhaps elements of those are at play, as are shades of Donna Tartt’s Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The National Theatre’s online broadcasts got off to a storming start with One Man, Two Guvnors – watched by over 2.5 million people, either on the night or in the week since its live streaming, and raising around £66,000 in donations. Let’s hope that engagement continues with their next offering: Sally Cookson’s dynamic adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, a Bristol Old Vic and National Theatre co-production which also toured the UK.Cookson’s devised work blows past the problems associated with transferring literature to stage. There is nothing stuffy or static about her version; on the Read more ...