Constantly toying with the boundaries between reality, the supernatural, fate and madness, Shakespeare’s Scottish play is renowned for being one of his darkest. It is this shadowy aspect of the work which co-directors Tom Fawcett and Lucy Clarke are eager to embrace in their own production.

Their stage is the front quad of Regent’s Park and, in spite of the jam-packed bike racks (which I’m assured will all have been removed by show time), it is certainly a space with dramatic potential. With stony steps providing elevation and the two-storey windows of the dining hall giving effective backlighting, Lucy also tells me the courtyard provides great acoustics. The cast therefore has quite a challenge ahead of them in matching their performances to this striking environment, and they undoubtedly try their best, although sometimes stretch too far and become a tad melodramatic.

 I was shown three scenes including the well-known sequence where the trio of witches in the midst of an incantation are stumbled across by Macbeth and Banquo and impart their infamous prophecy – Macbeth will be king. Dressed in black the witches all shrieked and squealed their spells with maddening pace and volume and their movements across the stage were slow but purposeful, like poisonous snakes. Stan Carrodus as Banquo successfully carried an air of fearlessness and entitlement well-suited to a nobleman and has an admirable grasp of the Shakespearean dialogue. Unfortunately, being in his company makes Alex Hartley’s Macbeth seem almost timid. Even before hearing his fortune, he seems worried just about being in Scotland, although this anxious and frantic demeanour works much better in later scenes once he is implicit in treason.

Speaking of intrigue we turn now to Lady Macbeth. Played by Francesca Nicholls, this Lady Macbeth is as manipulative, half-crazed and dynamic and you could wish her to be. While her speech at times feels forced, overly breathy and mature, it works well in most of her scenes and her faux fainting and forceful shoves provide much of the energy I saw.

With still half a week of rehearsals to go this performance shows a lot of promise, and, while not subtle, this show looks set to reward viewers for embracing the dramatic side of things. Although I would advise audience members to wrap up in as many layers as possible, I’m certain that once you’ve achieved a level of comfort your attention will be captivated by this haunting production. And as one cast member mentioned, if you’re lucky enough for the moon to come out, you might even start thanking the directors for not putting on this show indoors.

★★★☆☆
Three Stars

It seemed almost sacrilegious – the idea of blowing up Michael Bond’s quintessential pillars of British children’s literature for the big screen. But we can all sleep soundly in our beds with the knowledge that director Paul King has created a cosy, heartfelt, and giddily witty family film, proving that he has taken the eponymous bear’s famous tag, “Please look after this bear,” very seriously indeed.

Opening with grainy black and white footage of a geographical expedition to darkest Peru, we witness the origins of the juvenile ursine protagonist and his family – namely their first contact with human beings, and how the bears are promised the warmest of welcomes should they ever find themselves in London. Lo and behold, some years later, after perfecting their English manners and language, the bears’ Peruvian abode is struck by disaster, and our young hero sets off for (yes, you guessed it) that very same London to seek solace, comfort, and – above all – a new home.

The outlandishly contrived opening aside, the Peruvian bear finds himself in England completely unscathed but tragically alone, and sets himself up in Paddington Station looking for some kindly humans to offer him a home (as one does). As expected, his romantic notions of English niceties and etiquette are completely obliterated after spending a few mere moments in one of the country’s busiest train stations. Only the kindly Brown family, who happen to be passing, are prepared to take him in, and thus the story quickly finds its feet – or paws. Looking up at the station in which they found the little bear, the Browns immediately decide upon his name: they will call him “Paddington”.

Ben Whishaw voices the famous bear, and quite frankly he fits the role perfectly. His slightly naïve, playful, milk-and-honey chirp lends itself superbly to Paddington, who is very childlike and trusting. It’s easy to see that Colin Firth was miscast as the original voice (sorry, Colin); his mature, dreamy, Darcy purr simply wouldn’t have worked. As in the original stories, Paddington gets into all kinds of scrapes. Most memorably, he single-handedly manages to flood and destroy the Brown family bathroom. Oh, and he also sets their kitchen on fire. Somehow Whishaw’s affectionate Paddington prevents us from ever scolding him too harshly though. He is terribly cute, after all.

Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins bring Mr. and Mrs. Brown to life with great spirit, and the Brown children are equally delightful. There’s also fantastic assembly of British character actors in supporting roles. Paddington finds an unexpected kindred spirit in Jim Broadbent’s evacuee from Nazi persecution, Mr. Gruber, who owns an antiques shop, and also began his refuge in the country at a train station. Peter Capaldi plays grouchy neighbour Mr. Curry, who epitomises the brunt of the xenophobia Paddington receives from the moment he arrives. Julie Walters is in fine form sporting a Scottish brogue as the ship-shape Mrs. Bird, and there’s even a funny little cameo from Matt Lucas as a London cabbie.

