Calendar Girls was a real hoot when it came out as a movie featuring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters in 2003. I wish I could say the same about the play I saw at the Athenaeum Theatre – but in all good conscience I can’t. Tim Firth adapted the script from his hit film, which…
Cain and Abel – biblical brothers at loggerheads. In American playwright Sam Shepard’s searing, black comedic drama it is well educated Hollywood screenwriter Austin (Justin Hosking) and his older brother Lee (Mark Diaco) – a drifter, thief and drinker – in conflict. The pair hasn’t seen each other in five years and find themselves together in their…
Eoin Colfer is best known as the author of the highly successful children’s fantasy series Artemis Fowl. This series, pitched squarely at the older child market, features a ten-year-old super rich, hyper-intelligent, criminal mastermind who finds and takes on a technologically advanced fairy world. But the first Artemis Fowl book came out in 2001, putting…
John Krasinski – that all-round good guy from The Office (US) – never struck me as an action hero. But somehow he makes it work in Amazon Prime’s spy drama Jack Ryan (or to give it its full title: Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan). Remember, this is a character that’s been played by Alec Baldwin (in…
A mystery, drama, science fiction and psychological thriller all rolled into one, 10 Cloverfield Lane is the spiritual successor to 2008’s sleeper hit Cloverfield. We are introduced to Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) when she is at sixes and sevens. Not thinking all that clearly, she packs a suitcase and exits her city apartment in haste…
Three friends – drag queens Mitzi and Felicia, and trans performer Bernadette – board a battered old bus named “Priscilla”. They plan to travel from Sydney across the desert to fulfill a performance engagement in Alice Springs. Mitzi’s past has come back to provide an unlikely second chance. Along the way to the Alice, the “girls” frock…
Twenty-one-year-old Leo Joseph-Connell (Shiv Palekar) values his independence. He’s fallen out with his mother Jane and is on a cross-country bike trip. The family hasn’t heard from him in weeks and they are worried. Leo lands on the doorstep of his 91-year-old grandmother Vera Joseph’s (Nancye Hayes) apartment in Greenwich Village, dirty and smelly. He’s…
All that glisters is not gold – and there was plenty of non-gold glistering on the Lyric stage. The whole show, from curtains to costumes, and even the seats in the stalls sparkled with sequins, colour, and glitter – and the sky was dotted with shining stars. Designer Catherine Martin’s set and costumes were a…
An immigrant family business that grew and grew to become the fourth largest investment bank in the United States before it disintegrated. That is the story of the Lehman Brothers, as told with remarkable insight and stagecraft in The Lehman Trilogy. Born on September 29th, 1822, Hayum Lehmann, the son of a cattle merchant, emigrated from…
British intelligence is under the microscope in Black Bag. George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is an elite operative at Britain’s closely guarded National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). He can’t stand liars. He seeks them out an exposes them. That has included his own father. Now there appears to be a mole in the ranks of the…
