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 hard-core 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-esque assertion "I am Black!" after his encounter with Ife provides him with a role model feels bogus; an opportunity for a more nuanced exploration of biracial identity in the British WWII context is squandered here in favour of what might be better accepted in the context of today's 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 Hill 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 flourish 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

Awake, Arise: A Report on Awakenings (Przebudzenia) - the 13th Retroperspektywy Festival (Łódź, 23/8 - 1/9 2024)

Culminating in the sublime LIVET: Suite for the Earth concert, which brought together performers from Poland, Ukraine, Norway and Bulgaria, last year's Retroperspektywy proved an unforgettable edition of the international theatre festival, which is invariably a highlight of summertime in Łódź. And Retroperspektywy returned this year with a just-concluded edition marking a milestone: the 20th anniversary of its founder, Teatr CHOREA, whose activities encompass workshops with and training of diverse community groups, and, of course, the staging of its own inimitably creative concerts and shows.  

Tomasz Rodowicz... and the CHOREA birthday cake

Based at Fabryka Sztuki in Łódź since 2007, CHOREA's defining feature (or one of them) has been its merging of ancient traditions with practices associated with the 20th century avant garde (taking particular inspiration from the work of Grotowski) and cutting-edge contemporary physical theatre, generating dynamic performances combining song, text, movement, and dance.

The group's ethos has never been one of slavish reconstruction of past models. Rather, CHOREA has been all about exploring how ancient theatre forms can be mobilised to speak to current concerns (and enduring existential ones). As a company they're bridge-builders, alchemists, risk-takers, empowerers, and creators of unique theatrical experiences that attune audiences to the expressive capabilities of the human body and voice, providing a fusion of sensual and intellectual pleasures - also accomplished with a spirit of play.

Exhibition:
Evocations - 20 Years of CHOREA

Under the title "Przebudzenia" ("Awakenings"), this year's edition found CHOREA in a mood both reflective and celebratory. This was evident, for one, in the theme of the festival's accompanying exhibition, "Evocations: 20 Years of CHOREA," curated by Magda Milewski and Janusz Adam Biedrzycki, which presented a narrative of the group's activities accompanied by photos and a well-chosen physical "trace" of each live event through the display of a prop or costume. On Monday and Tuesday there was also the rare opportunity to watch filmed shows from the CHOREA archive.

Ola Shaya opening What's Demeter?

What's more, the opening show of this year's edition, punningly titled What's Demeter?, offered an exhilarating rollercoaster ride through a diverse selection of songs and scenes from CHOREA's performance history - a bit like 2013's "50 Years on Stage" event by the British National Theatre, but much more excitingly done. With artistic supervision by CHOREA co-founder Tomasz Rodowicz and "interventions" by director Łukasz Kos adding a fresh eye, the evening was no mere cobbled together "Greatest Hits" package. 

Elina Toneva and the company in What's Demeter?

Instead, What's Demeter? worked as a profound, playful and cohesive experience in its own right, with a strong flow and meaningful transitions but also loose, improvisatory elements, as artists from the company's past and present took to the stage or joined in and sang from the audience.

Po Ptakach (After the Birds) in What's Demeter?

Highlights were plentiful, from Ola Shaya opening the proceedings in cabaret style to quiz audience members on favourite productions and deliver a number from 2011's The Blue Parrot concert, to Sean Palmer unleashing his gorgeous gritty growl ("CHOREA in the house!") to score Rodowicz and Dorota Porowska's super-sensual pas de deux from 2005's After the Birds (Po Ptakach) - incidentally the first CHOREA performance I saw. 

Ragnarok in What's Demeter?

And even if you had seen some of the featured extracts before you would perforce experience them afresh here, since a major component of the event was the live filming of most of the performances by Kamil Wallace, with the images relayed on a large screen to achieve some startling juxtapositions. 

