family relationships
Matilda the Musical, Cambridge TheatreFriday, 25 November 2011
WC Fields once famously cautioned against working with children or animals. He might very well have gone crazy had he been involved with the RSC’s hit musical production Matilda, which started out in Stratford-upon-Avon last November, garnering... Read more... |
The Café, Sky1Thursday, 24 November 2011
To start a new sitcom with 18 seconds of unbroken silence after the opening music has faded is a brave move. Such minimalism is not to everyone's taste and some viewers may switch off there and then, but others will recognise it as the calling card... Read more... |
SnowtownFriday, 18 November 2011
Snowtown gets as close as a film can to making you feel serial-killing’s human cost. It’s hard to thank Australian director Justin Kurzel for his extraordinary debut, so grim is the story it tells. But he and writer Shaun Grant have done a selfless... Read more... |
Juno and the Paycock, National TheatreThursday, 17 November 2011
“The whole world's in a terrible state of chassis,” says Captain Jack Boyle more than once during Sean O'Casey's great play, set in 1922 and the second of his Dublin trilogy, bookended by The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) and The Plough and the... Read more... |
Who Do You Think You Are? USA: Steve Buscemi, BBC OneThursday, 17 November 2011
Steve Buscemi says he’s “from the country of Brooklyn”. In the wake of Boardwalk Empire he could have said the empire of Brooklyn. Although the family history disinterred was genuinely strange, this first entry in the new series of Who Do You... Read more... |
The Lion in Winter, Theatre Royal, HaymarketWednesday, 16 November 2011
Don't be misled by the mini-history lesson with which Trevor Nunn's belated London stage premiere of The Lion in Winter begins, a sequence of dates, facts and maps that scroll up a decoratively appointed screen and threaten to turn the sumptuous... Read more... |
We Need to Talk About KevinThursday, 20 October 2011
Rich with cinematic life but existing doggedly in the shadow of death, Lynne Ramsay’s epically disquieting adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s bestseller is fluid and imaginatively realised. It's an emotional ambush, but executed with extraordinary... Read more... |
Who Do You Think You Are? - Tracey Emin, BBC OneThursday, 13 October 2011
Tracey Emin once made a tent for which she gained some notoriety. On it, she’d appliquéd the names of everyone she had ever slept with – including, as a child, her beloved Granny Hodgkins. Sadly, the tent, called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963... Read more... |
The Veil, National TheatreWednesday, 05 October 2011
Conor McPherson has set his latest play at an interesting point in Irish – and European – history. It is 1822, post-Napoleonic wars, and Ireland is in an economic mess, with impoverished peasants facing the failure of their crops for the second year... Read more... |
The Tempest, Theatre Royal HaymarketWednesday, 07 September 2011
Memo to William Shakespeare: could we have more, please, in The Tempest of the anxious, angsty Prospero, the mortality-minded magus played in his most riveting theatre performance in years by Ralph Fiennes? As long as Fiennes is prowling the... Read more... |
Outnumbered, Series Four, BBC OneFriday, 02 September 2011
From the long shot of the suburban London semis onwards, I couldn’t help but think of the 1960s BBC sitcom Not in Front of the Children which similarly focused on a middle-class couple with three children. There’s no laughter track on Outnumbered... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe: DeAnne Smith/ A Slow Air/ DregsTuesday, 16 August 2011
DeAnne Smith, Gilded Balloon **** Don’t be fooled by DeAnne Smith’s gamine appearance of boyish clothing and Bieberesque hairstyle. And don’t be fooled either by the way her act begins with a riff on existential angst - prompted by an... Read more... |
