Theatre Review: The Smile of Her (Marylebone Theatre)

Reviewing her Oscar-nominated supporting performance in Jonathan Demme's Swing Shift back in 1984, Pauline Kael described Christine Lahti as "one of the towering Venuses who are changing our image of women. Like Sigourney Weaver, Joanna Cassidy, Kathleen Turner and, of course, Vanessa Redgrave," Kael continued,

"[Lahti] is heroically feminine. She's also a rip-snorting comedienne, and she gives [Swing Shift] whatever spark and intensity it has."

‎‎Over 40 years on, Kael's great descriptions hold true for Lahti on stage, where she continues to "change our image of women," this time with a deeply personal work. 

(Photo: Mark Senior)

This summer the actress/writer/director is making her quite unexpected but very welcome London theatre debut in The Smile of Her, which premiered three years ago at the Berkshire Theatre Group's Unicorn Theatre in Massachusetts, in a production by Robert Egan.  

Unlike Susan Sarandon's very low-key first foray onto the UK boards last year as one of the five incarnations of Mary Page Marlowe, Lahti's stage debut here could hardly be bolder or more self-revealing. Not only is The Smile of Her self-penned, it's also intensely confessional; the play takes off from Lahti's book of autobiographical essays True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness (2018), which in turn originated from her performance of some of those pieces as monologues in small NYC venues. 

(Photo: Mark Senior)

The Smile of Her comes to London in a fresh, tweaked new production by Mêlisa Annis at the Marylebone Theatre. Girl-group pop warmly welcomes the audience into the show before Lahti, casually resplendent in red, takes to Sarah Beaton's spare, sofa-dominated set to begin her story.   

The female-fronted creative team seems appropriate for a play that feels very much of the #MeToo moment in its focus on Lahti's feminist awakenings. These are explored as they occurred on the home front - in memories of her middle-class Michigan childhood, her siblings, her authoritarian father and compliant mother (to whom the title refers). And also in the professional arena as she recalls her first forays into acting - inspired when she saw a production of Long Day's Journey Into Night and headed to New York, "where all bad bitches go to make their dreams come true."

Across 90 compelling, cathartic, frequently funny and sometimes gut-wrenching minutes, Lahti reveals her growing awareness of the power dynamics in her family and the wider inequalities they point to, and recalls some disturbing encounters with industry men. (Though celebrated by Kael, Lahti's height definitely wasn't considered an asset by some of those in power in her chosen profession.)

(Photo: Mark Senior)

The Smile of Her isn't quite a monologue. As well as serving as audience-addressing narrator, and  playing her family members in quick, revealing sketches, Lahti also interacts with her childhood self (well played by Isabella Ford). With notable wit, fierceness and generosity of spirit, Lahti moves fluidly between roles, moods and perspectives, keeping the proceedings pacey but also nuanced and thoughtful (she also dealt elegantly with a tech hitch on the night I saw the show). 

The language is sometimes crude, sometimes lyrical; pitched somewhere between Fleabag and The Year of Magical Thinking, the show emerges as something distinctive: part memoir, part drama, part social history, part therapy. 

Looking back, Lahti's film choices often displayed a feminist bent - the aforementioned Swing Shift, plus Housekeeping (1987) and Leaving Normal (1992), for instance. While it's fun to see some footage of her hilarious 1998 Golden Globes win, I'd have loved to hear more about her particular experiences on those films instead. 

But maybe Lahti prefers to be quite vague about aspects of her career in order to avoid solipsism and to give more space to the audience. For, ultimately, it's the family dynamics that cast the longest shadows here, as Lahti movingly honours the traumas experienced by two of her sisters and details a reconciliation with the mother who her college consciousness-raising had distanced her from. 

As a work of contemporary feminism, The Smile of Her is intergenerational but not "intersectional"; it might be viewed as an example of what's these days sometimes fashionably disparaged as "white feminism." Perhaps such labelling, with its reversed hierarchies of value, only serves to create more division, though.  Part of what the play conveys so powerfully is the Second Wave tenet that our most intimate, affective experiences often shape our political consciousness - and how our perceptions can shift over time. 

Lahti tells us at one point that she was drawn to acting for its ability to explore all of life's "messy, ugly and beautiful" aspects. Drawing on painful personal experience to deliver one of the year's essential stage performances, she ensures that The Smile of Her conveys all of that in spades. The show comes warmly recommended. And here's to Lahti's return to London after this run ... Long Day's Journey Into Night, anyone?

