Theatre of 2024 - 10 Favourite Productions

 

Till the Stars Come Down, NT
(Photo: Manuel Harlan)

The National Theatre started the year with one of its strongest shows: Bijan Sheibani's glorious production of Beth Steel's Till the Stars Come Down, set during an East Midlands Anglo-Polish wedding. Steel's play is another three sisters' story in essence, but a fresh and rich one, as the disappointments, hopes and fears of Sinéad Matthews' bride, and Lisa McGrillis and Lucy Black as her siblings, gradually come into focus. Firmly rooted in community and time but with a touch of cosmic magic besides, and playing out on a mirrorballed set by Samal Black that made the audience the wedding reception guests, Steel's play was laugh-out-loud funny (take a bow, Lorraine Ashbourne's peerless Auntie Carol), huge-hearted, sharply perceptive and, in its final stretch, unafraid of big emotions. Review here. 

Dear Octopus, NT
(Photo: Marc Brenner)

Another NT highlight was another ensemble family play, Dodie Smith's 1938 Dear Octopus - one of a more sedate vintage but rendered equally vivid and involving in Emily Burns' beautiful staging. The production worked by playing the text, with its old-fashioned surface but ever-relevant ambivalence about family, absolutely straight and without gimmicks, allowing the cast plenty of space; a performance of rare and magical translucence from Lindsay Duncan as the fussy but insightful and, it turns out, adaptable matriarch, was one standout of many. 

Roots, Almeida 
(Photo: Marc Brenner)

Adorable as the son in Dear Octopus, Billy Howle had a great year on stage (not that anyone except Lloyd Evans seemed to notice), delivering a compelling Jimmy Porter in  Look Back in Anger at the Almeida and adding a hilarious supporting performance to the theatre's cross-cast Roots - in which  Morfydd Clark shone as Beatie. An hour shorter than the leisurely Donmar production of 2013, director Diyan Zora took the action of Arnold Wesker's play at a clip but didn't stint on nuance or emotion. 

Nye, NT
(Photo: Johan Persson)

The founding of the NHS was  dramatised in two memorable shows this year. Nye, in Rufus Norris' production, had some of the forced larkiness characteristic of the director and didn't always do Tim Price's writing justice. (For Salt Root and Roe alone, I'll be Price's fan forever.) But there were potent moments throughout, and, back on the Olivier after his great turn in Lindsey Turner's pandemic-period Under Milk Wood, Michael Sheen gave another performance as robust as it was detailed.

The Human Body, Donmar
(Photo: Marc Brenner)

Concerned, among many other things, with the impact of the NHS on 'ordinary' lives rather than just those of policymakers, Lucy Kirkwood's  excellent The Human Body premiered at the Donmar with Keeley Hawes as the GP and budding MP reckoning with difficult personal and professional choices, as she gets sidetracked by an affair with Jack Davenport's returned-from-Hollywood actor. Paying tribute to 1940s British cinema (especially Brief Encounter), the intricate production, with its brilliantly multi-rolling cast and live filming, offered a rich portrait of post-WWII Britain, as well as an elegant farewell to the Donmar from Artistic Director Michael Longhurst (here co-directing with Ann Yee). 

Bluets, Royal Court
(Photo: Camilla Greenwood) 

Expressive live filming was also a key component of Bluets, in which Katie Mitchell made Maggie Nelson's highly interior, by turns perceptive and pretentious, text into a meditation on grief and loss for three performers, delivered to perfection here by Ben Whishaw, Kayla Meikle, and Emma D'Arcy. 

Twelfth Night, Orange Tree
(Photo: Ellie Kurttz)

Of what I saw at the Orange Tree this year, Trevor Nunn's widely praised Uncle Vanya - poorly designed, miscast and generally overacted - seemed much too generously received, but Tom Littler closed the year on a high note with a fantastic chamber Twelfth Night - a jewel of a production, with glittering performances from a cast including Jane Asher, Patricia Allison and Oliver Ford Davies, plus Stefan Bednarczyk's piano-playing master-of-revels Feste and Clive Francis again revealing himself as something of a comedy genius.  

