drama
The Tempest, Cheek By Jowl, Barbican TheatreSaturday, 09 April 2011
Tradition, in the form of Victorian performance, conferred on The Tempest the VC of Highest Shakespearean Poetry, though it probably wasn't Shakespeare's final play. John Gielgud was in an important sense the last great Victorian English thesp and,... Read more... |
Room at the Top, BBC FourThursday, 07 April 2011
Another week, another northern novel about working-class libidos adapted for BBC Four. One is still catching one’s breath from the festival of copulation that was Women in Love. Spool forward a few decades - or a week in television scheduling... Read more... |
Cause Célèbre, Old VicTuesday, 29 March 2011
Sexual intercourse, according to Larkin, began in 1963. By 1974 it had had a free-thinking, free-loving decade to become comfortable and frankly rather routine. It was the year the Ramones formed, when The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was in cinemas and... Read more... |
The EagleTuesday, 22 March 2011
A chorus of "Hooray! No CGI!" has greeted Kevin Macdonald's new film version of Rosemary Sutcliff's popular novel, The Eagle of the Ninth. Not for him a Gladiator-style digital Rome, or Troy-like computer-generated navies stretching away into... Read more... |
The Knot of the Heart, Almeida TheatreFriday, 18 March 2011
The Knot of the Heart takes its title from a Sanskrit phrase, but David Eldridge's new play for the Almeida Theatre is likely to speak forcibly to anyone who has witnessed, not to mention experienced, the addiction unsparingly charted across two... Read more... |
Ecstasy, Hampstead TheatreTuesday, 15 March 2011
Film-maker and playwright Mike Leigh simply doesn’t do revivals. His method of working - which involves a group of actors improvising characters and situations until a story emerges - runs contrary to any notion of returning to a play after its... Read more... |
DVD: The Sinking of the LaconiaFriday, 11 March 2011
Alan Bleasdale, along with Dennis Potter one of the truly original voices of British television drama, has spent the past decade in silence. His brand of epic narrative, his penchant for letting his characters talk and talk, went out of fashion... Read more... |
Monroe, ITV1Thursday, 10 March 2011
James Nesbitt has always looked full of himself and too bumptious for comfort, so who better to play a smart-arse neurosurgeon who prides himself on his rock-steady hands and steely nerves? "What really matters is how well you handle losing," he... Read more... |
ArchipelagoWednesday, 02 March 2011
Upper-middle-class familial relations are placed under an unflattering spotlight in Joanna Hogg’s rich, resonant and often scathingly comic drama, which triumphantly harnesses the power of the unsaid and the unseen. Like its predecessor Unrelated,... Read more... |
Moment, Bush TheatreMonday, 28 February 2011
At the moment, most of the energy in British new writing seems to be coming from American and Irish playwrights. This is such a regular phenomenon, one that comes around every few years, that it seems idle to speculate on the reasons for it; surely... Read more... |
Winterlong, Soho TheatreFriday, 25 February 2011
In contemporary British drama, kids are usually either suffering or doomed innocents. But Winterlong's Oscar is different. He is a loner who was abandoned by his schoolgirl mum and his scary dad at the age of four years old, and tries to make his... Read more... |
Silk, BBC OneTuesday, 22 February 2011
There was a moment in last night’s Silk when a young solicitor turned up late for a trial. He was also an actor, he explained to his client’s counsel, and had to attend an audition. For a Head & Shoulders ad. The USP of Peter Moffat’s... Read more... |
