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| | | Theatre criticism is a quick and dirty act – our views change and so do plays | Arifa Akbar | | by Arifa Akbar May 3, 2022 | | A two-star show has the potential to be turned into a five-star hit – as I learned on a recent trip to the Royal Court I went to see a play for the second time recently and changed my mind about it. If that sounds like an innocent statement in itself, it is surely a mea culpa for a critic who delivered a damning star-rated judgment the first time around. Or is it? The production was Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy, which is currently at the Royal Court. I reviewed it in October 2021, when it was first mounted at the New Diorama theatre, and I was unequivocally disappointed. All the more so because I was sure I was going to like it, having been blown away by Cameron’s previous drama, Typical, streamed during lockdown. That play drew on the last day in the life of Christopher Alder, and I was so moved by its story, so exhilarated by its language, that it took me several cups of tea to calm down afterwards. Arifa Akbar is the Guardian’s chief theatre critic Continue reading... | | | | | Spider-Man at 20: the superhero film that changed blockbuster cinema | | by Guy Lodge May 3, 2022 | | Sam Raimi’s charming, if patchy, 2002 adventure showed that mass audiences were eager for a new kind of superhero and the industry never looked back It seems positively absurd to say this now, but in the summer of 2002, Spider-Man reached cinema audiences as a relative novelty. The superhero genre wasn’t dormant, though neither was it all-consuming. The goth-kitsch Batman cycle of the 1990s had petered out at that point, but successful adaptations of Blade and X-Men had resurrected Marvel Comics as viable cinematic fodder after direct-to-video stabs at Captain America and The Punisher. Blade, however, was an R-rated gorefest aiming for cultish endurance; X-Men, while a notch more accessible to younger viewers, was still a dark-ish, dour-ish affair intended first to please comic book loyalists. Swinging on to screens 20 years ago today, Spider-Man was different: a bright, goofy, youthful adventure with a wholesomeness that the genre hadn’t seen since the Christopher Reeve-starring Superman films two decades before. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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