Long Day's Journey into Night, Wyndham's
(Photo: Johan Persson)

Underwhelming reviews greeted several starry West End revivals this year - probably deservedly in most cases, but not when it came to Jeremy Herrin's loving and beautifully pitched production of Eugene O'Neill's great family play. I saw it twice, and the performances of Brian Cox, Patricia Clarkson, Daryl McCormack and Laurie Kyanston deepened to find fresh textures in the relationships each time. The traditional approach of Herrin's production was even more appreciated after witnessing the utter travesty that Luk Perceval's staging, from Kraków's Helena Modrzejewska National Old Theatre, made of the play, which it didn't seem to understand at even the most basic level. 

Beze mine jesteś nikim, Teatr Nowy
(Photo: HaWa)

Along with a misbegotten musicalised version of The Secret Garden at Teatr Nowy, Perceval's production was by far the worst thing I saw on a stage in 2025. But, these disappointments aside, there was of course some fine work on Polish stages too. Nowy redeemed itself thoroughly with Agata Biziuk's production Beze mnie jesteś nikim  (Without Me You're Nothing), a penetrating exploration of domestic violence based on Jacek Holub's reporting, accomplished with cast of four and a haunting theatrical vision. 

What's Demeter?, Teatr CHOREA 
(Photo: Agnieszka Cytacka)

And, under the Festival theme of "Awakenings," Teatr CHOREA celebrated its 20th anniversary in inimitable style at Retroperspektywy with What's Demeter? - an exhilarating rollercoaster ride through two decades of risk-taking performances that also worked as a cohesive experience in its own right. An evening of multiple awakenings, indeed. (Report on the Festival here.) 

Also: Burza (The Tempest) (Teatr Jaracza) The Ballad of Hattie and James (Kiln), Hotel ZNP (Nowy), Hic Sunt Dracones (Retroperspektywy Festival)

Hic Sunt Dracones
(Photo: Agnieszka Cytacka)

Cinema of 2024: 10 Favourite Films (Sight and Sound ballot)

The full list of individual Top 10s for the Sight and Sound Best Films of 2024 Top 50 is up at the BFI website. You can read the full set of lists here.

My Top 10: 

1. Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, US, Italy)
2. Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, France, Belgium)
3. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, France, India, Netherlands, Luxembourg, US, Italy, Switzerland)
4. When Fall is Coming (François Ozon, France)
5. Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, Japan, Germany)
6. Dahomey (Mati Diop, France, Senegal, Benin, UK)
7. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni, Zambia, UK, Ireland)
8. Pepe (Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias, Dominican Republic, France, Namibia, Germany)
9. A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg, Poland, US)
10. Blitz (Steve McQueen, UK, France, US)

 

Sight and Sound (Winter 2024-25)

 

The Winter issue of Sight and Sound is out now, including the Top 50 Films of the Year list. I wrote about Home Alone for the "Endings ..." column in this issue. More about it here.

Interview with Richard Eyre (BFI online)

The interview I did with Richard Eyre is up at BFI online. You can read it here. 

Film Review: Blitz (dir. Steve McQueen, 2024)

 

The two films made by Steve McQueen last year - the 4 hour WWII Amsterdam documentary Occupied City, and Grenfell - were hardcore art-house projects not much seen beyond the festival circuit or the gallery. With Blitz, though, McQueen now returns with a much more mainstream proposition, one that continues Occupied City's exploration of Second World War experience (this time set in the city where McQueen was born rather than the one where he currently lives). But, as McQueen told Sight and Sound with disarming frankness last month, Blitz also seeks to put "bums on seats." 

