Spectacular stage performances, awesome new albums and a host of fantastic films – they are all featured in our critics’ picks of the best of theatre, music and film.
Our experts have explored all the options for culture vultures to get their teeth into, and decided on the plays, albums and movies that are well worth dedicating your weekend to.
Read on to find out what to see and do…
THEATRE
SHOW OF THE WEEK
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the mother of all family-row plays. Every box set and modern broken-family drama owes it a debt. That includes Succession, whose star, Brian Cox, a limber 77, now returns to the West End stage in this American classic set on one day in 1912.
Eugene O’Neill’s family-at-war play comes with awesome levels of boozing. If you matched this drama drink for drink, you’d be in a coma before the interval.
Cox plays James Tyrone, a has-been actor, a miser – he unscrews light bulbs to save his electric bill – a bully and an alcoholic.
L-R: Laurie Kynaston, Brian Cox, Patricia Clarkson and Daryl McCormack as the Tyrone family in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Both his sons have crawled inside a bottle of whisky to escape his withering tongue. Then there’s his poor wife, Mary, convent-educated and charming but a hopeless dope addict. Medicinal morphine has helped dull the pain of years being hitched to the world’s stingiest touring actor.
There’s not a dud part in the play. The sons are terrific: Daryl McCormack exerts a futile charm as the whoring barfly son Jamie (a part that was memorably played by the unknown Kevin Spacey in the 1980s, when Jack Lemmon played Tyrone in London) and Laurie Kynaston is the sweet, tubercular Edmund, a coughing poet.
Cox – not quite on top of his lines on opening night – is at his best when he’s all crestfallen and on the verge of making up with these boys before a new blast of invective ruins it. For sheer presence, he is matched by screen star Patricia Clarkson, beautiful as the away-with-the-fairies Mary, her mind lost in a mist of sorrows, always aching for her next fix.
Louisa Harland (Derry Girls and Renegade Nell) as the sly Irish maid provides some much-needed laughs.
It could have done with a less bleak design – it’s all bare boards, and the sound of foghorns booming becomes its own lament for this ruined family.
But it would be wrong not to issue a customer warning. The evening is long, wordy and the second half is gruelling. At times I wanted to sneak out and massage my poor bottom.
It doesn’t help that it’s directed by Jeremy Herrin with a hint of slavishness. But what an impressive great beast this play is, ripped from the gut of a writer who based Tyrone on his own ghastly father.
Watching these fine actors bring to life a family wrecked by addiction, their love for one another corroded by hatred, is sad but also weirdly uplifting. One’s own family issues don’t seem so bad after watching this lot.
Robert Gore-Langton
Wyndham’s Theatre, London. Until June 8, 3hrs 20mins
FOUR OTHER SPARKLING SHOWS
The Divine Mrs S
The Divine Mrs S is about the actress Sarah Siddons (1755-1831). ‘Mrs Siddons’ was a great star of her day but there is still no biography of her, so this new backstage comedy is very welcome.
Rachael Stirling plays Sarah Siddons with terrific vim in this welcome comedy
She is played with terrific vim by Rachael Stirling, in what at times seems like a Georgian version of Noises Off.
Siddons’ deep talent – we get a hint of her famous Lady Macbeth – is offset by her controlling brother, John Philip Kemble, a shouting ham actor played by Dominic Rowan with Ernie Wise levels of pretentiousness.
Then there’s an oily critic (Gareth Snook), Patti, a Barnsley girl who becomes Mrs S’s confidante (played by Anushka Chakravarti), and Eva Feiler as a young playwright called Baillie, who has to conceal her identity as a woman.
April De Angelis’s comedy has a wide feminist angle – the theatre is, after all, still a man’s world. But it’s an evening generously laden with jokes.
Even if you find these jokes over the top (though I didn’t), in Rachael Stirling’s genuinely moving portrait of the actress and survivor it’s a pleasure to meet the remarkable Mrs S.
Robert Gore-Langton
Hampstead Theatre, London. Until April 27, 2hrs 20mins
The Dream Of A Ridiculous Man
The Dream Of A Ridiculous Man is a short story by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky that’s been updated by director Laurence Boswell as a vision of redemption in modern Hackney.
