family relationships
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... |
Who Do You Think You Are? - June Brown, BBC OneWednesday, 10 August 2011
Your typical consumer of Who Do You Think You Are? on BBC One would almost certainly have been disappointed by last night's first instalment of the eighth series. There were no tears from June Brown, EastEnders' Dot Cotton, for a start. That is as... Read more... |
Sarah's KeyTuesday, 02 August 2011
History rears its harrowing head in Sarah's Key, a sometimes galumphing film that lingers in the mind not least because of the terrible tale it has to tell. Reminding us that the atrocities of the Holocaust weren't any one country's exclusive... Read more... |
DVD: Animal KingdomMonday, 11 July 2011
David Michôd’s stark, screw-tight debut is, in his own words, a “grand Melbourne crime drama”. Though it presents us with a menagerie of criminality it eschews many of the paradigms of the genre and feels courageous in its elegant, near... Read more... |
The Tree of LifeThursday, 07 July 2011
At the end of last week it was reported that a Connecticut cinema, besieged with requests for refunds, had posted up a sign warning punters that The Tree of Life “does not follow a traditional, linear narrative approach to storytelling”. And so what... Read more... |
TrustSunday, 03 July 2011
Do you know where your teenagers are? If they're smart, they'll be somewhere watching Trust, the sophomore directorial effort from actor David Schwimmer that turns out to be as deftly compelling as it is unnerving. The depredations of the internet... Read more... |
The Secret Sisters, Pleasance, EdinburghTuesday, 28 June 2011
Emmylou Harris once described to me the sibling harmonies of the Louvin Brothers as sounding like they were “washed in the blood”. The voices of Laura and Lydia Rogers, two twentysomething sisters from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, have that same haunting... Read more... |
Hundreds and Thousands, Soho TheatreMonday, 27 June 2011
One of the many strengths of new writing for the stage is that it’s not afraid to go into the darkest and most upsetting places of the human psyche. Whether at the Royal Court or at the Bush or Soho theatres, young playwrights have dived in to... Read more... |
The BeaverThursday, 16 June 2011
It doesn’t augur well when the first comment you hear as the credits roll is, “Well, it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting.” That’s really not a great place to begin a review either, but let’s anyway. Or rather with a fnar, fnar moment - did nobody... Read more... |
Chicken Soup With Barley, Royal Court TheatreWednesday, 08 June 2011
"Love comes now. You have to start with love," urges Sarah Kahn (Samantha Spiro) early in Chicken Soup With Barley, and it's inconceivable that Dominic Cooke's knockout production of Arnold Wesker's 1958 play could have sprung from any other... Read more... |
Jerry Seinfeld, O2 ArenaSaturday, 04 June 2011
Jerry Seinfeld, acclaimed New York stand-up and star of the eponymous American sitcom co-created with Larry David, last performed in the UK 13 years ago. He’s currently doing a brief European tour and, while keen fans were quick to snap up tickets... Read more... |
Prince Philip at 90, ITV1Tuesday, 24 May 2011
David Frost and Richard Nixon. Melvyn Bragg and Dennis Potter. Parky and Ali. The list of seminal TV interviews is a relatively short one, and it's not about to get any longer. Alan Titchmarsh’s hopelessly mismatched bout with Prince Philip saw the... Read more... |