Adding the slightest snag of peril is Nicole Kidman, whose dastardly villainous taxidermist resembles something of a cross between Cruella De Vil and Cate Blanchett’s sadistic Soviet colonel in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Kidman really sinks her teeth into the role, and – though she looks a bit like a dominatrix (perhaps that explains the controversial PG rating!) – she offers plenty of light-hearted relief. The climactic perilous scene in the Natural History Museum is great fun. 

“In London nobody’s alike, which means that anyone can fit in,” says Paddington in a moment of surprising poignancy. This is undoubtedly a film about fitting in – about finding one’s place in the world, about acceptance and tolerance. Rather funnily (though it feels like something out of a Ionesco play), nobody questions the fact that this anthropomorphic bear talks, let alone with meticulous articulation and maturity. Mr. Brown tells his children when they first spot the bear seeking friendship at Paddington station to keep walking, telling them that “he’s probably selling something.” Weirdly, it isn’t so much Paddington’s species that sets him apart, but rather simply the fact that he is an outsider, and that he is searching for a new place to call home. Harkening back to the image of evacuated children standing anxious and scared on railway stations during the Second World War (which would have been very fresh in the mind of the reader when the books were first published in 1958), Paddington reverberates timelessly. It’s a refugee story, essentially.

The world of Paddington doesn’t feel all too far from the original setting of the 50s and 60s, though we know it’s been modernised. There is a classic feel to the kinetic colours bursting from every frame of the Brown family home, the bustling London streets, the hazy city skyline, all of which mean that the old-school adventure plot sits quite comfortably. The whole film rests on the shoulders of its impenetrable charisma and well-mannered frivolity. It’s sure to become something of a Christmas classic. It’s a bit like Ted, but a PG-rated version, and in many ways much funnier.

There are very few bones to pick, if they are bones at all. Mrs. Bird may have been changed from housekeeper to “elderly relative” to crush any accusations of a moneyed family, but it’s difficult to escape the fact that it’s all rather fortunate for Paddington that he ends up housed by the middle class well-to-do Browns in a North West London townhouse. Then again, it’s admirable how Paddington doesn’t try to burrow too deeply into issues of class; the Brown family are not happy because of their wealth – they’re happy because Paddington brings them all together in ways they had simply never considered before. As Mrs. Bird says, “What this family needed was a little bit of chaos.” And that’s exactly what young Paddington brings.

★★★★☆

Four Stars

I’m always a bit uncomfortable when I go into a theatre and the actors are already on stage. It makes you feel you are thrown into the performance without having the time to ‘prepare’ yourself for what you are going to see. But maybe, being thrown into The Effect is what the characters themselves are feeling. The play is such that, if we don’t experience what Connie (Ellie Lowenthal) and Tristan (Calam Lynch) are living, we won’t be able to understand much.

An experiment is taking place, a new anti-depressive is being trialled. And this is used as a way to raise big questions. How much do drugs and pills affect our own life? How much does our life depend on or maybe consist of mere chemicals? How can we be sure that what we feel is real, and the person doing the feeling is really ‘us’? It would be tempting of a play to simply raise these questions and leave them unanswered, floating in the air. But the play finds the right balance between creating dilemmas and subtly pointing to a solution – which, for the audience, is kind of a relief.

Particularly powerful is the exchange between the two doctors, where the effectiveness of the anti-depressive is discussed. Opinions are divided, and everything seems to be circular: the symptoms observed could be due to the drug, and giving the impression in the patients that they are in love, or the patients could have fallen in love independently. The play thus reflects on love from different perspectives, although the focus is very much on physicality. The suspicion is never raised that love may also come from witty conversation, intellectual engagement and sharing of values. All this is shadowed by the uncontrollable power of emotions, which drag away everything they find on their way. But the attention of the play is clearly somewhere else, and what it investigates is brilliantly done. ‘The Effect’ is a great play, thought-provoking like few theatrical performances can be. Furthermore, it does so without falling into a mere philosophical inquiry or making us lose interest in what is going on between Connie and Tristan.

The actors are all extremely talented, Connie in particular, and span out the complex dynamics created by the artificial and/or natural dopamine rush. The dialogue is brilliant, never prosaic, but constantly engaging. The only moment in which the play gets perhaps slightly over didactic is the monologue on mental health, which is useful to contextualise the whole thing. It, perhaps, slows down things a bit too much. One clever expedient is making the framework of the play (setting, gestures, corollary characters, music) extremely factual and stiff, and making the doctors moving in a simultaneous and twitchy way. As if it was possible to contain and quantify the elusive mystery of love in a few facts, gestures, or in a play even.

