It just wouldn’t be Christmas without another celebrity children’s book adaptation for the stage. Some projects feel a tad cynical but The Bolds, based onJulian Clary’s popular series, isn’t a bad bet. It’s a quirky story about a family of hyenas who escape a national park in Africa and wind up living as humans in a semi-detached in Teddington. There’s plenty of fun physical comedy, endless jokes...
Dark lighting combines with booming music. With naked torsos shining, artists Daniel Kok and Luke George slowly, carefully, bind each other in rope. They string themselves – and later audience members – from the ceiling, like colourful trussed chickens. Placed on stage are everyday objects, including a kettle, table and mop bound by neon string, lending a playfully surreal touch. So sets the...
Black Earth Rising is not the kind of drama that allows its audience to be caught napping. In the first couple of minutes alone, a Q&A session with an esteemed human rights lawyer dissolves into a ferocious argument over the “neo-colonialist bullshit” and “self-righteous western paternalism” of the international criminal court (ICC). Moments after we see an animated sequence of a young girl...
There’s a recurring impulse throughout Inventing Anna, the nine-part Netflix limited series on the so-called “Soho Grifter”, to apply the scam logic of Anna Delvey – a broke twentysomething Russian émigré who posed as a wealthy German heiress in mid-2010s New York – to society at large. Capitalism is a scam. So is meritocracy. Rich people can skate by on the assumption of their wealth; men fake...
We’re standing together in a London park, not far from where the 23-year-old actor grew up, on a cold but sunlit morning in February. Soon, Edgar-Jones will fly to Los Angeles for the premiere of a gory and provocative new thriller she has made called Fresh. Although her career exploded in spring 2020, when she starred with Paul Mescal in the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, the...
The notorious cult leader Anne Hamilton-Byrne has died in Melbourne. Hamilton-Byrne, guru of a cult known as The Family, is reported to have died at an aged care home on Thursday night. She was 98 and had had dementia for many years. From the 1960s until the 1980s, the cult treated children cruelly and violently, bringing them up in virtual isolation from the rest of the world at a base north...
Swamp Motel knows how to put on a show. Founded by Ollie Jones and Clem Garritty, alumni of the experimental theatre troupe Punchdrunk and members of comedy group Kill The Beast, the London-based company has made its name with sell-out events that blend immersive storytelling and brand tie-ins with West End production values. Since its launch in 2017, Swamp Motel has built a zombie-filled police...
“Star Wars has always had its home in the UK,” a Disney representative announced before a London screening of Solo: A Star Wars Story, the latest film in the franchise. But as the movie wore on, I realised this was only partly true. There are lots of Americans, and lots of posh English people, but as someone with a regional accent, Solo involved me about as much as the Royal Wedding. From the...
It’s April 4, 2019. The first Sonic the Hedgehog movie trailer has just dropped and the reactions are as damning as they are derisive. ‘I’d pay $15 to never see bad Sonic again’. ‘He’s like a mascot for a disease in a pharmaceutical ad’. ‘They’re missing the point of the source material’. ‘It’s an utter abomination’. ‘Absolutely horrifying’. The comments and memes were brutal. Overnight, the...
The once desirable Sunset Valley, where Hank Hankson lived a humble life with his dog Sumo, has been ripped to pieces but an unknown, malevolent, but somehow familiar force. The peaceful facade of suburbia has been destroyed – townsfolk, neighbours, and friends crushed, houses bulldozed and replaced with a series of six-storey tall hedge mazes, looming ominously over Hankson’s small and rundown...