Greg Hicks stars in an updating of Dostoyevsky’s story to modern Hackney
Our hero (Greg Hicks) is a loner who has come to believe that human life is an unhappy accident without meaning. Ostracised, isolated and terminally depressed, he resolves to top himself.
But he’s saved by a dream of paradise, in a tale that turns out to be an allegory of the degradation and original sin of capitalism. Salutary as that may be, it’s also a bit simplistic.
Instead, the really interesting thing about Boswell’s production — and Hicks’s performance — is the ease with which they both move between different levels of experience: reality, dream, psychosis and unfettered imagination.
Loren Elstein’s staging transforms a bare black set with blurry city lights projected on a rear curtain, and immerses us in impressive wraparound sound effects.
Hicks looks like an emaciated Euro-clown in a jacket that’s too small, highwater trousers and espadrilles.
Multiple accents catch the flavour of melting-pot Hackney and his supple, expressive movement takes us on a cosmic joyride.
The ending is a sentimental reversal of Dostoyevsky’s conclusion, but — with acting like this — I’m willing to forgive it.
Patrick Marmion
Marylebone Theatre, London. Until April 20, 1hr 15mins
The 39 Steps
Patrick Barlow’s madcap adaptation of John Buchan’s very British spy story (later turned into the 1935 Hitchcock movie) has been going so long you might have thought it had run out of road. Fat chance.
Eugene McCoy, Safeena Ladha and Tom Byrne in the madcap 39 Steps
After a nine-year break, the caper is now back on tour in a delightful new production. The secret of its success is combining intrigue and romance with flat-out comedy.
After our hero Richard Hannay is stitched up for the murder of a glamorous German brunette, he is pursued by cops and killers across the Scottish Highlands in his search for the truth about the mysterious ‘39 steps’.
Pre-Barlow, most sane people would have considered this story unstageable. And yet using the larkiest tricks of physical theatre, he proved them all wrong.
The fun had by the actors is infectious. Tom Byrne is gleeful as Hannay, oozing bashful, upper-class charm. Safeena Ladha has fun as the glamourpuss blonde hitched to Hannay — literally — by a pair of handcuffs. Eugene McCoy amuses in sundry roles and Maddie Rice has a ball as the dastardly Professor with the missing finger.
A helter-skelter frolic that remains a stairway to comic heaven.
Patrick Marmion
Touring until August 3, 2hrs
The Lover/The Collection
According to Larkin, sexual intercourse began in 1963, but by then Harold Pinter’s characters were already adept at playing the games that make and break intimate relationships. As proved in Lindsay Posner’s expertly performed double-bill of early Sixties miniatures.
Claudie Blakley and David Morrissey in Harold Pinter’s The Lover
‘Is your lover coming today?’ David Morrissey’s respectable city gent, Richard, casually asks his wife Sarah as he goes off to work. It’s the first sentence of The Lover. The joke is that it is Richard who returns as Max and unzips his suede jacket for some afternoon delight.
A supercool, calm Claudie Blakley effortlessly slips from prim and proper Sarah’s cotton frock into the velvet sheath of the raunchy mistress. For her, this is a ‘beautifully balanced’ arrangement. But Hubby finds the fantasy bleeding messily into his domestic life and wants it to stop.
In the final image, Sarah kneels above her husband. In charge once again? I think so. But in Pinter ambiguity is everything.
In The Collection, the betrayal is for real. Or is it? We shall never know what actually happened at the bash when Bill (Elliot Barnes-Worrell) met Stella (Blakley). Bill’s older lover (a superbly reedy-voiced Morrissey) is suspicious that his toy-boy may be playing away with a woman. But he is much more agitated to see Stella’s hubby (Mathew Horne) flirting with insolent Bill.
Much more than a period piece, the consistent unpredictability and deliciously slippery tone make this a tense, timeless, if disturbing, delight.