★★★★☆

Four Stars 

Last week’s exclusive iPlayer release of the bold new documentary by Adam Curtis, Bitter Lake, makes it nearly a four year gap since we were last gifted a full-length film by Curtis. During that period, following the debut of the three-part All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace in 2011, Curtis fans have had to make do with scraps: small five-minute features on Rupert Murdoch and ‘non-linear war’ for Charlie Brooker’s yearly Screenwipes, as well as characteristically rambling posts on his eclectic BBC blog (the more devoted might also have made the trip to Manchester to witness his collaboration with Massive Attack live in 2013).

Curtis is the great chronicler of postmodern chaos and he returns – if not on our televisions, at least our computer screens – in triumphant fashion, with a sprawling, beautiful treatise on the collapse of what he calls the ‘ordered world’, told chiefly through the prism of Afghanistan. It’s a frightening vision, but Bitter Lake is both visually arresting and deeply human.

“We live in a world where nothing makes any sense,” Curtis begins the film by declaring. “Those in power tell us stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality. But those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow. This is a film about why those stories have stopped making sense, and how that led us in the West to become a dangerous and destructive force in the world.”

It says much about Curtis’ filmmaking, and the strength of his aesthetic identity, that his documentaries lend themselves so easily to parody. There is certainly a house style. In Bitter Lake, Curtis doesn’t depart from the trademarks that make his films so instantly recognisable. Like his other recent works, it comprises his narration over footage excavated from deep within the BBC archives and elsewhere. It is, however, far longer, running slightly over two hours.

There is, as in his other films, the same predilection for the Arial typeface, all in capital letters, the characteristic fondness for juxtaposition and, of course, the very Curtis-like taste for both the surreal and the sentimental: truly bizarre looking footage of the Afghan version of The Thick of It is cut alongside poignant scenes of a father and his war-injured daughter. The effect is jarring.

Curtis briefly tutored Politics at Oxford before foregoing its cloistral hush for a weird kind of in-house position at the BBC and his films, appropriately enough, resemble intricately crafted essays. They generally begin the same way: Curtis disclosing his central argument, expounded over beautifully cut footage, before noting some crucial qualification (“But this was a fantasy…’”) He delights in contradiction and in the marriage of incongruent sound and image: in one scene Curtis tells us of a coup in Afghanistan, accompanying that with footage of play-fighting Afghan hounds. It doesn’t feel forced.

Bitter Lake covers much of the same ground as Curtis’ earlier works. Though mainly about Afghanistan, the film also detours into a story about the rise of neoliberalism and how oil money allowed banks to escape from the clutches of political regulation, echoing parts of The Trap and All Watched Over. This wouldn’t be a documentary by Curtis if Blair, Reagan or Thatcher didn’t feature and rather predictably they do, as Curtis rails against the ruthlessly simplified moral fables of good-versus-evil told to us by those in power in one of the documentary’s many interesting subplots.

Given that Curtis is so emphatic on the need for us to avoid simplifying reality, it is kind of odd of him to attribute the source of our modern disorder to one sketchy meeting between FDR and the King of Saudi Arabia (above a lake from which the film derives its name). Ultimately, however, Bitter Lake’s excellence comes not from the coherence of its narrative, but from the sheer aesthetic spectacle it provides. Curtis really is a collage artist of the highest order. And, besides: so what if his own story doesn’t make sense? It’s the kind of paradox one feels that Curtis would be proud of.

★☆☆☆☆

One Star

“Johnny Depp is Mortdecai!” proclaimed the posters promoting this latest star vehicle for the prolific actor. That much is certainly true – Depp is the film, or at least, the only reason for this bizarre, misjudged and pointless romp to exist. A vanity piece from top to bottom, the film struggles to find a purpose as it trudges from set piece to set piece. These occasionally well constructed scenes serve to provide more opportunities for Depp to wear out his trademark tics and oblivious bemusement which have blighted cinema screens for the best part of a decade.

Mortdecai’s plot centres around our titular hero and his hangers-on, who are attempting to recover a stolen painting in an adventure that takes them around the world from London to Moscow and even to Oxford. Yet this plot is really just the means to contrive scenes for the talented cast to raise their eyebrows sarcastically and wink at the audience. It’s thoroughly unsatisfying.

