sex
Adam Sweeting
Jenna Coleman seems to pick her roles with care, whether it’s Queen Victoria, the girlfriend of mass murderer Charles Sobhraj in The Serpent, or “occult detective” Johanna Constantine in The Sandman, but her antennae may have been a bit awry when she climbed aboard this one.The Jetty is long on atmosphere and scenery but short on plausibility, and hammers away at its themes of abused women and abusive men so relentlessly that there’s not much room for anything else.The plot is kick-started by an arson attack at a lakeside boathouse, but screenwriter Cat Jones’s plan was to use this to ignite Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Times change, people don't. Does a knighthood sit well on a man who shags anonymous strangers in the Blue Lion out of hours? Emlyn Williams played his own fruity lead when his play Accolade premiered in 1950 - Bill Trenting, a hugely successful writer of seamy bestsellers who (improbably) is about to be knighted and (still more improbably) won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but who will be publicly exposed for his double life enjoying promiscuous stranger-sex in Rotherhithe bars, if he doesn't pay his blackmailer. Sir William, as everyone must now get used to calling him, is on arguably Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Isabelle (Eva Green) leans over, her long hair catches fire from a candle, and Matthew (Michael Pitt) devotedly snuffs it out. She doesn’t miss a beat at this real-life accident, consumed already by The Dreamers’ closed world of a Left Bank apartment in May ’68, where sexual transgression stands for the barricades and baton charges outside.Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaptation of Gilbert Adair’s novel The Holy Innocents emphasises straight over gay sex, and further infuses it with cinephilia. Naïve American Matthew, bee-stung lips pursed and head tilted towards adventure, crosses the Seine to the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
What would happen if a notorious misogynist actually fell in love? With a glacial Danish librarian? And decided his best means of getting this woman’s attention was to ask his worst enemy, a leading feminist academic, for help?These probably aren’t questions most people would prioritise, but the Australian playwright Van Badham did and then fashioned her answers into a satirical comedy, Banging Denmark. It fills the little Finborough space very adequately, though it recedes in the memory somewhat once its excellent cast have taken a bow.The piece opens with a young man at home in his Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a too brightly tiled Gentlemen’s public convenience (Nitin Parmar’s beautifully realised set is as much a character as any of the men we meet), a lad is shaving his head. He’s halfway to the skinhead look of the early Seventies, but he hasn’t quite nailed it – he's too young to know the detail.Another walks in, older, confident to the point of arrogance, looking not just for another man, but for this particular man-child. Handing over a pair of oxblood DMs with the garish red laces, he doesn’t just complete the boy’s outfit, he inducts him into the two worlds that he will Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Transgression was so deliciously enticing. Back in the Eighties when I saw Les Liaisons Dangereuses in the West End on three occasions, life was simpler – or so us straight white men flattered ourselves to believe. Consent was unproblematic for over-16s (unless you were young, gay and male), there was no social media, nor even any camera phones, and Britney was still a decade away from sucking on a lollipop and asking sweating middle-aged men how was she supposed to know on primetime TV. Things have become more complicated since, rightly so, and transgression’s darker side has Read more ...
stephen.walsh
We can’t do without Così fan tutte; it’s an irresistible masterpiece. But it’s a thorn in the flesh of modern directors, who struggle to find the "relevance" they seem to need in order to get the wretched piece on to the stage.In his new production for Welsh National Opera, Max Hoehn latches on to the opera’s subtitle "The School for Lovers", ignoring da Ponte’s irony and setting it in an actual school; but this is yet another of those doomed concepts that should have remained where they probably originated, among the dirty plates and half-empty wine glasses at the end of a boozy dinner party Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Whitney Houston once sang that “the greatest love of all is happening to me-ee-eee.” In 2024, however, the greatest love of all, at least in terms of sheer, outward-expanding volume, is happening to Jennifer Lopez (and, one must presume, Ben Affleck). J-Lo has spent, we are told, $20 million of her own money on a triple-headed monument to the rekindling of her romance with Affleck; a (from the trailer, very camp-looking) feature film, a documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, inspired by letters from Affleck, and this album. The sheer chutzpah is impressive, and the album sometimes Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Piero Schivazappa’s 1969 debut The Frightened Woman toys with living up to its title, suggesting a sadistic test of endurance. Its Italian title, Femina Ridens, though, translates as The Laughing Woman, and this is really an ironically extreme battle of the sexes, carried by extravagant pop art designs and its star Dagmar Lassander’s playful pertness.Dr Sayer (Philippe Leroy) is a wealthy head of a philanthropic institute who spends his weekends sadistically dominating prostitutes. Let down by a regular, he’s delighted when a previously unknown journalist in his press department, Maria ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following their award-scooping collaboration on 2018’s The Favourite, Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos return with this mind-bending adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s eponymous novel. Also on board is screenwriter Tony McNamara, who wrote (with Deborah Davis) The Favourite’s screenplay. You might say lightning has struck twice, with Stone collecting the Best Female Actor award at the recent Golden Globes and the film winning for Best Musical or Comedy. More mantelpiece-adornments seem certain to follow.But while it’s not a musical (though it has music in it), is it a comedy? It’s Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It was a year of bleak and brutal conflict, ugly and stupid imposition of power, overt Fascism in the mainstream public sphere, decay of infrastructure and apocalyptic weather. So what better than a record of total pleasure? And Janelle Monáe’s fourth album in 13 years really does do exactly what it says on the tin, in every possible ways. Over 14 songs in just 32 minutes, it positively glows with self-confidence, satsifaction, in-the-moment joy, and deeply felt sensualism.And by sensualism I mean complete filth. Its appeal, though, is not just titillation, not by a long shot – and it’s not 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 ...