Tag: Alastair Coomer

How to eat your muffins with aplomb

In ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, written by Oscar Wilde in 1899, it is the fresh directness of the set, and the articulate and unequivocal performances of the cast – in their bustles, snakeskin suits and all – that make it sing with a mix of cynicism, middle-finger-to-society chutzpah and sheer joy.

Health bills clean and filthy

‘Nye’ is about parliamentary fights and the helplessness of being on call at a parent’s deathbed. It offers one of the deepest understandings of a death scene you may experience on a live stage, and interpretations of iconic figures such as Bevan, Churchill and Chamberlain to knock your socks off.

Ode to a city of kites and crows

FILM REVIEW: CORIOLANUS. THE UNCOMFORTABLE MYTH which sees a greatly loved hero get vilified and banished with the ebbs and flows of societal energies is one of the streams of narrative that infuses Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. But like his works of the ilk of King Lear, there is so […]

Original sin; utter hubris

FILM REVIEW: FRANKENSTEIN. This review is premised on the version of the work with Jonny Lee Miller as the creature. A man makes a living creature by pulling together alchemical possibilities and graveyard detritus sewn together with a crude hand. And thus starts one of the western world’s […]

A tale of monsters and broken men

FILM REVIEW: FRANKENSTEIN. This review is premised on the version of the work with Benedict Cumberbatch as the creature. What is it that gives us humanity? Nay, that gives us life? The stuff that distinguishes life from death is the substance of the 1817 prototype gothic horror novel […]