The film has absolutely no sense of danger – Mortdecai is the film, so his success is unquestionable. A particularly ridiculous scene sees our hero jump through a window several stories up, only to bounce up off the street below completely unharmed. This cartoon-like quality attempts to heighten the film’s comedy, but merely acts to rob the thin narrative of any excitement. Worse still, a late third act reveal negates the purpose of almost the entire preceding hour. Not only does the film insult the audience’s intelligence, it undermines their good-will too.

Ostensibly a comedy, though you’d be forgiven for not knowing it, Mortdecai’s ill-founded faith in the lovability of both its protagonist and its lead actor is almost tragic. No one has wanted to see Depp in these films since Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, as attested to by the abysmal reception the film received at the box office. It’s almost heartbreaking to see such a great film actor drowning under a lazy performance that’s more irritating than engaging. Furthermore, the film never seems to give us a reason to like Mortdecai – he’s a bumbling incompetent aristocrat clinging to notions of his masculinity as much as he is his inherited title and squandered wealth. It’s very hard to care.

The out-of-place aristocrat trope gives the film a farcical sensibility, particularly in one of the film’s more amusing sojourns to Los Angeles, whilst whizzy CGI scene transitions illustrate the globe trotting exploits of our protagonist. Presumably an attempt to liven up the film’s theatricality, their distracting cheapness ends up detracting from the film’s other limited stylistic aspirations. Amongst the starry supporting cast, Gwyneth Paltrow is perfectly cast as Mortdecai’s haughty high society wife. She plays perhaps the film’s most engaging character, with her defining motivation being to rid her husband’s visage of his ludicrous moustache – understandable if trivial. Her incredible line reading of “darling they are in cahoots” was one of the two laughs the film got from this reviewer.

Poorly conceived and ultimately exhausting, Mortdecai is a waste of talent, money and most importantly your time. Hopefully the film’s failure will encourage Depp to return to the arthouse, so we’ll be saved from watching as he, just like the character of Mortdecai, degrades himself for big cheque after big cheque.

Any seasoned student who enjoys a cheeky beverage from time to time will know that there are few things more annoying in life than last orders. Even more annoying is when the impending last call is drawn that slight bit closer by an aggressive global pandemic.

The George and Dragon is a piece of new writing that doesn’t mind laughing at universal sickness and doesn’t make you feel too bad if you do too. Set in a local pub, the piece takes a look at the lives of The George’s regulars as they drink and dance off death by global virus. Mixing together various different archetypes, writers Michael Comba and Sami Ibrahim have produced a real dirty-pint of a performance. And I mean that in the nicest way possible. Fusing crude farce, tragedy and comedy, the piece journeys through vignettes of the musical, stand-up, silent-movie and Talking Head documentary variety – enough, surely, to go straight to anyone’s head.

But it’s bleak, really. The George and Dragon pub, once a thriving social hub, now faces closure because all of its customers are dead. Or dying. Or off somewhere talking about how they’re all going to die. Forced to re-open as a local community centre, the rowdy watering hole ironically takes on a new lease of life. Opening with a classroom scene performed with all the painful dumbing-down of fairy-tale didacticism, it’s from the edge of our stool that we learn to stay away from the “big, nasty, evil germ Jemima”, who kills with a single cough. This is, of course, delivered alongside the slightly less sensitive guideline that any diseased “smug cunt that thinks he can go on living” should be shot point-blank. It’s a promising start to what is likely to shape up to be a real ‘corker’ of a performance (pun fully intended).

The real warmth and camaraderie of the cast will no doubt contribute to the sense of false comfort achieved amidst an inviting pub atmosphere, perfectly suited to the intimate space that is the BT studio. Swept away by outbursts of My Fair Lady, Grease and ‘Purple Rain’, as the musical vignette ensues like a really perky round of karaoke, it’s easy to forget that there’s a rather bloody pandemic going on outside and that what you’re watching is actually quite dystopian.

And this was kind of the intention, according to Ibrahim, who inspired by a love of crappy 1950s sci-fi films – “You know the type with too tight a budget to shoot an actual alien invasion so people just run into the room and tell you about it instead” – wanted to play with this kind of comic, narrative frame. The use of other genres as well has “a vaguely pretentious explanation”, he says, but it’s “mainly just that every good play needs a gimmick.”

Starting out as a pub sketch-show, the writers have instead concocted something with a little more kick. Yet, despite the hilarity of cast performances, particularly from Daisy Buzzoni’s hearty landlady turned stand-up comedienne, the play is not without it’s depth and darkness, and looks to draw upon the absurdity of human experience when faced with the threat of real civil strife. It’s just that the hysteria is often pretty hysterical, too.

The George and Dragon promises “pints and pandemics” at the Burton Taylor Studio during 4th Week.