Particularly overwhelming in this regard was the opening sequence of 2022's Ragnarok. This was already a uniquely haunting spectacle that seems to distill all human suffering and striving, fear and fortitude, as, to the celestial sound of Arvo Pärt's Stabat Mater, the performers slowly make their way across the stage towards the light as a tangled, straining collective. This time, with the variously pained or hopeful faces also presented in close-up on the screen, the piece combined the power of physical theatre with that of silent cinema, and reduced this viewer, for one, to tears.

Joanna Chmielecka in What's Demeter?

On the solo side, Joanna Chmielecka delivered a physical and vocal Bruno Schulz-derived tour de force atop, under and whilst taking the legs off of a table, while Małgorzata Lipczyńska, Anna Maszewska (who is also the festival's indefatigable coordinator), and Julia Jakubowska reassembled for a scene from the latter's witty 2020 feminist fairytale revision Księżniczki (Princesses). 

Dzień Dobry Pinky Mouse! in What's Demeter?

A number from 2021's Dzień Dobry Pinky Mouse! took the already anarchic children's musical to a new level of hilarious mania. And the company's versatility is such that the next moment they could morph into the protagonists of 2015's Derby.Biało.Czerwoni (Derby. Red and White): rapping football fans ready for a ruck.

Maciej Maciaszek in What's Demeter?

Threaded throughout were some soul-stirring interludes of choral singing that spoke to the group's deep roots, while the final section, from 2014's Vidomi - a piece originally developed in collaboration with visually impaired performers - was a delicious last tango in which the audience was invited to the stage to dance, bringing the performance to a perfect, bonding close as we then headed outside to the CHOREA birthday party. The whole evening was an invigorating and inspiring experience. 

Zjem twój dżem

The organisers also took the opportunity in this anniversary year to significantly spotlight the work of CHOREA's Intergenerational Group and its Older and Younger Children's Groups. Among several shows for family audiences, the Older Group presented the endearingly berserk Zjem twój dżem (I'll Eat Your Jam) which brought songs, some film noir spirit and a dose of well-judged social commentary to its tale of food, crime and cross-generational relations set in the Łódź district of Bałuty.

Eden:
A Scenical Fairy Tale in Several Pictures

Made up of participants from ages 16 to 80, the all-female Intergenerational Group presented two shows: Pauza, and Eden: A Scenical Fairy Tale in Several Pictures. Pauza didn't come together for me, but Eden, directed by Biedrzycki, Magdalena Paszkiewicz, and Wiktor Moraczewski, proved a magical experience - something of a companion piece to the same team's also ecologically-minded Rój. Sekretne życie społeczne ("The Hive: Secret Social Life") from 2018. 

Starting with a disarming scene of chat and comedy (look out for the troublesome deckchair), the piece evolved into an ambient evening of physical theatre, one that - through brilliant lighting (green and blue washes turning fiery red), sound, costumes and performances from the 13-strong cast - conveyed the kind of deep care for and attention to nature that Teatr Nowy's witless recent musical adaptation of The Secret Garden sorely lacked. 

Eden:
A Scenical Fairy Tale in Several Pictures

Each different section of Eden was clearly designed and delineated, but the show felt cohesive, and developed a very tender, affirmative tone, with the bodies of the cast eventually becoming the garden plants, blooming by night in a gorgeous final sequence. With audience members given seeds on our way out, the show offered a cleansing and restorative celebration of nature in the feminine. 

Teraz wiesz, jak się czuję

The invited companies this year included Grupa Performatywna Chłopaki, who presented Teraz wiesz, jak się czuję (Now You Know How I Feel), a lively, crowd-pleasing exploration of contemporary Polish masculinity that combined quiet heart-on-sleeve confessional moments with wild elements of stand-up, game show and porn-parody to interrogate social expectations and stereotypes, and point to possibilities of moving beyond them.

Hic Sunt Dracones

The Czech company Teatr Divadlo Continuo provided one of the festival's most startling experiences with Hic Sunt Dracones, directed by Pavel Štourač. This piece probed the darker corners of consciousness and  corporeality, creating some jaw-dropping images of dismemberment and bodily fragmentation, though not without a dose of absurdist black humour that Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam might enjoy, very much operating in the bold surrealist Czech tradition of Jan Švankmajer. The physical panache of the four performers - Sara Bocchini, Kateřina Šobáňová, Granada Gallego and Diana Khwaja - was enhanced by fantastic music and sound performed live by Jakub Štourač.