Georgina Brown
Ustinov Studio, Bath. Until April 20, 2hs
MUSIC
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Beyonce Cowboy Carter Out now
Having established herself as one of the world’s biggest pop stars, Beyonce is now adding another string – a twangy one, made in Nashville – to her mighty bow.
Cowboy Carter is her first full-length foray into country music and, to ram home the point, the album sleeve depicts her as a Stetson-wearing rodeo queen perched (side-saddle) atop a great white horse.
‘Got folks down in Galveston, rooted in Louisiana,’ she drawls on Ameriican Requiem (the unusual spelling is hers). ‘They used to say I spoke too country.’
Cowboy Carter is Beyonce’s first full-length foray into country music. But this isn’t a wholly country record. The genre-hopping singer is keen to point out it’s simply ‘a Beyonce album’
It’s an opening gambit that sets the tone for an epic, 80-minute gallop through American musical history that sometimes feels more like a series of themes from a Western-orientated stage blockbuster than a pop album – but raises the bar high all the same.
Texas-born Beyonce, 42, made her name with slick R&B trio Destiny’s Child, but her earliest musical memories involved visiting the Houston Rodeo, where she was exposed to country music, folk and 1950s rhythm and blues. She sang there four times, and took inspiration from southern fashion and culture as much as music.
Cowboy Carter certainly boasts a kaleidoscopic array of sounds. Rather than the electronic dance rhythms that fuelled 2022’s Renaissance, we have gentle acoustic strumming, pedal steel guitar, accordion, harmonica, washboard, fiddle and banjo. There are handclaps, boot stomps on wooden floors? and Beyonce’s long nails as a percussion instrument.
This isn’t a wholly country record. The genre-hopping singer is keen to point out it’s simply ‘a Beyonce album’ and – amid the yee-haws and fiddles – there are steps into country rock and reminders of her background in R&B and dance. Its southern credentials are enhanced by appearances from Nashville grandees Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, but she stamps her own identity forcefully throughout.
At the core is that powerful, versatile voice. She shines on acoustic hoedown Texas Hold ‘Em and, at the other extreme, delivers a harmony-soaked cover of Paul McCartney’s Blackbird from The Beatles’ White Album, which was partly inspired by racial segregation in 1960s America.
Dolly Parton’s spoken-word interlude (‘Hey miss Honey B, it’s Dolly P’) precedes a version of the country icon’s classic Jolene. The clear template here is Whitney Houston’s powerhouse 1992 cover of Ms Parton’s I Will Always Love You, and Beyonce doesn’t disappoint, adding lyrical and musical twists.
Cowboy Carter loses some sharpness as it enters the home straight. Ya Ya opens with a sample of Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ and veers off into The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations, while dance track II Hands II Heaven could be an out-take from Renaissance. But you can’t fault its ambition.
‘The joy of creating music is that there are no rules,’ says Beyonce. If there were any doubts as to her latest exercise in confounding expectations, she dispels them in the best way possible – by co-writing some superb songs and delivering them with dazzling aplomb.
Adrian Thrills
FOUR MORE AWESOME ALBUMS
THE BLACK KEYS: Ohio Players
When The Black Keys decided to freshen up their sound for their 12th album, they asked a few high-profile friends to lend a hand. The Ohio duo made their name playing bluesy rock and roll, but singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney wanted to reflect their wider musical interests as well.
This is the 12th album of American rock duo The Black Keys
Among those friends fuelling the party mood are Britpop icon Noel Gallagher and genre-hopping Californian Beck. It’s a move that pays off handsomely. Ohio Players is the sound of a great night out.
Of the album’s 14 tracks, seven are co-written by Beck. He also contributes as a backing vocalist and musician. Noel co-writes and sings on a further three songs, adding guitar on two.
Noel provides two classic singalongs in On The Game, a big, Beatles-like ballad, and Only Love Matters. His third track, You’ll Pay, is a stomping northern soul number. Beck shows off his pick ’n’ mix instincts with backing on Don’t Let Me Go, and lead vocals, guitar and organ on psychedelic soul track Paper Crown.