The Smile of Her is at Marylebone Theatre until 29 August. Further information here. 

Finest Hours: Danny Glover in To Sleep with Anger (BFI online)

 

On the occasion of Danny Glover's 80th birthday I wrote about his performance in Charles Burnett's To Sleep With Anger (1990). You can read the piece here. 

Spaces of Freedom: Reflections on the 25th Edition of Fotofestiwal, Łódź (18-28 June, 2026)

"Łódź is a city of contrasts, of four cultures, a promised land. The Polish Manchester. A city of women. A city of Lodzermensch types. A city of transformation and its consequences... It carries a whole range of associations and emotions." (Katarzyna Kończal, curator of the exhibition School of Seeing: The City, Herbst Palace Museum, Łódź, 18 June - 31 December 2026) 

The artistic and cinematic history of the Polish city of Łódź - with it famed film school, and strong links to the avant garde in painting and sculpture - continues to intersect with its post-industrial present in vibrant ways, including in the many cultural events that take place in the city's revitalised spaces. After almost two decades of encounters with the city, I still find myself surprised by it, discovering new facets to a prismatic and often still undervalued place. 

One such event is Fotofestiwal, which celebrated its quarter century this June with a spectacularly packed programme across 10 days. While its primary focus remains photography, the festival also ranges across arts and culture in their widest expressions - film, music, sculpture, performance - dissolving boundaries to create an event that's as inclusive and interdisciplinary as it is international. 

Vive la résistance, Marta Bogdańska ©️ Fotofestiwal

When it was founded in 2001, by students from several different academic disciplines, a decade after the post-communist closure of the city's textile factories had left Łódź at an economic low point, Fotofestiwal was very much an underground endeavour, with films shown from VHS tape and displays created from magazine cut-outs.

Vitamin, Augustin Rebetez.
©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Augustin Rebetez

Though much changed, expanded and polished since then, the festival still retains something of that raw, punkish energy today. For all the engagement with contemporary political and social ills in the art displayed, a defiant playfulness is also evident - both in the exhibits chosen by director/co-founder Krzysztof Candrowicz and the team of programmers/curators, and also in the city-wide locations in which the work is placed. 

Better 'Magua' Than Pain, Helena Majewska

              ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź/Helena Majewska

Take, for instance, Vitamin, by Augustin Rebetez, a deliriously anarchic combo of kitsch, cats and politics presented in the loft of the Biedermann Palace. Or Helena Majewska's Better 'Magua' Than Pain, a funky but also meditative reflection on Berlin and Warsaw club culture that took over the Machine Room of Fuzja, a historic former power plant, now a mixed-use site of cultural events, restaurants, and residences. 

Eclipse, Adrian Chmielewki
©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Adrian Chmielewski

Majewska's immersive exhibition was nicely complemented across the city, in the swish Brama Miasta surroundings of PKO Bank Polski's Galeria Koncept, by the display Przesilenie / Eclipse. Presided over by the kind and charismatic music manager, events organiser and concierge Eryk Czyżewski, this display of Adrian Chmielewski's exciting series of photographs taken at music festivals captured moments of artists' performances and revellers' communion with cinematic verve and even some fiery Sirât (2025)-style vibes. 

Meanwhile, the former YMCA swimming pool on Moniuszki Street was startlingly repurposed as a cinema for Kino UTOPIA, an uncanny evocation of past picture palaces as centres of imagination and ideas. Here short films by Taiwanese talents Ying-Ju Chen, Kuang-Yu Tsui, Jui-Chung Yao, and Zi-Fu Chen were screened in the pool, in a concept designed by Paweł Giza, with retro film posters adorning the walls of the upper level. 

Kino Utopia ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź 

More orthodox but still highly rewarding was the School of Seeing: The City display at the Herbst Palace Museum. This is an expansive reflection on 19th and 20th century urban experience and flânerie that transports the viewer from the Polish Manchester of the exhibition's location to Paris, London and other metropolises through carefully curated images and quotes. 

American Cycles, Philip Montgomery ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź, Philip Montgomery

In contrast, American Cycles, the exhibition of Philip Montgomery's photography at the City Art Gallery in Sienkiewicz Park, brought audiences right up to date with its focus on recent and ongoing US traumas, from the opioid crisis to BLM protests. The first time that the work of Montgomery, a regular contributor to publications including The New York Times, has been presented in Poland, the black-and-white images also brought intimacy to celebrated subjects, from amusingly startled Supreme Court Justices to Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, gently head to head. 

