Writer: Jez Butterworth Director: Jonathan Reed Jerusalem is a monstrous, Hydra-headed, wonder of a play. It requires a towering central performance and an ensemble that acts like a Greek chorus, that ebbs and flows like the River Severn, that allows the play to simultaneously portray a sad static Traveller who gives a mob of kids drugs and booze, and a mythic archetype, a Lord of Misrule, Jack o’the Green, Puck. If either of these stories fails to connect, it becomes a sort of morality tale without any moral. Both strands have to be credible. It is enormously to the credit…
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Writer: Rona Munro Director: Rachel Watt The story of Bold Girls follows three ladies living through the troubles in Belfast as they go about their daily chores, and then progress to a night out. As often happens when alcohol is consumed, a lot of truths come out about their intermingled lives. The main characters are Marie (Gwen Watson) who’s house much of the action takes part in, her neighbour Nora (Primmie MacGillivray) and Nora’s daughter Cassie (Joann Watt). There is also the mysterious figure of Deirdre (Lailey Sinclair). The contrast between domestic life, and the roadblocks and fires going…
Writer: Alys Williams Director: Andrea Heaton ‘What use will you be if you go under?’ asks the woman who, trying to save a partner struggling with despair, feels herself in danger of drowning too. She must keep going, finding moments of silliness amid the sadness, holding the hope for someone who doesn’t feel strong enough to hold it themselves. In this intensely emotional performance, Alys Williams takes us with her on a very personal voyage – quite literally, as she musters a fair number of audience members to provide sound effects and play the roles of her best friend, mother,…
Writer: Kazuya Konomoto Director: Baku Kinoshita, Nana Harada, Shintaro Matsui The Last Blossom is an oddly charmless piece of animation. The plot time-switches between protagonist, Minoru, as an old man, after thirty years in prison, and a period when he was young. We learn – because he decides to confide his life story to a talking balsam flower, the eponymous Last Blossom – that he once took in a young pregnant woman, Nana, and they set up home together as friends. Minoru is a supposedly a decent character, but with his sullen silences and his unchanging slab of a face,…
Festival Director: Alison Strauss HippFest, Falkirk Council’s world-class annual silent film festival based at the Hippodrome Cinema in Bo’ness, is back. Running from 18 to 22 March, the programme features a strong international line-up of movies. Every screening features live accompaniment by some of the most accomplished cinema musicians on the planet. The result is an exquisite combination of fascinating historic films and brilliantly tailored music. The Wednesday’s opening film, The Outlaw and His Wife (1918) is an emotionally gripping melodrama set in Iceland but shot in Sweden and directed by and starring Victor Sjöström as a one-time thief dogged…
Director: Jan Komasa This movie has a Polish director but is set in America and there are no subtitles. Released last year, it’s part of London’s Polish film festival, Kinoteka. Anniversary opens with what has become a dreadful cliché – the establishment of a well-to-do, grown-up American family at a celebration at their lovely home, in this case the parents’ silver wedding anniversary. It’s also a cliché that the smug family is about to be ripped apart, usually by the appearance and interference of a malign character. And so we have Liz (Phoebe Dynevor), girlfriend of Josh (Dylan O’Brien), the…
Written by: Laura Wade Directed by: Tamara Harvey Somerset Maugham’s 1926 comedy of manners is updated by Laura Wade in a sumptuous production that combines the elegance and tight-lipped values of the 1920s with a thoroughly modern commentary on marriage and fidelity. The pastel-hued art deco-inspired set and impeccably glossy costumes evoke an era exactly a century ago, but both the intransigence of tradition and the guile of the individual shine through as universal themes in this pacey, entertaining ensemble piece. Constance, played with vigour and witty charisma by TV star Kara Tointon, is the knowing central character. It soon…
Writer: Alaa Shehada, Charlotte Knowles Director: Alaa Aliabdallah The documentary Palestine Comedy Club follows a small group of stand-up comics. They get together for a daring venture: to create a comedy show and tour it round Palestine. It might feel like an impossible task, finding comedy in the darkest of times. Writer and performer, Alaa Shehada, admits: “When we started this project, we had no idea of where it would take us.” Palestinians have no control over their daily lives, he continues, so they must create comedy by observing and watching life going on around them. One of the most…