Auerbach and Carney could have been overshadowed, but they rise to it while including enough to keep old fans happy. Blues number Live Till I Die has a familiar feel. Thanks in part to its guests, this fun, freewheeling return mixes the variety of a DJ set with the energy of a great live band.
Adrian Thrills
THE LIBERTINES: All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade
Older, wiser — and drug-free — the former tearaways return with their first new album in nine years.
The Libertines’s first new album in nine years
Titled after Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel All Quiet On The Western Front and the quartet’s new Margate HQ, its songs strike a balance between anthems in the style of 2003’s Don’t Look Back Into The Sun and Pete Doherty’s reflective, nostalgic character sketches.
French producer Dimitri Tikovoï beefs up the guitars with strings, brass and backing vocalists, and there’s even an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake — but a certain ramshackle charm still remains.
Adrian Thrills
VAMPIRE WEEKEND: Only God Was Above Us
Five years in the making, and painstakingly finessed by singer Ezra Koenig, Vampire Weekend’s latest record is a studied affair. Named after a 1988 headline about an Aloha Airlines flight that suffered a decompression, Only God Was Above Us adds gritty edges and sonic twists without sacrificing the group’s melodic instincts.
The album is named after a 1988 headline about an Aloha Airlines flight incident
Formed in 2005 at Columbia University, the New York band broke through with preppy songs about bus routes and grammar rules. But with Koenig turning 40 next week, these new songs are more worldly. He lives in LA now, but The Big Apple is clearly still an inspiration.
The curveballs arrive early. Ice Cream Piano combines punky guitars and swirling strings. Connect is a manic jazz number. The Surfer, all slow, shuffling rhythms, feels like a fever-dream.
Anxieties surface on Gen-X Cops, with its angular guitars and ominous lyrics about sharp axes and dark skies.
But the highlight is Mary Boone. Named after an 80s Manhattan art dealer, it’s a mix of lush orchestrations, an operatic choir and a sample from Soul II Soul’s 1989 classic Back To Life (However Do You Want Me).
Adrian Thrills
SHERYL CROW: Evolution
There’s nothing remotely machine-tooled about Sheryl Crow’s new album, Evolution, which moves between tender country-soul and upbeat pop on songs inspired by a desire to connect on a simple human level.
Sheryl Crow makes a comeback in new album Evolution
Most of the new songs are of a sunny, if slightly bruised, disposition: ‘I’m not gonna let a moment slip away,’ she sings on Love Life. She’s similarly philosophical on You Can’t Change The Weather, playing a Beatles-like melody on a Wurlitzer electric piano as she suggests that ‘every moment has a brand new start’.
Having set a high bar with 2019’s Threads, Crow’s reluctance to make another LP was understandable. But with a new wave of female artists — Boygenius, Lorde and Haim — citing her as a role model, she’s timed her unexpected comeback rather well.
Adrian Thrills
FILM
FILM OF THE WEEK
The First Omen Cert: 15, 2hrs
The First Omen, notionally a prequel to The Omen (1976), stands on its own as a gripping horror film that unfolds like a thriller, and contains a superb central performance by the 24-year-old English actress Nell Tiger Free.
The First Omen contains a superb central performance by the 24-year-old English actress Nell Tiger Free as a young American nun who arrives to work at an orphanage in Rome in 1971
She plays a young American nun who in 1971 arrives to work at an orphanage in Rome, and there uncovers some deeply sinister goings on.
A powerful cabal of clerics has decided that the only way to stop galloping secularism is to bring the masses back to the church through fear, so naturally they plot a way of birthing the Antichrist.
It’s a nuttily compelling premise, what you might call the Devil and the Holy See, and Arkasha Stevenson’s film realises it splendidly.
Charles Dance has a pre-titles cameo, Ralph Ineson is excellent as an excommunicated Irish priest, and the Eternal City of 50-odd years ago is convincingly re-created.
I found it harder to believe in Bill Nighy as a creepy cardinal, as solidly wooden as his crucifix, but you can’t have everything.
