Don't bother, they're here
I’m loving this deep dive that the Guardian is doing into Tristram Kenton’s archive, this time taking a turn to the many David Hare productions he has been witness to. Highly recommended (the photos, not the Hare):
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/gallery/2020/sep/02/plays-of-david-hare-in-pictures
“No-one knows what Queen means because it doesn’t mean one thing”
Most everything you need to know about Bohemian Rhapsody is contained within the fact that Brian May and Roger Taylor were engaged as consultants on the film, intimately connected enough to be able to steer the direction of the movie in the way that they wanted. And so any hope of an independently-minded biography of queer icon Freddie Mercury disappeared behind a PG-friendly hagiography of Queen.
In some ways, it doesn’t matter. The film scored huge commercial, if not critical, success, snagging 4 Academy Awards along the way, but it still doesn’t make it right. How are you going to put your name to a film that is filled with inaccuracies? Because those inaccuracies put yourself in a better light, allowing you to show that you were tolerant of Mercury’s sexual proclivities and later AIDS diagnosis but that you were a finger-wagging Cassandra at his pursuit of a life outwith the heteronormative. Continue reading “Film Review: Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)”
Film
Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role
Christian Bale – Vice as Dick Cheney
Bradley Cooper – A Star Is Born as Jackson Maine
Rami Malek – Bohemian Rhapsody as Freddie Mercury
Viggo Mortensen – Green Book as Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga
John David Washington – BlacKkKlansman as Ron Stallworth
Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
Emily Blunt – Mary Poppins Returns as Mary Poppins
Glenn Close – The Wife as Joan Castleman
Olivia Colman – The Favourite as Queen Anne
Lady Gaga – A Star Is Born as Ally Maine
Melissa McCarthy – Can You Ever Forgive Me? as Lee Israel Continue reading “25th Screen Actors Guild Awards nominees”
“I adored you.
‘It was not the same…'”
Fresh from a successful run at the Hampstead Theatre and before its arrival in the West End in the New Year, this revival of David Hare’s The Judas Kiss visits Richmond Theatre for a week and packed out the halls (and overcrowded foyer) of this Victorian theatre last night. The play focuses on two episodes in the destructive relationship between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas: the first as the playwright retreats to a suite in the Cadogan Hotel in the wake of his failed attempt to sue Bosie’s father for libel and in anticipation of his own arrest; and the second two years later as Wilde tries to recuperate post-incarceration in the warmer climes of Naples.
Everett makes a different Wilde to the one one might expect. Hare resists the temptation to over-burden him with an ever-present rapier wit, making him a more solemn, melancholy figure – though one who can still produce a barbed comment at the drop of a velvet hat – thoroughly pummelled by the weight of Victorian society’s puritanical hypocrisy, a point hammered home by the opening image of screwing servants. But there’s an element too of self-flagellation here, even against the advice of his nearest and dearest to flee for France. With a tragic knowingness in his eyes, Everett’s redoubtable Wilde determinedly holds onto his personal integrity even as he knows that Bosie cannot, or will not, match such devotion. Continue reading “Review: The Judas Kiss, Richmond Theatre”
“Questions? Observations? Misgivings?”
Forming the final entry in her debut season as Donmar AD, The Physicists continues Josie Rourke’s realignment of the Donmar’s artistic policy. And as with Making Noise Quietly, it is into previously unknown areas for me as this play was written in 1962 by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt (although Rourke commissioned a new version here from Jack Thorne), someone I’ve never previously heard of. Wikipedia informs me he was a proponent of epic theatre but what it translates to here is a tragi-comedy with a farcical first half, which darkens to a more serious second which reflects its Cold War origins.
It starts off like the punchline to a joke: three nuclear physicists are in a mental asylum. Herbert Georg Beutler, who believes he is Sir Isaac Newton, Ernst Heinrich Ernesti who is convinced he is Albert Einstein and Johann Wilhelm Möbius who has regular visitations from King Solomon. It emerges that the first two have murdered their nurses and that Möbius seems set to follow suit, but as the reasons for their actions slowly become apparent, it is clear that something greater is at stake here. Continue reading “Review: The Physicists, Donmar Warehouse”