Category: Features – Archive

January 17, 2022 / Features - Archive

Musicals used to about as violent as grazing cows. West Side Story changed that, before first Sweeney Todd and then American Psycho really opened the blood-gates. Now Lizzie comes to town. Where Todd neatly slit his victims’ throats with a razor, the real Lizzie Borden used an axe to polish…

January 13, 2022 / Features - Archive

FILM VENUS & ADONIS 8/10 Awaiting classification, 144 minutes In cinemas January 20 Damien Ryan’s commanding film-directing debut opens with a quote from writer Peter Handke: “If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.” We now know what that’s like, at least in relation to our on-stage storytellers.…

January 8, 2022 / Features - Archive

Had there been no plague to close the London theatres in 1592, Shakespeare may never have penned his epically erotic poem Venus and Adonis. Had there been no COVID in 2020, Damien Ryan would certainly not have made a film based on that poem. Ryan had written a play interweaving…