Magda Kuraś Quintet / Bilgoraj Triptych

Two terrific concerts by female-fronted Polish bands also spoke to the CHOREA ethos of combining tradition with experimentation. With repertoires based on Konin-area melodies and South-Eastern Polish traditions respectively, the Tuleje trio (Gosia Zagajewska,  Wojtek Kurek and Ksawery Wojcinski) and the Magda Kuraś Quintet (featuring Kuraś, Maciej Świniarski, Ziemowit Klimek, Tomasz Chyła, and Kuba Krzanowski) both took folk music in fresh directions, with jazz, rock, art song and improvised elements, to create rich, immersive sounds that felt totally organic. 

Eine Winterreise. A Winter Journey.
Schubert/ Müller/ Baczyński

The festival's final show also centred music, this time from the classical canon. Contrasting with the expansiveness of What's Demeter?,  the Festival closed with an intimate piece for three performers: an interpretation of Schubert's seminal 1827 song-cycle, Winterreise. Eine Winterreise. A Winter Journey. Schubert/ Müller/ Baczyński was co-directed by singer Łukasz Konieczny and dancer/choreographer Boris Randzio who also performed the piece, alongside accomplished pianist Nikolaus Rexroth. 

The performance's innovations included Randzio's danced contribution  - and the incorporation of poems by the great Polish poet Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, who was killed in the Warsaw Uprising. The use of Baczyński's verse alongside the original Wilhelm Müller poems that Schubert based the work around developed a powerful counter narrative that suggested the building of a Polish-German cultural bridge in the context of the work's themes of alienation, melancholia and mortality.

Summing up CHOREA's achievements at the time of the company's 15th anniversary five years ago, the critic Piotr Olkusz described them as "the wealth of Łódź," crediting the group with forging "a new form of participation in culture and new responsibility for culture. They've slightly changed us." That definition still stands, and Awakenings was another edition of RPS that opened viewers' eyes, ears, minds and hearts to a rich variety of performances and expressions. As CHOREA enters its next decade I continue to wish that the company would push the "international" element of Retroperspektywy further in terms of audiences as well as performances, broadening out to be more accessible to non-Polish speakers and to ensure that their world-class work is more widely seen than ever. Still, as it is, this year's Festival offered some beautiful ways of celebrating CHOREA's past, being in the present, and looking to the future. 

The 2024 Retroperspektywy Festival took place at Fabryka Sztuki in Łódź between 23 August - 1 September.

All performance images by Agnieszka Cytacka fotografia.

Film Review: Lee (dir. Ellen Kuras, 2023)

 

Ellen Kuras's biopic of Lee Miller has been a long-in-gestation passion project for its tenacious producer-star Kate Winslet. The passion hasn't quite made it to the screen, though. Instead, Lee emerges as a work(wo)manlike biopic that too often defaults to the traditional tropes of the genre. These include a flashback structure featuring Winslet tetchily reminiscing in old age make-up, and reductive broad-brush caricaturing of some of the famous figures who crossed Miller's path. With a spelling-it-out script by Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume that doesn't trust the audience to know the basics about the Blitz or that Jews were not the only group to face Nazi persecution, the film sometimes skirts Shining Through (1992)-style silliness. But with expectations suitably lowered it's a fairly entertaining piece of work. 

It's not hard to see what drew Winslet to Lee as a subject. Miller's life trajectory - from model and Modernist muse to a dedicated war correspondent whose photos from the frontlines and concentration camps, published in Vogue, revealed the horrors of WWII to the wider international public - is a unique one, to say the least. (The full range of her photographic work was only discovered after her death in 1977, when it was published by her son.)

