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| | | The Glass Menagerie review – Amy Adams's West End debut fails to find its heart | | by Arifa Akbar Jun 1, 2022 | | Duke of York’s theatre, London
Tennessee Williams’s story of yearning, passion and despair never puts us under its spell in Jeremy Herrin’s production Tennessee Williams’s narrator begins by speaking of all the ways a “memory play” conjures its effects: dim lighting, sentimentality, a lack of realism. This production uses those artifices and also boasts central star casting in Amy Adams, yet stops short of putting us under its spell. Adams’s West End debut is solid but unremarkable. She plays Amanda Wingfield, the temperamental matriarch desperate to find a husband for her disabled daughter, Laura (Lizzie Annis) and keep a grip on her son, Tom (Tom Glynn-Carney), whose work at a shoe warehouse leaves him with itchy feet – and a desire to be away from this suffocating household in St Louis. The Glass Menagerie is at Duke of York’s theatre, London, until 27 August. Continue reading... | | | | | Dashcam review – Maga-loving social media monster leads pandemic horror | | by Leslie Felperin Jun 1, 2022 | | Annie Hardy plays a livestream host so toxic that even zombies struggle to deal with her Nasty, brutish and mercifully short, but occasionally mildly amusing, Dashcam represents another dollop of pandemic-themed shock schlock from writer-director Rob Savage, recently renowned for his lockdown-set horror pic Host. This time around, Savage has exchanged Host’s Zoom-chat framing device for a Discord stream, with comments and emojis scrolling up from the bottom of the screen as a fictional audience reacts to the main content. This will probably need a lot of explaining to viewers in 20 years’ time, but for now it seems very à la mode and down with the kids, as is the blurry gore-soaked violence, smutty material (get ready for lots of jokes about anal insertions) and air of cynicism. The star of the show is Annie Hardy, a social media star apparently playing a version of her IRL self: she is an intentionally abrasive millennial Maga fan, whose usual gig is driving around Los Angeles livestreaming and improvising raps in response to suggestions from her fanbase. Unfortunately, lockdown has thinned the action on the streets, apart from the odd naked cyclist. So Annie flies over to the UK to visit her old friend and former bandmate Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel), who in the years since he’s seen Annie last has got less amused by her racism and refusal to conform by, for instance, wearing a mask around others. Hardy is a personification of everything that is obnoxious about the American right, but seemingly about as unkillable as a cockroach or Donald Trump’s political career judging by the way she navigates through a zombie apocalypse that starts out of nowhere. Continue reading... | | | | | Villager by Tom Cox review – a glorious ramble | | by James Smart Jun 1, 2022 | | A paean to people and nature in a fictional moorland village, from prehistory to 2099 Few books have such a damply pungent sense of place as Tom Cox’s intriguing first novel. Its setting is the fictional village of Underhill and the moorland that surrounds it, and Cox heralds his time “living and walking” on Dartmoor as inspiration. Fittingly, Villager gives us a landscape of wonder, the peaty soil thick with history while folk tales and gossip fill its contours with life. Cox’s writing career has been propelled by a rich variety of enthusiasms. His 2007 memoir Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia described his disastrous attempt to become a professional golfer; his other memoirs, podcasts, blogs and tweets feature everything from vinyl (he once reviewed music for the Guardian) to hills, sheep, interior design, pixies, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and his many cats. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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