adaptation
But I'm A Cheerleader: The Musical, Turbine Theatre review - two cheers for feelgood showFriday, 04 March 2022
We open on “Seventeen is Swell”, the antithesis of Janis Ian’s 70s angsty anthem, “At Seventeen”. Megan is living it large as the cheerleader’s leader with her football captain boyfriend, two loving if strict parents and a golden future of all-... Read more... |
Saturday Night Fever, Peacock Theatre review - crowd-pleaser stays true to its rootsThursday, 17 February 2022
Wind the clock back 45 years and the Big Apple was bankrupt, the lights had gone out and many native New Yorkers were packing their bags. Gangs controlled whole neighbourhoods, drugs were the currency of choice and, for a kid with no college,... Read more... |
Broken Wings, Charing Cross Theatre review - new musical fails to flyWednesday, 16 February 2022
Somewhere in the world right now, one can hear Mister Mister's AOR hit, "Broken Wings" on an MOR radio station, capturing mid-Eighties synth pop perfectly. Few listeners will know that its inspiration is a 1912 autobiographical novel by Lebanese-... Read more... |
Wuthering Heights, National Theatre review - too much heat, not enough lightFriday, 11 February 2022
“If you want romance,” the cast of Emma Rice’s new version of Wuthering Heights say in unison just after the interval, “go to Cornwall.” They’re using the modern definition of romance, of course – Emily Brontë’s novel is full of the original meaning... Read more... |
Force Majeure, Donmar Warehouse review - fissures in a marriageTuesday, 11 January 2022
It sounds like the title of a play by Rattigan. No such luck: “Force Majeure” – a legal term with which all too few will be familiar, in which circumstances beyond anyone’s control cancel a contract – is how Ruben Östlund’s 2014 film Turist is known... Read more... |
The Humans review - staring headlong into the abyssMonday, 10 January 2022
A small film that packs a significant wallop, The Humans snuck into view at the very end of 2021 to cast a despairing shadow that extends well beyond the Thanksgiving day during which it takes place. Adapted from the much-traveled Tony-winning play... Read more... |
The Tiger Lillies' Christmas Carol: A Victorian Gutter, Southbank Centre review - cult band get inside Scrooge's headSaturday, 18 December 2021
Charles Dickens and Martyn Jacques is a marriage made in heaven (well, hell I suppose): the Victorian novelist touring the rookeries of Clerkenwell the better to fire his imagination and, 150 years or so later, the post-punk maestro mining London's... Read more... |
The Book of Dust, Bridge Theatre review – as much intelligence and provocation as fleet-footed funThursday, 09 December 2021
It’s been seventeen years since Nicholas Hytner first directed Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials at the National Theatre, ambitiously whirling audiences into Pullman’s universe of daemons, damnable clerics and parallel worlds. Now he has... Read more... |
You Don't Know Me, BBC One review - true love meets inner-city crime waveTuesday, 07 December 2021
I sympathised with the prosecuting barrister when she put it to the court that the accused, a man called Hero (Samuel Adewunmi), was “using his closing speech to construct a work of fiction”.This was a crafty meta-joke. You Don’t Know Me itself is a... Read more... |
Life of Pi, Wyndham's Theatre review - visually ravishing show uplifted by astonishing puppetryFriday, 03 December 2021
When the Canadian Yann Martel went to India as a young adult backpacker he fell in love – not with one person but with the rich imaginative landscape opened up by its religions and its animals. A struggling writer at the time, he channelled this new... Read more... |
The Good Life, Richmond Theatre review - popular sitcom gets its own origin storyMonday, 29 November 2021
"Off-grid" wasn't a thing in the mid-'70s. Sure, people planted a few potatoes in the garden and pottered about a bit in an allotment, but nobody went the whole hog. The rat race was certainly a thing though, a fertile seam for comedies like The... Read more... |
little scratch, Hampstead Downstairs review - a maverick director surpasses herselfMonday, 15 November 2021
Katie Mitchell’s desire to bust the boundaries of theatre has taken a brilliant turn. Over her long and distinguished career as a director she has been tirelessly inventive, injecting stylised movement into Greek tragedy, projecting film onto giant... Read more... |