Unsurprisingly, Lee is quite single-minded in celebrating Miller's pluck and daring. We pick up her story from the late 1930s (that is, post-Man Ray) when she's hanging out in France with a diverse group (including Marion Cotillard as  Solange d'Ayen, noblewoman and French Vogue fashion editor). Lee's bohemianism is immediately signposted when Winslet whips off her top to go bare-breasted during an al fresco lunch, and Kuras can't resist making her a proto-#MeToo heroine with equal obviousness, whether she's  intervening to prevent a rape or revealing her own horrendous experience of sexual assault in a late monologue.

But if the script struggles to get to grips with Miller's complexities,  contradictions or artistic development, Winslet - smoking harder even than Jane Fonda did in Julia (1977) - is compelling throughout, and at least succeeds in making Lee's impulsiveness and drive palpable. 

Most of the supporting cast get fewer opportunities to shine, from Alexander Skarsgård as Roland Penrose, Miller's second husband, to Angela Riseborough taking the clipped diction to Harriet Walter levels as sympathetic British Vogue editor Audrey Withers, or Samuel Barnett as Cecil Beaton in a weak caricature of a cameo. Josh O'Connor, invariably an asset, brings some hints of his special soulfulness to the 1970s scenes, but the performance is slightly hampered by the film's insistence on pointlessly obscuring the identity of his character, long after the audience has twigged. 

Though less adept at shaping these performances, Kuras, an acclaimed cinematographer making her directorial debut here, brings some distinctive visual life to Lee as it moves through time periods and locations; the film is shot with polish by Pawel Edelman. Miller's most problematic iconic moment - taking a bath in Hitler's tub - is faithfully recreated, and the centrepiece concentration camp sequence, with the colour drained to practically monochrome, has some of the power of the Ukraine scenes in Agnieszka Holland's Mr Jones (2019) which employed a similar technique. A biopic-by-numbers that too often resorts to unsubtle shorthand, Lee doesn't succeed in doing justice to its fascinating protagonist, but as a competent primer it's worthy of your time.

Lee is out in UK cinemas on 13 September. 

Sight and Sound Summer 2024

 

The summer issue of Sight and Sound is out now. I interviewed Agnieszka Holland about Green Border for this issue. More details here. 

Concert Review: Barb Jungr - Singing into My Seventies (Crazy Coqs, May 2024)

Barb Jungr
(Photo by Steve Ullathorne)

It's not everyone who'd necessarily opt to celebrate their 70th birthday by performing a trio of shows - each one made up of completely different, challenging musical material drawing on a repertoire of about 40 years.

But if there's one thing we know about Barb Jungr by now it's that she doesn't take expected routes. So that's exactly how Jungr spent her 70th - with a three night residency at one of her favourite venues, Soho's Crazy Coqs, accompanied at each show by a different long-time collaborator on piano.  

The first show on 9th May (Jungr's birthday night itself) found Jenny Carr joining to perform a set titled Dark Love: Elvis, Chanson & More. The 10th May show presented Jungr alongside Simon Wallace with a Dylan-centred programme, while the final night saw John McDaniel re-teaming with Jungr on a set revisiting their beautiful collections of work by The Beatles and Sting.

I was only able to make it to the 9th May performance, but have seen Jungr in concert many times since 2015 and it's always a unique, profound and exhilarating experience. She is, without a doubt, one of the greatest of contemporary singers: her supple voice, always exceptionally expressive but undiminished and deepened with the years, is able to dig into a dazzling range of material to find new and surprising qualities. And she's no slouch as a songwriter herself, either. 

But live she's even more than that: a great mover (in the sense of giving a vivid physical life to each song), and a spontaneous, hilarious and often subversive story-teller. At a Jungr show, you never quite know where the between-song chat will go: "I was obsessed with the Gothic nature of swamps," was one of the gems she shared this time around. But what might initially seem to be a non-sequitur always ends up adding to the texture of the song she's about to perform. Movement, gestures, delivery, chat - for Jungr, it's always about serving the story of the song in the most expressive way. 

