sex
philip radcliffe
Seeing Miss Julie played in-the-round would, I suspect, have delighted Strindberg. In his preface to the play, he was much exercised about the setting, presuming a proscenium stage: a single set, asymmetrical scenery, no clutter, no “tiresome” exits through doors, no footlights. And so on.I imagine that he didn’t envisage theatre-in-the-round, but he longed for some way of breaking the custom of formal staging (“nothing left to the imagination”) and tidy dialogue. He wanted actors playing “for the audience, not with it”, sometimes even having their backs to the audience whilst speaking. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the right hands, the English language can work itself up into an intensely erotic lather. It can seduce and caress, tease and undress. It can perform tantric wonders, all through the power of the word. In the right hands. “You ain’t got yer knob out already?” said Jenny, on the blower to a gentleman while redecorating her kitchen. “Listen to how wet I am.” And she dipped her brush in a sloppy tub of Dulux.Jenny, slightly wheezy at 56, is a phone sex worker. If she’s broad in the beam, she’s broader in the mind. “Control the cock, you control the man,” she advised. One of La Rochefoucauld’s Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Everything that’s best about the opening episode of Paula Milne’s White Heat, a decade-straddling saga of seven friends who begin as flatmates in 1960s London, is encapsulated in its Hartley-quoting title, The Past Is a Foreign Country. For estranged friends Charlotte (Juliet Stevenson) and Lily (Lindsay Duncan) it’s also a country fraught with unresolved tensions and deeply painful secrets, and one that they’re forced to revisit after a death brings the old group back together in the present day. So far, so The Big Chill. But the more commonly drawn comparison has been to the Beeb’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Many a redoubtable British theatre talent has stumbled at the altar of cinema before, which is another way of saying that Bel Ami is hardly the first film to suggest that not every heavyweight of the London and international stage - in this case two such titans in Cheek By Jowl supremos Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod - is to the celluloid manner born. Leading man Robert Pattinson deserves credit for thinking outside the Twilight box while only confirming one's sense that he, too, looks sadly adrift beyond his established habitat. Much like his co-directors, if the truth be told.There Read more ...
philip radcliffe
What is it about the Sixties that keeps drawing us back? Surely, it can’t just be that anniversary thing – 50 years on? Perhaps, in these care-worn times, we just like to revisit our don’t-give-a-damn anti-heroes, having their cake and eating it, pleasuring their mates’ marriage-weary wives, arranging abortions if things go wrong, downing pints in the pub. That was the life.Recently, we had Alfie Elkins, Bill Naughton’s scallywag, brought to life again. Now comes Arthur Seaton from Alan Sillitoe’s famous first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, freshly adapted for the stage and Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Twentysomething emotional confusion is fertile ground for drama. In this new play, Stefan Golaszewski - writer of the BBC Three sitcom Him & Her and star of BBC Four’s Cowards - explores the situation of a young man who doesn’t really know what he wants. Well, except for lots of sex of course. With lots of different women. Or so it might seem. But does he really?The plot is as bare as a binge-drinker’s arse. Twentysomething Adam, who works in sales but has a really good idea for a new website, goes clubbing with his mates. During an evening of drinking and dancing, he manages to pick up Read more ...
David Benedict
As in sex, so it is in music: there’s a lot riding on the climax. The celebrated third act trio of Der Rosenkavalier is arguably the most famous orgasm in music – dear reader, can you name a better one? – but time it wrongly and you’ll regret it. There is, however, absolutely nothing regrettable about this A-list cast in the hands of director David McVicar and conductor Edward Gardner. Theirs is the most assured, most riveting Rosenkavalier in this country for years.Lush, plush and dangerous to know though Strauss’s score is, many directors shy away from the opera for the simple reason that Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In his previous films, the French director Bernardo Bonello has demonstrated a non-judgemental affinity for pornographers, prostitutes, and other transgressors. In his latest, House of Tolerance (House of Pleasures in the US), his sympathy is with the languid courtesans of a doomed high-class fin-de-siècle Parisian brothel, who are united in their contempt for the wealthy, condescending men who subject them to fetishes, diseases, and violence.Early in this gloomy elegy to the organised vice of the Belle Epoque, which implies the maisons de tolérance weren’t much safer then the sordid Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the title of this new DVD box set was a given considering the nature of the films included, all six films collected are – whatever their reputation, levels of nudity and explicitness – sober-minded, hardly measuring up to any standard of what normally constitutes erotica. Three are dry sex education films, presented by real-life psychologists, while the other three are bizarre examinations of an alienated young women in relationships that involve power play, subjugation and abuse. Like nightmare, no-budget counterparts of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage.Swedish cinema Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Alfie’s back. The eponymous scallywag from the late Bill Naughton’s picaresque yarn set in London’s so-called Swinging Sixties is at it again, canoodling the women and cuckolding their husbands. “Keep them all happy,” he says in cavalier style, “Happiness is transitory, of the moment.” He takes no responsibility other than helping to arrange the odd back-street abortion. Never get attached and never get dependent - these are his watchwords. Life’s a giggle. His attitude to women is expressed by his dated vocabulary – “bint”, “bird” or just “it”. And he’s always on the fiddle.Half a century Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, Steve McQueen’s second film, Shame, got rave reviews from male critics. Michael Fassbender (who played Bobby Sands in McQueen’s splendid debut feature, Hunger) is brilliant as Brandon, a successful thirtysomething New Yorker. His screen presence is so appealing that one could ogle him for hours and if, indeed, that is his body sauntering naked past the camera, he is well hung as well as handsome. Like Hunger, Shame explores bondage, but of a different kind: Bobby Sands was in prison, while Brandon is free but imprisoned by his Read more ...
theartsdesk
“Brandon is everyone.” Shame, Steve McQueen’s new film, opens later this week. It is a brutally frank portrait of a man’s struggle with addiction to sex. As McQueen explains here, it was shot in New York for the specific reason that no one in the UK would talk to him about sex addiction. No sex please.And yet the film has a distinctly British flavour. McQueen co-wrote the script with Abi Morgan, the television scriptwriter who has branched out into film and theatre: she wrote the script for The Iron Lady, which opened last week, as well as the plays 27 and, opening this week at the Lyric Read more ...