American Cycles, Philip Montgomery ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Philip Montgomery 

A street over, at Re:Medium Gallery on Piotrkowska, Izabela Łapińska's American Beauty collated the Polish photographer and filmmaker's portraits of individuals whom Łapińska had encountered on New York streets. With special attention to the subjects' lips, the exhibit offered a warm, affirmative display of US diversity. 

Pig, Feng Li @Fotofestiwal Łódź / Feng Li

Alongside the aforementioned Biedermann Palace, the festival's other central hub was at Art_Inkubator, the former complex of textile warehouses close to Fuzja, where the main programme was presented. Here the festival's central theme of relations between human and animals was most prominently in evidence. 

Memorable highlights included Pig, Feng Li's subversive take on domestication: a photographic document of family life with an ever-growing porker and other adopted animals in a Chengdu apartment that suggested a Chinese counterpart to Malcom Mowbray's A Private Function (1984). The photos in Vive la résistance, by Marta Bogdańska, hilariously and pointedly gave the gaze back to various animal subjects. Nikita Teryoshin's Backyard Diaries, meanwhile, was a moving, gritty display of photos of street cats from across the world: a sometimes painful but also vital antidote to Instagramable cuteness. 

 I'll Bet the Devil My Head, Carlos Alba ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Carlos Alba

Also asking tough questions about human/animal relations in an urban context, this time through a fable-like form, was Carlos Alba's I'll Bet the Devil My Head. Here photos of urban foxes prowling the London borough of Tower Hamlets were juxtaposed with images of city brokers to evoke the capital's wealth disparities.

Flipping the Bird,
Jaap Scheeren/Rik van den Bos  ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Jaap Scheeren

Jaap Scheeren and Rik van den Bos contributed Flipping the Bird, a brilliant 15 minute short film, or "photo novel," based around a walk across the Dutch dunes. As the journey progresses, pastoral rapture gives way to a subversive rebuttal from nature's perspective. By turns reflective, irreverent, sexy, meditative, confrontational, laugh-out-loud funny and profound, this was among my favourite exhibits of the festival. Do yourself a favour and watch it here. 

Luke Stephenson, An Incomplete History of Show Birds ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź 

A sometime collaborator of Scheeren's, Luke Stephenson brought his delightful An Incomplete History of Show Birds to the festival, an example of the photographer's heartening attention to the more eccentric, arcane and undersung elements of British culture. The pictures looked at once sweetly enticing and quite imposing in their outdoor display at Schiller's Passage on Piotrkowska Street, where the city's own birds could be counted among the exhibit's charmed spectators. 

The festival's biggest coup was surely its opening event, again held at Fuzja, and this time based around an unexpected collaboration. John Akomfrah's Listening All Night to the Rain was the celebrated artist-filmmaker's commissioned contribution to the 2024 Venice Biennale's British Pavilion. 

A further development of Akomfrah's series of collectively devised multi-screen film installations, Listening All Night to the Rain has been seen in a couple of iterations since its Venice premiere: at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, and, currently, at Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery.

 

The Fotofestiwal presentation of the piece was entirely unique, however, in boasting new music composed to the images by Hania Rani (a recent winner at the European Film Awards for her soundtrack to Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value [2025]). This was performed live by Rani on piano and cymbals at Fuzja. 

Listening All Night to the Rain ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź/ John Akomfrah 

This surprising audiovisual synthesis proved highly effective and quite emotional. Since his breakthrough film, Handsworth Songs (1986), Akomfrah's tender and radical works, combining freshly filmed images with others drawn from archives, have always boasted extremely intricate soundscapes of their own; they may not seem to require further sonic intervention. Here, though, some of the original sounds could be heard faintly beneath Rani's live playing, creating another layer, a kind of audio palimpsest, that added to the richness and surprise of the images. 

Listening All Night to the Rain ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / John Akomfrah

The presentation of the piece as a 30 minute work on 8 screens meant that its original scope (which included around 30 hours of footage across 60 screens in 8 rooms in Venice) was considerably reduced. But Akomfrah's fluid, associative, haptic imagery - of drowned clocks and dancing bodies, ticking metronomes and James Baldwin on the telephone, political protests and pre-Raphaelite paintings - still offered plenty to absorb, with Rani's playing a by turns rapturous, delicate and discordant addition. 