Brian Viner
FOUR OTHER FAB FILMS STILL IN CINEMAS
Monkey Man
Cert: 18, 2hrs 1min
I’m not wild about the title of Monkey Man, which is taken from Indian mythology, or some aspects of the storytelling, but Dev Patel makes a hugely impressive directorial debut with this, a revenge-based action thriller set in a modern India positively pulsing with life, energy and violence.
Dev Patel makes a hugely impressive directorial debut in Monkey Man
It’s a little derivative, with a screenplay good-humouredly acknowledging a debt to John Wick, but the sheer cinematic swagger is a joy to behold.
Patel also stars as Kid, who scrapes a living as an ineffective wrestler who fights in a monkey mask but dreams, we think, of bettering himself. But when he lands himself a job at an exclusive club we soon learn that it’s not so much money he’s after as revenge. Be warned, that 18 certificate is fully deserved.
Matthew Bond
Mothers’ Instinct
Cert: 15, 1hr 34mins
At first glance, Mothers’ Instinct looks like a stylish 1960s prequel to the once hugely popular TV show Desperate Housewives. In fact, it’s a remake of a 2018 Belgian film, itself based on a 2012 novel by Barbara Abel.
Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain are just OK in Mothers’ Instinct
But as we watch Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain playing perfect suburban housewives, with their perfect homes, perfect husbands and perfect sons, it’s definitely the desperate ladies of Wisteria Lane that come to mind. Because, as they showed us, no life is ever as perfect as it looks.
So it duly proves here, as a tragic accident suddenly brings the happy round of shared school runs and evening cocktails to an end. One mother is grieving, the other nursing a sense of possibly undeserved guilt. One mother has a history of mental illness, the other is possibly heading that way.
There’s no doubt that Hathaway and Chastain are pretty much dream casting, and for a little while it looks like we might be in for the sort of sensitive exploration of grief and loss that Todd Haynes might have given us. But slowly and with a disappointing inevitability, we slip into the familiar and melodramatic territory of the psychological thriller.
It’s still watchable but also a shame as, while Hathaway and Chastain are just OK here and will no doubt make better films in the future, the terrific performance of Eamon Patrick O’Connell as young Theo is somewhat wasted.
Matthew Bond
Robot Dreams
Cert: PG, 1hr 42mins
There are no humans in Robot Dreams. The animation, exquisitely written and directed by Pablo Berger, is set in New York City in the 1980s, a seedy metropolis populated entirely by animals.
Robot Dreams is exquisitely written and directed by Pablo Berge
Our hero is a lonely dog, who finds companionship in a mail-order robot, which he builds from a kit.
Joyously funny, achingly sad, gorgeously observed, it’s a (dialogue-free) delight from beginning to end.
But note that the two-dimensional animation is deliberately basic, evocative of early Hanna-Barbera cartoons. This lovely film is more likely to appeal to nostalgic grown-ups than sophisticated kids, raised on Pixar movies.
Brian Viner
Drive-Away Dolls
Cert: 15, 1hr 24mins
Weighing in at a succinct 84 minutes, Drive-Away Dolls does not hang about. Within moments, it has comprehensively set out its cinematic stall.
Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan star in Drive-Away Dolls
And what well-crafted fun it all turns out to be, as director and co-writer Ethan Coen takes a break from making films with brother Joel and instead creatively partners up with his wife (Ethan’s, not Joel’s), Tricia Cooke.
What ensues is like a freewheeling cross between Thelma & Louise and the Coens’ own No Country For Old Men, with two young women – promiscuous, motor-mouthed Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and buttoned-up, Henry James-reading Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) embarking on an impromptu road trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee in Florida.
Jamie needs to remove herself from a difficult break-up, while Marian wants to reassess her life and possibly end a long sexual drought. But their respective plans are forcibly put on hold when they discover that the car they are supposed to be delivering contains a hat box and an executive briefcase, and that a pair of bickering bad guys are suddenly after them.
Yes, the basic plot is familiar – that’s clearly deliberate – but the execution is highly enjoyable, with Qualley having a ball as the loquacious Jamie and cameos from the likes of Bill Camp, Colman Domingo, Matt Damon and an uncredited Miley Cyrus adding to the considerable fun.
Matthew Bond