I hope he succeeds - although, sadly, given that the film is soon to be on Apple TV+ after a short, limited UK theatrical release, those seats are more likely to be sofas at home than ones in cinemas. Photographed by the great Yorick Le Saux, Blitz really deserves the big screen. It's a terrific entertainment in which McQueen draws on varied traditions of British WWII-centred filmmaking - from Humphrey Jennings' Fires Were Started (1943) to John Boorman's Hope and Glory (1987) to Terence Davies (a communal Tube shelter sing-along here is straight out of The Deep Blue Sea [2012]) - while also taking the tradition forward. The film isn't aggressively revisionist and it's definitely not anti-'heritage'; indeed, it's rather old-fashioned in its surface contours. But in placing a biracial protagonist - Elliott Heffernan's  9-year-old George - at the centre, it inevitably broadens the scope of World War II representation - sometimes heavy-handedly, but for the most part affectingly and excitingly.

The plot is a quest narrative in essence: it follows George's attempt to return to his Stepney home after being reluctantly evacuated by his single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan), a munitions factory worker and  amateur singer. George never reaches the destination of his evacuation: rather, he leaps off the train in the countryside and immediately starts his perilous odyssey back to London. 

George's journey allows Blitz to create a kind of picaresque panorama of WWII Britain that works at both epic and intimate levels. Whether sharing jam sandwiches with a trio of fellow-runaway brothers, bonding with the nice Nigerian blackout warden Ife (Benjamin Clementine, adding some true feeling to a saintly characterisation), or being pressed into criminal service by a gang (Kathy Burke and Stephen Graham in full-on Dickensian mode), George is constantly alerted to the kindness and the cruelty that the war brings out in individuals. 

Flashbacks sketching out elements of the character's past - the racist bullying that he can't  quite tell his family about; the relation between his mother and Grenadian father - are elegantly integrated without inhibiting the momentum of the quest. If the characterisation often seems heightened, then that's in keeping with the child's-eye view the film gives us. There's a 'Boys' Own Adventure' spirit at play here, but McQueen is at his sharpest in the fleeting details George observes: the legs of a Punch & Judy puppeteer; a sexual encounter in the crowded Underground shelter (a space the film uses quite brilliantly throughout, right up to its most harrowing sequence). 

At times Blitz doesn't trust the audience as much as it might. Just like Ellen Kuras' Lee, it also thinks that we need to have what the Blitz was explained to us - although at least here that information comes in the shape of an opening title rather than in thuddingly exposition-heavy dialogue. The film is at its weakest when it most obviously defaults to the binary simplifications of US-influenced contemporary identity-politics. George's Obama-evoking assertion "I am Black!" after his encounter with Ife provides him with a role model means that the film participates in the contemporary marginalisation of mixed as a category. 

Heffernan's excellent performance - a very assured film debut - compensates for the simplification, though, conveying George's tenacity and vulnerability, and a constant, contending sense of connection and set-apartness, with great skill. The young actor creates a lovely, fond family dynamic with Ronan and with Paul Weller (in a belated, effective acting debut as George's grandfather). From the unstressed warmth of these early scenes we understand why the threat of evacuation is particularly traumatic for George. The casting is canny across the board and the film feels fully inhabited, with Leigh Gill a diamond as the firebrand Mickey Davies and Linton Kwesi-Johnson briefly glimpsed as a street-corner poet. Harris Dickinson's role, as a returned soldier with an affection for Rita, seems an afterthought, but the actor brings a likeable spirit to the underwritten part, sweetly dogged and a little bit dopey. 

In its details and textures, Blitz feels convincingly rooted in working-class wartime experience, and from its jolting opening sequence, it captures the confusion, chaos and panic of the bombing in a visceral way that puts the viewer right there. There are simply beautiful moments, too, such as the sequence in which Rita sings a song at a BBC broadcast at the factory (a convincing retro McQueen/Nicholas Britell/Taura Stinson composition titled "Winter Coat"), while the camaraderie between her and  her fellow-workers (Hayley Squires and Sally Messham), and the women's dynamic with their Boss (Joshua McGuire), are perfectly judged. 