Barb Jungr
(Photo by Steve Ullathorne)

With only one Jacques Brel piece, "The Tender Hearts," featured, the 9th May show didn't exactly adhere to its title - a case of 'its my birthday and I'll shake up the set-list if I want to', perhaps. But it was a rich and glorious evening nonetheless. Jungr opened with a punchy "Last Train to Clarksville," placing the song in a Vietnam context that I for one had never been aware of. As the evening progressed, connections between the  songs emerged, whether by theme - loss and separation were big - or by specific imagery: trains pulling out of stations, walking, rain. "It does get cheerful in a bit," she deadpanned at one point. 

With Carr's brilliant piano-playing as a by turns delicate and dramatic accompaniment, highlights included a pair of Elvis songs, drawn from Jungr's often wonderfully weird and spooky 2005 Love Me Tender album, a deeply moving "In the Ghetto" and "Kentucky Rain." With Jungr's delivery morphing from gossipy confidence to a preacher's declamation, the rendition of  Dylan's "The Man in the Long Black Coat" was staggering. And so, in an entirely different way, was "Au Depart," an extraordinary piece of writing by Robb Johnson that conjures a world of history, absence, loss, leave-taking and starting over through its economical images. With Johnson himself in the audience, Jungr performed the song with a captivating stillness that made each word pierce the listener. 

Jungr placed "Au Depart" in the context of the post-war refugee experience of her Czech father. This was one example of the resonant way she wove personal stories through some of the songs, from teenage Stockport memories to a traumatic visit to the eye hospital with her beloved mother (who sadly passed away just before Christmas last year) to her joy at getting a dog (Bambi, from Hungary). The latter relationship was celebrated via a rendition of Cat Stevens' "I Love My Dog," a warm performance of the song and a wry deconstruction of it at the same time. 

Indeed, when the evening did "get cheerful" it was with that infectious, soul-enhancing energy that's one of Jungr's essential qualities as an artist. She expresses a sheer joy in communicating with an audience that's often sadly absent from performers half her age.  A glorious take on Jeff Barry's "Walking in the Sun" and a singalong "Forever Young" were irresistible.  Carr led the crowd in a chorus of "Happy Birthday" before Jungr's rollicking version of "Walking in Memphis" sent us out of the club on an exultant high. 

From Ella to Emmylou, June Tabor to Joan Baez, Jungr joins the many female artists who've continued to perform dynamically in their later years, blowing apart pervasive ageist and sexist assumptions in the process. "I couldn't think of anything I'd rather be doing than singing tonight," Jungr said. A more vibrant and vital artist than ever - listen to last year's blistering My Marquee album for recorded proof - may she continue to do so for many more years to come. 

Sight and Sound (June 2024 issue)

 

The June issue of Sight and Sound is out now. I reviewed Ellen E. Jones's new book Screen Deep for this issue. 

Theatre Review: The Ballad of Hattie and James (Kiln Theatre)

 

A decades-spanning play about loss and forgiveness, talent and time, music and memory, centred around a thorny, complicated male/female friendship, Samuel Adamson's The Ballad of Hattie and James tells the story of the title protagonists - piano prodigies who meet as teens in the mid-1970s to collaborate on a college production of Benjamin Britten's  Noyes' Fludde. 

Inevitably, perhaps, they're a contrasting pair: James a stuttery, pretentious boy who flaunts his high cultural ideals like a badge of honour, and she an unruly middle-class girl, open to contemporary music, who turns up at rehearsal with a bottle of booze in her bag. Adamson's writing - rude, allusive, surprising and tender by turns - is attentive to the places where their experiences and temperaments connect and diverge - and how an early tragedy ends up shaping both their personal and professional lives in different ways.

Though not quite as ambitious as Adamson's last play Wife (2019), which traced and placed queer currents in and around productions of a A Doll's House over many years, The Ballad of Hattie and James shows a similar interest in time and its impact on creative artists. In Wife, a tambourine used in the Doll's House tarantella scene became a talisman passed down over decades. Here a similar function is served by a Bechstein piano owned by Hattie's family, coveted by James, and over which the two bond and bicker through the years.

Again, Adamson includes a futuristic flourish, but adopts a non-linear structure to tell this particular story - dropping in on Hattie and James at various points, moving backwards and forwards in time, as their dynamic shifts and changes. 