Listening All Night to the Rain ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / John Akomfrah

Akomfrah's bricolage filmmaking has always sought connections between apparently disparate aspects of the world. And with the screens fading in and out on the faces of different human subjects, suggesting a relay of experiences both deeply private and collective, this iteration of Listening All Night to the Rain wonderfully evoked the idea of each individual as a living archive of memories and incidents. For all the histories of oppression and crises they gesture towards, Akomfrah's recent works have a deeply cleansing, spiritual impact, and the new music accentuated that effect. "We might do it again," said Rani, of the performance. Let's hope so. 

American Beauty, Izabela Łapińska  ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Izabela Łapińska

Akomfrah - whose first visit to Łódź this was but who, in his brief introduction to the performance, called the city a "mecca" for students of his generation - has described an important aspect of his work as "creating spaces of freedom" for audiences. In its remarkable range and its democratic showcasing of work by global artists - both those long established and those newly emerging - this year's anniversary edition of Fotofestiwal offered many such liberating, challenging and inspiring spaces for its attendees. The above remarks cover only a fraction of the festival's abundance of riches - its at times overwhelming array of events and exhibits, concerts, workshops, and talks. This unique and exhilarating festival continues to grow and evolve, and showcases Łódź at its best and most inclusive. Here's to the next 25 years.

Fotofestiwal took place in Łódź between 18-28 June 2026. However, some of the exhibits, including several mentioned above, continue to be displayed throughout the year. Further details here. 

Article on Polish Representation in British Fiction (culture.pl)

 

At culture.pl, I wrote about how post-2004 Polish / CEE male migrant characters to the UK are portrayed in some recent British fiction. You can read the piece here.

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Article on the British Reception of Andrzej Wajda's Work (culture.pl)

 

At culture.pl, I wrote about the British reception of Andrzej Wajda's films over the years. You can read the piece here.

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Theatre Review: Archduke (Royal Court)

 

Three directionless youths come under the influence of a charismatic figure with women issues who manipulates them into a deadly action... In outline, the plot of Rajiv Joseph's play has a torn-from-the-headlines topicality connected to current "manosphere" obsessions. In fact, the setting is Serbia, 1914, and what our heroes are being coerced into is nothing less than the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, catalyst for WWI.

‎Already a hit OFF Broadway, Joseph's play receives its European premiere in a solid production by Lindsey Turner at the Royal Court that benefits from a fine, atmospheric design by Es Devlin - ushering us from tunnel to train compartment - and from great performances from its five-strong cast. 

‎As the assassins, initially motivated, as much as anything, by the promise of food, Chris Walley, Abraham Popoola and Stanley Morgan spark off each other with aplomb. Funny and chilling as the Captain who grooms them, Marc Wootton brings gleaming-eyed gusto to the production, including to some heavy, context-setting exposition. And, reunited with Wootton from last year's fragrant When We Are Married at the Donmar, Janice Connolly does another sly, eccentric gem of a supporting turn as the Captain's cook.

‎Despite the world-shaking events it heralds, the play is intimate not epic, and Joseph finds a convincing idiom, his dialogue neither period fusty nor irritatingly anachronistic. Those expecting a  sweeping Coast of Utopia deep dive into the complexities of revolutionary politics might feel short-changed but the production delivers the play effectively up to a poignant 'What If?' coda. A worthwhile evening.

‎Archduke is booking at the Royal Court until 25 July. 

Theatre Review: Les Liaisons Dangereuses (National Theatre, Lyttelton)

 

‎[Review with mild spoilers.]

‎Though it soon played in bigger theatres after its hugely successful RSC debut at The Other Place in 1985, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Christopher Hampton's theatrical version of Pierre Choderlos des Laclos' scandal-provoking 1782 epistolary novel, is still usually regarded as a chamber drama best suited to small spaces.

‎With her new production in the Lyttelton, Marianne Elliott sets out to blow that idea out of the water. Boasting a monochrome mirrored set by Rosanna Vize, around which shadowy suited males prowl as the audience take their seats, and making dance a central component (choreography is by Tom Jackson Greaves), Elliott's take on the play is big, broad-strokes, balletic.