The showiest sequence - an elaborate camera swoop around a Café de Paris-esque club - seems overly calculated to make a class point (see the rich people enjoying themselves while the world burns!) but the cut to the aftermath of the bombing of the club is chilling. And McQueen allows himself one avant-garde reference that really works: intermittent inserts of black-and-white images of daisies from Man Ray's Emak-Bakia (1926): an emblem of hope and possibility in the midst of the conflict.

From conversations at London Film Festival, where Blitz premiered last month, it's clear that some viewers found McQueen's film too conventional in its trajectory and wanted it to go darker or weirder. But I think it's a considerable achievement - a rich evocation of our wartime past made with care and love. 

Blitz is in UK cinemas from today.

A Human Link: Piece on Agnieszka Holland at Culture pl

 

I wrote this piece on Agnieszka Holland's work and reputation for Culture.pl.  You can read it here. 

Theatre Review: Look Back in Anger (Almeida)

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick, and many hearts are sick at what they see in England now." (John Osborne, 1959)

Given its (perhaps overinflated) reputation as the play that single-handedly blew the doors of off fusty ol' 50s British theatre and put working-class grievances centre stage, Look Back in Anger is revived with surprising infrequency in the UK. 

Times change, tastes change, and what once looked radical, now - in form at least -  may look tame, since Osborne's play is in essence a static Three Act relationship drama which, apart from the often stinging language delivered by its iconic protagonist, seems not very far removed from the middle-class domestic dramas that the playwright and others of his generation so aggressively critiqued. As Richard Eyre has put it: "However abrasive and excoriating, far from looking back in anger, the play looks back with a fierce, despairing nostalgia."

All of this makes Arti Banerjee’s revival at the Almeida quite welcome - even just as an opportunity to see how the play stands up from a contemporary vantage point. Staged alongside Arnold Wesker's Roots, with which its partially cross cast to form the rather cringingly named "Angry & Young" season (t-shirts available in the foyer!), there's much that doesn't quite work in Banerjee’s production: feeble Expressionist movement flourishes; an unhelpful red carpeted circular set by Naomi Dawson that's too obvious a representation of a domestic hell; and some miscasting. 

But damnit if the power of the play doesn't peek through in the end. That's mostly due to a great performance from Billy Howle (last seen on stage in a more revelatory revival, of Dodie Smith's Dear Octopus at the NT) who, without any sentimentalising, manages to humanise Jimmy in surprising, unexpected ways.

In Tony Richardson's film version of the play, the character's rants as delivered by Richard Burton were effective but felt over-rehearsed. Down to his restlessly twitching toes as Jimmy reads the paper in the opening scene, Howle makes the character's frustration more subtly palpable and demonstrates how it manifests in domestic tyranny. He doesn't stint on conveying Jimmy's cruelty - mostly directed at his wife Alison -  but also shows that to view the character as a "toxic masculinity" exemplar is simply a diminishment. Whether you like the content or not, Jimmy's outbursts against the post-war English scene are often bitingly acute and funny and have a theatrical charge: even if last Friday's audience seemed determined to register their disapproval of the character by responding only with the occasional tut. But Howle's triumph in the role is to reveal Jimmy as at once infantile and insightful, a rebel without a cause who's clearly in pain but also thinks he has a monopoly on it. 

Overall Banerjee's production gets better as it goes along, and some of the sketchier performances start clicking into place as well. As Alison's friend and (apparent) defender, Morfydd Clark lacks the sensual quality that Claire Bloom brought to the part on film but gradually manages to make sense of the character's tricky trajectory  - especially a moral awakening that's powerfully conveyed here.

Playing Alison, Ellora Torchia hits odd notes in most of the earlier scenes. But from the character's touching encounter with her Empire-and-Establishment-representing father (a well-judged Deka Walmsley) onwards the performance begins to find its shape and I wasn't prepared for the depth  of emotion she reaches in the final scene. As a combined portrait of the pain of marriage and the state of a nation, Look Back in Anger reveals itself as a flawed work, but while Banerjee's revival isn't ideal I came away moved in the end. 

Look Back in Anger is at the Almeida until 23 November. Further details here. 

Photos: Marc Brenner