At first you might wish for a more straightforward telling. But the structure, elegantly managed in Richard Twyman's astute production, gives the piece a richness of texture  and pays off emotionally in the second half. Layering in references from Britten to Bush to Pulp's "Disco 2000", the play is much concerned with how music shapes identity - and vice versa - and how gender has impacted upon the career trajectories and expectations of musicians through history. 

A depiction of a friendship between a gay man and a gay woman is a rarity on stage or screen, and neither the writing nor the performances sentimentalise the protagonists, who are often prickly, selfish, or blinkered but retain our interest and affection, in all their recognisable flaws. 

With a Penguin book in his cardigan pocket and perfect pitch (but dodgy cords), Charles Edwards incarnates in James a certain species of gawky Englishman, smug and shy at once, dismissive in a kneejerk way of the female composers and writers who mean so much to Hattie. But Edwards also reveals the sense of sadness and loss underpinning James' attitudes. As often, Sophie Thompson seems on the cusp of doing too much, vocally and physically, yet keeps an emotional truth in her performance, including in her most florid moments to make Hattie a vital force even when at her lowest.  The mix of competitiveness and complicity that pair's interactions 

With Suzette Llewellyn multi-roling to great effect, and a pianist on stage to tackle the musical interludes, Twyman's production remains intimate but conveys the vagaries of fate and time and creative expression, a brief ballet of past moments bringing the piece together in a beautiful way. 

The Ballad of Hattie and James is booking at the Kiln Theatre until 18 May. 

Theatre Review: Player Kings (Wimbledon; Manchester Opera House; Noel Coward Theatre, West End)

 

Though widely praised for iconoclastic boldness and intellectual rigour, the productions of Robert Icke have often seemed reliant on slightly half-baked appropriations of tropes associated with "European theatre-making" (sic): mics and pop songs, CCTV screens. Applied to classic plays from Aeschylus to Ibsen, these undergrad-level impositions have sometimes come complete with textual misreadings that the majority of critics have seemed willing to overlook. But even those of us who haven't bought into the forced eccentricities of Icke's approaches could find ourselves wishing for a few such quirks across the near-four hour running time of his latest piece of work. (The production might well be shorter by the time it reaches London; let's hope so.)

Player Kings, which opened last week at New Wimbledon Theatre and now heads up to Manchester before settling in to the Noel Coward Theatre in the West End, is a mash-up of the Henry IV plays - with the report-of-Falstaff's-death scene from Henry V tacked on at the end (to sadly little effect). And apart from a blast of techno announcing the first Tavern scene - and repeated during the Gad's Hill robbery sequence - it's a surprisingly straight-laced affair. Hildegard Bechtler's design is minimal and unfussy, with rather bland contemporary costumes, and scene changes and location-shifts nicely accomplished by a swift swish of a curtain. (We also get place-setting titles, and a bit of historical context about the Battle of Shrewsbury that feels equal parts patronising and random.)

Possibilities for bigger, more attention-grabbing effects aren't taken - the production would surely benefit from a smaller space. Musical choices - "I Vow to Thee My Country," "Jerusalem" - are obvious. And some scenes (especially in the much-gutted yet still sluggish take on Part 2) are so under-directed that it feels like Icke simply abandoned them. Even with the great Robin Soans as one half of the pairing, I don't think I've ever seen a duller take on the Shallow/Silence scenes than the one offered here. You can feel a collective slump in the audience. 

Engagement is much stronger in the more compelling first half - especially, of course, whenever Ian McKellen as Falstaff takes to the stage. The goodwill is palpable, and McKellen is certainly more of an asset in this role than he was three years ago as Hamlet - particularly when delivering Falstaff's exaggerations about his field-of-battle prowess or sparring with Mistress Quickly (Clare Perkins, using her inimitable squawk to up the energy level). 

It feels like there's still a lot more to mine in Falstaff's relationship with Toheeb Jimoh's Prince Hal, though, and while Jimoh is very good - delivering Hal's portent of his rejection of Falstaff with chilling casualness, as an inevitability - there's more going on emotionally between him and Joseph Mydell's Lord Chief Justice, with a clear arc charted from hostility to a replacement father / son dynamic. 

