It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case I’ve missed them.
The usual “TMINE recommends” page features links to reviews of all the shows I’ve ever recommended, and there’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever. And if you want to know when any of these shows are on in your area, there’s Locate TV – they’ll even email you a weekly schedule.
Elsewhere on this ‘ere blog, I’ve already reviewed all the new TV shows I could find this week and which you should either try to find yourselves or desperately avoid, these being:
So if you’re looking for new shows here, I ain’t got nothing for you, mister, I’m afraid, since I haven’t had a chance to watch Netflix’s new Sense8, the entire series of which was released today. Thanks Netflix.
However, we’ve got a few returning regulars this week, too, which means that after the jump, I’ll be reviewing the first new episodes of the latest seasons of Hannibal, Halt and Catch Fire and Strike Back: Legacy. I’ll also be looking at the latest episodes of Between and Game of Thrones, and casting an eye over perhaps the last ever episode of Community.
But first, a theatre review! I have in fact between to the theatre twice this week, but I’m saving up my review of the Almeida’s marathon modernisation of The Oresteia – a trilogy in four parts, it turns out – until next week when I can give it due consideration.
The Elephant Man (Theatre Royal Haymarket)
Little known actor Bradley Cooper and the rest of the Tony Award-nominated Williamstown/Broadway cast (Patricia Clarkson, Alessandro Nivola, Anthony Heald et al) come over to the Theatre Royal for this 12-week run of Bernard Pomerance’s 1979 play about the deformed Joseph Merrick aka ‘the Elephant Man’ because he was exhibited in a circus. Most people will be familiar with the 1980 David Lynch movie starring John Hurt, and this follows similar beats, focusing on Merrick’s life between his discovery by a Dr Treves (Nivola) at the circus run by Heald through his life in Treves’ care at the London Hospital and his friendship with Clarkson’s famous actress (who in real life actually did perform at the Haymarket) until his eventual death in the hospital.
It’s a moving piece, albeit one that can’t quite focus on a theme, jumping between questions of God and Darwinism through to women’s bodies in Victoria society. Merrick here is similar to Lynch’s version, being the beautiful souled man trapped in a body so horrifying everyone but a trained actress can’t help but avoid screaming and running away from. However, this is less ‘disabled as object pity’ than the movie, giving us a Merrick who’d quite like to see a naked woman, please.
Cooper takes on the challenging role of Merrick but eschews all make-up in favour of an entirely physical and quite breathtaking performance, assuming each deformity as it’s described in an early scene. Cooper’s obviously and deservedly the focus of the play, but Nivola’s performance is what anchors it and Scott Ellis’s direction is innovative. I was impressed, my wife loved it and the whole thing got a standing ovation, so see it while you can.
It’s time for our regular look at the TV that the BFI is showing, this time in June 2015. This month’s output is devoted purely to the fourth part of the ongoing Dennis Potter season, this time focusing on the themes of sex and death. If that doesn’t sound much, you should probably see how many showings that amounts to, given it includes showings of all of Casanova, Blackeyes, Karaoke, Cold Lazarus, and The Singing Detective, as well as Blue Remembered Hills and Double Dare.
There’s also Where Adam Stood, Potter’s 1976 free adaptation of the autobiography of naturalist and fundamental Christian Edmond Gosse, whose father had trouble reconciling the Bible with the latest works of Charles Darwin, causing Gosse all manner of difficulties. Don’t want to wait to see it? Well, you don’t have to as it’s this week’s Wednesday Play (on Thursday):
As we saw recently with AMC’s Better Call Saul, prequels can be tricky things. You typically only get a prequel to a show if it’s been popular and has a strong fan base, and those fans are going to want everything to line up nicely with whatever’s already been established in the original story. However, unless you want ever-reducing audience numbers, you have to ensure that the prequel is of interest to a wider circle than just the fans.
The show formerly and cleverly known as Westside Story, but which is now presumably for copyright reasons simply Westside, has these two issues to juggle. Now, I’ve already gone into the history of its progenitor Outrageous Fortuneelsewhere, so I won’t bother here but suffice it to say, as esteemed New Zealand shows with a huge fan base go, you couldn’t find a bigger one than Outrageous Fortune. All the same, that finished five years ago and wasn’t widely known in its original form overseas – indeed, these days it’s perhaps better known as the show that the creators of The Almighty Johnsons ran before venturing into matters more fantastical and theological. As a result, there’s a potential new audience for Westside that never saw the original and who might be looking forward to Rachel Lang and James Griffin’s latest production.
So will the story of safecracker Ted West, his wife Rita and their son Wolf, the future prison-bound patriarch of Outrageous Fortune‘s West family, stand on its own two feet or will it simply be a piece of fan service from a creatively bankrupt team that have run out of ideas?