‎Indeed, following her quite colourless film debut The Salt Path, Elliott seems to have decided to go all-out in terms of theatricality here, with the characters' savage social/sexual warfare and interior struggles conveyed through movement as much as dialogue. The approach feels much more integrated than in Matthew Warchus' dance-heavy Oedipus at the Old Vic last year, though given the mix of cheers and grumblings in the audience reaction following the fourth preview, the expressionist result looks likely to be just as divisive. For me, though, this proved, overall, a highly entertaining evening, though not one without some flaws. 

‎The production's tone of glittering camp is set from the first appearance of Lesley Manville's Marquise de Merteuil as a masked figure in scarlet striding into the ballroom, and marking out her latest prey: the convent-reared 15-year-old Cecile, whose premature seduction Merteuil is determined to bring about as a way of getting back at a lover who has jilted her. Central to Merteuil's plot is another previous lover, the Vicomte de Valmont, who is planning another seduction: that of the virtuous, married Madame de Tourvel.

‎Can the exploitative erotic power games of two nasty pre-Revolution French aristos have much to say to audiences today? Well, according to the programme what resonated in the 80s as a proto-portrait of "the 'me' generation" now works just as well as an exploration of the abuses undertaken by the powerful. Accordingly, costumes (by Natalie Roar, in a distinctive theatrical design debut) in Elliott's production mix periods - dress suits for the men and a series of sparkling red outfits (plus red-soled Louboutins!) for Manville; and the odd fetish flourish.

‎Actually, it's not necessary to force contemporary parallels to find the machinations of Merteuil and Valmont compelling, and Hampton's arch, epigrammatic dialogue still sounds quite good. But it's certainly notable that Elliott, as often, brings the female characters to the fore, whether Gabrielle Drake as Valmont's elderly aunt or Hannah van der Westhuysen's Cecile (tall and rangy like Uma Thurman in the Stephen Frears film of the play), even though the "feminism" of the piece still ends up seeming highly equivocal.

‎Maybe that focus accounts for the deficiencies of Aidan Turner as Valmont. If Alan Rickman was often described as "born to play the role", the same can't yet be said for Turner. Actually, the actor looks the part but seems to have been directed to frequently play for crowd-pleasing laughs, an approach that inevitably lowers the dramatic stakes.

‎Given his Poldark and Rivals form, it's no surprise that Turner gets a shirtless moment - though that's nothing compared to Manville's jaw-dropping display at the opening of the second half, an intimate scene designed to reveal Merteuil's private fears and vulnerabilities in a production which enhances the protagonists' age gap.

‎There's something so fascinatingly honed, immaculate and precise about Manville's stage acting: she achieves her effects without grandstanding of any kind. The economy, control, perceptiveness and wit she brings to the calculating Merteuil, along with her history with the play (she was Cecile in the original production and appeared in the 2022 TV version), makes all of her scenes highlights. Later, she brilliantly shows this self-described "virtuoso of deceit" being confronted by the limits of her power and the realisation that "life can be... frighteningly unpredictable."

‎The biggest surprise in the cast, though, is Monica Barbaro, who makes a superb stage debut as the ill-fated Madame de Tourvel. Barbaro did a a passable impression of folk's madonna Joan Baez in the very dull Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. She retains a madonna quality here too but her work is on another level of delicacy and intensity. 

Tourvel's initial resistance to, gradual deep love for and then rejection by Valmont makes her the tragic heroine of the piece, and Barbaro pulls us into the character's conflicting emotions with subtlety and skill. Trained in dance, Barbaro is the protagonist of one of the show's most effective stylised, choreographed sequences, as Tourvel is seduced away from prayer by her thoughts of Valmont, externalised by the ministrations of the grasping dancers surrounding her.

‎With its masque and movement elements, and emphasis on exploitative schemes and treacheries, the Elliott production I was most reminded of here was her 2010 take on Women Beware Women - a title that would equally suit this play. Sometimes exhilarating, sometimes strained, this Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a similarly mixed bag in which subtle touches merge with scenes that default to obviousness. ‎It's a shame the staging overdoes Tourvel's final moments, with an attempted operatic fever dream quality that isn't achieved - at least not yet.

‎But for me the production pulls off a bold, totally altered ending in which the mantle of manipulation and cruelty gets picked up by a member of the next generation - one who has, like Catherine Sloper in The Heiress, been "taught by masters." 

The dance goes on...

‎Les Liaisons Dangereuses is booking at the National Theatre until 6 June, and will be filmed for NT Live. Further information here.