Richard Coyle contributes a few fine, regretful moments as the ailing king Henry, and a final tableau brings the proceedings full circle in a satisfying way. Still, though well-acted, this much-anticipated production lacks epic sweep, richness of texture or an overarching concept, and ends up more solid than essential.

Player Kings is at Manchester Opera House between 14 March -23 March, and at Noel Coward Theatre between 1 April -22 June.

Preview: Danny is Fantastic (Arch 21, Valentia Place, Brixton)

 

It's lovely news that Daniel Cerqueira's very special solo show Danny is Fantastic is back at Arch 21, Valentia Place, Brixton for performances on 20 March, 21 March, 22 March. 

Danny is Fantastic was one of the best shows I saw last year, and I wrote about it here. The thing about the show, though, is that it's never the same night after night: it's "so live", in Cerqueira's wry words, and so influenced by the audience's presence, that it's a unique event each time. 

It's theatre as a present tense, in-the-moment, intimate experience: the opposite of the internet, the opposite of constant distraction. Cerqueira quietly creates such a warm and inclusive atmosphere that you come out feeling connected and inspired.

Go with some friends or go alone and maybe make some new ones. You can expect songs and stories and poems and fairy lights and readings and reminiscences, and you can leave a "remnant" of yourself behind afterwards. It's a gorgeous evening. 

For more info, go here.

Programme article for The Human Body (Donmar Warehouse)

 

The Donmar Warehouse is incredibly special to me as it's the place where I first really discovered theatre 24 years ago. So I was especially pleased to write an article on 1940s cinema for the programme for the Donmar's current show: Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee's production of Lucy Kirkwood's The Human Body. 

The show is booking until 13 April. 

Preview: What to Watch at Kinoteka 2024

 

The 22nd edition of the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival starts today in London, with the UK premiere of Agnieszka Holland's Green Border. I wrote a preview of some of the highlights of the festival, which you can read here. 

Film Review: Memory (dir. Michel Franco, 2023)

 

My review of Michel Franco's new film, Memory, which is out in the UK tomorrow, is up at the Sight and Sound website. You can read it here. 

Film Review: American Fiction (dir. Jefferson, 2023)

 

My review of Cord Jefferson's American Fiction is up at the Sight and Sound website. You can read it here. 

10 Great British Films of 1974 (BFI online)

 

For BFI, I wrote about 10 British films released 50 years ago this year. You can read the piece here. 

March 2024 issue of Sight and Sound

The March 2024 Sight and Sound is out now. I interviewed John Akomfrah about his new film Arcadia for this issue, and also reviewed Cord Jefferson's American Fiction. More details on the issue here. 

Theatre Review: Till the Stars Come Down (National Theatre, Dorfman)

An Anglo/Polish wedding taking place on a sweltering summer day last year is the focus of the new play by Beth Steel, which gets its world premiere in a vibrant, sometimes exhilarating production by Bijan Sheibani at the NT's Dorfman. Often described (in meant-to-be-praising yet slightly patronising-sounding terms) as a foremost contemporary dramatist of "working-class lives," Steel follows up The House of Shades with another intergenerational Nottinghamshire family drama, albeit one in which events are telescoped into a day rather than unfolding over decades.

Placing the audience on four sides of a set (by Samal Blak) that variously suggests pitch, sparring area and dance floor (and, as lit by the great Paule Constable, also gives off more cosmic vibes at times), the play's slightly Steel Magnolias-evoking opening scene plunges us without preamble into the dynamics of the family on the morning of the big day of Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews), as she, her two sisters, nieces, Dad, Aunt and assorted other relatives prepare for the ceremony.

The man Sylvia's marrying is Marek (Marc Wootton), a Polish immigrant who, having arrived in England on a Megabus with little money to his name, has since successfully set up his own business. Nonetheless, it's a union that certain family members - especially Sylvia's older sister Hazel (Lucy Black) - view with scepticism that's pretty close to outright hostility. And as the booze flows freely during the wedding reception, those xenophobic feelings are exposed, along with sundry other family rifts and secrets - including an illicit attraction that turns out to be a little case of history repeating.

