| | | 'Anthony Hopkins committed within five minutes': how I wrote The Father with Florian Zeller | | by Christopher Hampton Sep 7, 2021 | | After Christopher Hampton saw Zeller’s dementia drama on stage in Paris, neither language, finance nor another film adaptation could thwart their collaboration on the screenplay I first met Florian Zeller about eight years ago. It was in the foyer of the Théâtre Hébertot in Paris, where I had just watched his play The Father, directed by Ladislas Chollet, with the astonishing 88-year-old French actor Robert Hirsch in the title role. I was pretty much overwhelmed by what I’d seen, but I think I was able to convey to Florian that I loved his play and hoped he would allow me to translate it. The Father was not the first play of Florian’s that I had seen. The year before, also in Paris, I’d watched a very deft and amusing comedy called The Truth and had been saying to whom it might concern that, providing a really gifted director could be found (because the play required razor-sharp precision and considerable wit and timing), I was confident a British audience would embrace it. What struck me now, however, having seen The Father, was how remarkable it was that a playwright in his early 30s could have written two such radically different plays, with nothing in common beyond the skill of their construction. Continue reading... | | | | | | | 'The point is ambition': are we ready to follow Netflix into space? | | by Adrian Horton Sep 7, 2021 | | The ambitious new look at SpaceX’s first all-civilian flight, the streaming platform’s first real-time docuseries, takes reality television to space The rise of commercial space travel is here, and for the vast majority who cannot afford its millions-plus price tag, streaming platforms are here to capture it. Starting this week, Netflix will air the first two installments of Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space, its first docuseries to cover an event – SpaceX’s launch of its first all-civilian crew on a three-day trip circling Earth – in “near real time.” Subsequent episodes will document the four astronauts’ preparation for the 15 September launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Episodes three and four will air just two days prior; a feature-length finale film of the mission itself will air in late September. Related: How the billionaire space race could be one giant leap for pollution Continue reading... | | | | | 'All of life is here. And it's too much!' – Mixing It Up: Painting Today review | | by Adrian Searle Sep 7, 2021 | | Hayward Gallery, London
Ghosts, fetish-wear, smokers, swimmers, monks, aubergines, birds, lots of cats … and Saddam Hussein. Our writer is overwhelmed by this attempt to survey contemporary painting Paintings have people in them. There is always someone, somewhere, even in the most terse abstraction; the painter for a start, the viewers who look, and all the painters and commentators and viewers who came before. If we didn’t already know what paintings were, we wouldn’t know how to begin to look. There are 31 painters in the Hayward’s Mixing It Up, subtitled Painting Today. What an uneven exhibition this is. Tightly hung and divided into seven sections or chapters, there is too much here to take on board in a single viewing. Painting is supposed to slow you down. It is impossible. Here are paintings with cats, dogs, monkeys and cockerels in them. Paintings with Spitfires, stealth bombers, a painting of a room whose door is barricaded by a chair. A painting of a city in winter under a snowfall of rice. We move between paintings of shirts, curtains, venetian blinds, a fetish-wear raincoat and a transparent plastic mac, a fish on a dish, ghosts, apparitions, false memories and invented scenes. Paintings whose every touch and deviation and change of heart is exposed, and others where all effort is hidden and suppressed. Paintings that need big studios and assistants and others that require nothing much more than a table to work at and a sheet of paper. You tailor your needs to what’s possible or plausible. Continue reading... | | | | | Angela Bassett on success, salaries and staying power: 'I gotta find a new queen to play!' | | by Steve Rose Sep 7, 2021 | | She is back on the big screen as an assassin, is reportedly the highest-paid female actor of colour ever for a TV drama – and is moving into producing. She discusses fairness, film-making and why acting is still her first love Even via a video call, from an anonymous-looking office in New York, against a backdrop of stacked cardboard boxes, Angela Bassett exudes glamour. Dressed down in a sleeveless white top, her hair long and dead straight, she still looks like a million dollars. But it is more Bassett’s irrepressibly expressive personality that leaps out of the screen. She is too self-deprecating and quick to laugh to be hammy, but even out of character she speaks as if she is delivering a monologue: clear and authoritative, with dramatic emphases on certain words, her face and hands in constant motion. When I ask if there are any roles left she would like to play, she says: “I used to say I wanted to play a queen, because I thought it would be really good for audiences to see a Black queen on their screens, you know, for people who grew up looking at queens not looking too much like me.” Continue reading... | | | | | 'The equivalent of shouting fire': coughing in theatres is new taboo | | by Rachel Hall Sep 7, 2021 | | BBC proms host says Covid pandemic has increased stigma, as people fear infecting others Once considered simply a vital bodily function, coughing could be joining the list of unacceptably disruptive behaviours in theatres, along with excessive rustling, talking and using your mobile phone, as people have become more concerned about contagion risk due to Covid. The change has been welcomed by BBC Proms host, Petroc Trelawny, who said one unexpected benefit of the pandemic that he has observed is that people no longer disturb performances in theatres by “coughing unnecessarily”.
In an interview with the Radio Times, Trelawny speculated that the stigma associated with potentially infecting others with Covid could mean that it will no longer be considered acceptable to cough in public, in a change that would be “particularly beneficial to music lovers”. Continue reading... | | | | | 'Novel of the moment': Sally Rooney's third book hits the shelves | | by Lucy Campbell Sep 7, 2021 | | Excited fans queue to meet author at Piccadilly launch event as Beautiful World, Where Are You smashes order records It’s been one of the most hyped book releases in the literary calendar, with fans desperate to get their hands on a copy of Sally Rooney’s hotly anticipated third novel. Following on from the dizzying success of her critically acclaimed first two books, Beautiful World, Where Are You is already the No 1 bestseller on Amazon. Waterstones said that not only were orders up on Rooney’s last novel, Normal People, it was their biggest order for fiction ever. Continue reading... | | | | | Fever Pitch! The Rise of the Premier League review – how Rupert Murdoch 'saved' football | | by Stuart Jeffries Sep 6, 2021 | | Since the media baron brought the beautiful game to the masses in the 90s, the sport has taken over the media and society – a process queasily celebrated in this BBC docuseries “Now they analyse everything in football,” laments Eric Cantona, genial, bearded and altogether more mellow than he was in his karate-kicking, sardine-citing 1990s Old Trafford pomp. “All I know is I can express myself. I don’t want to know more. It’s like in love – I don’t want to know why I love my wife.” These wise words from the Manchester United talisman come during the first episode of Fever Pitch! The Rise of the Premier League (BBC Two), a new series devoted to precisely what he was indicting. As Cantona’s compatriot and fellow philosopher Marc Perelman argued in Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague, today the media are “all united to make sport inescapable, so that everyday conversation is bloated with invasive logorrhoeic blather”. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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