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.
I haven’t quite managed to review the first episodes of everything I’d intended to, this week. The CW’s My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is still on the pile, as is CBC’s The Romeo Section, which will both have to wait until Monday or Tuesday next week.
However, miraculously, I’m up to date with everything else. Elsewhere, I reviewed the first episode of The Last Kingdom (US: BBC America; UK: BBC Two), and I passed third-episode verdicts on The Player (US: NBC), Quantico (US: ABC; UK: Alibi), Blood & Oil (US: ABC), The Grinder (US: Fox) and Grandfathered (US: Fox).
And after the jump, you can find reviews of the latest episodes of 800 Words, Arrow, Blindspot, The Flash, Limitless, The Player, Y Gwyll and You’re The Worst.
On top of all that, though, I managed to find time to go to the theatre, too.
The Oresteia (Shakespeare’s Globe)
The second of the three Oresteia‘s this year (Almeida/Trafalgar Studios, this, HOME), the Globe’s adaptation isn’t as radical a reinterpration as the Almeida’s, giving us pretty much the original text bar a few excisions. There’s even singing, too.
However, text is one thing, production is another, and between director Adele Thomas and the cast, what we have is every bit as radical, giving us comedy, thanks in part to a Klytemnestra who is quite clearly bonkers, and even sci-fi and horror towards the end, with the Furies/Erinyes reinterpreted as zombies. And while the the Almeida gave us an entirely new first act derived from the myth, here we have just the slightest incursion in the final moments from what would have been the fourth accompanying play to the Oresteia. Which is all almost as bonkers as Klytemnestra.
As well as some really interesting staging – a lot of which unfortunately requires the poor ‘pit audience’ to scoot out the way of the oncoming action – there’s some excellent costuming, too, that combines early 60s fashions with classical Greek armour, and that gives us an Athena who makes you think for a moment there really has been an epiphany.
The first act/play could probably have done with some trimming, since it does plod along a bit and drift into inaudibility when it’s mostly the chorus, but the rest of it goes along at a clip and is imaginatively handled, for once showing us why the second of the plays is called The Libation Bearers. Generally good, with some horrifically gruesome moments, but probably a bit funnier than it should have been, too.