At its big, messy heart, Till the Stars Come Down is yet another three sisters story. Sheibani's production works hard to get a Chekhovian flow of life and activity across, bringing characters of diverse ages into dialogue that's by turns wildly funny, perceptive and touching. (And there's surely a nod or two to the classic Polish wedding play, Wyspiański's 1901 Wesele, in there as well.) Steel's play also has something of the rude English humour and cusp-of-caricature vim of April De Angelis' Kerry Jackson, staged by Indhu Rubasingham in the same auditorium last year - especially in the way it puts un-PC remarks seldom heard onstage (yet heard in Britain itself every day of the week) into the mouths of working-class characters who it refuses to demonise - even if the spectre of "punch up at a wedding" cliché hovers (and is finally fulfilled) at times. 

Overall, the writing here feels fuller, though, and ultimately more adept at interweaving personal and social concerns. Despite the large presence of Polish migrants in Britain since Poland entered the EU in 2004, dramatists have seemed reluctant to explore their experiences or the resulting tensions in UK communities. Sensitive to the context of a post-industrial community, Steel confronts both directly: while Marek expresses pride in the achievements of Poles who've moved to the area, Hazel resents the overburdened services that she blames for her mother's death, and feels threatened by a perceived shift in power. The play's inclusion of only one Polish character could be critiqued, but it works dramatically on several levels, as latent suspicion turns to scapegoating, and pits the family group against the outsider. 

As the bride caught in between, and gradually finding her voice in order to confront a family of more dominant personalities, Sinéad Matthews, always an asset to a production, captivates here. Among her many gifts, Matthews is great at conveying a character's contradictory, unspoken emotions: just watch the mix of embarrassment, pride, sadness and pleasure that crosses her face as Sylvia listens to her dad and then her new husband give their speeches. And there'll probably be few more joyous moments on a stage this year than the one in which Sylvia gleefully shakes off her anxieties to leap up on the table to dance.  

Lisa McGrillis and Lucy Black match Matthews brilliantly as the sisters, the former bringing some beautiful plaintive notes to her characterisation of a once-confident, now-cautious divorcee who's moved from the area for reasons that gradually become clear; the latter treading a difficult but believable line between sharp humour and bitterness as her fears about her own marriage come to the fore. (Black is especially devastating in a scene in which Hazel witheringly maps out her husband's likely future if he leaves her; this is Steel's writing at its best.)

As the rambunctious Aunty Carol, Lorraine Ashbourne relishes the lion's share of the quips, whether lamenting that she's being asked to leave before doing the Macarena, getting down to "Toxic," or revealing a few rather toxic views of her own as the night wears on. And Marc Wootton is perfect as the personable spouse - astute, hearty, curious, adorable when horny, but increasingly disinclined to put up with Hazel's passive aggression, and frustrated at his wife's reluctance to challenge it. 

The production gives the pleasure of a true ensemble, and the cast work together wonderfully well to convey a sense of complicated family life, with further texture provided by Ruby Stokes as Hazel's disillusioned teenage daughter and Alan Williams as the deadpan Dad at odds with his brother (Philip Whitchurch), feeling stuck since his wife's death, and giving a longer view of Polish presence in the town. 

Some elements, such as a "stopped time" conceit, are underdone, and the play's final tonal shift is extreme, with an ending that feels truncated. But Steel's refusal to shy away from big emotions or contrive cosy resolutions is admirable in itself. Essentially, Till the Stars Come Down is about a family reckoning in contrasting ways with change and transition. Expressing the theme, the staging cleverly keeps things in motion, adding a revolve to the central dinner scene, and getting the cast to physically "orbit" each other as Max Richter's recomposed Vivaldi plays. Steel has written an insightful, caustic but large-hearted play full of recognisable characters; both literally and figuratively, Sheibani's highly entertaining production ensures that we see them in the round.

Till the Stars Come Down is booking at the Dorfman until 16 March 2024. Further information here.