Author refused UK visa to see refugee memoir adapted for stage
Ibrahima Balde, a Guinean who lives in Spain, has been told that the government is not satisfied he would return after the first night of Little Brother, which begins a run at Jermyn Street Theatre in central London next week.
Balde's memoir, Little Brother: An Odyssey to Europe, tells the story of his search along migrant routes of the Sahara for his sibling Alhassane, who ran away from school in Guinea, west Africa, to earn money to support their family.
The memoir has been adapted for the stage by
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The Guardian
a minute ago
- The Guardian
‘An undercurrent of impenetrable sadness': the tragic TV debut of Katie Price and Peter Andre's daughter
There is something slightly sweet about the new ITV2 show The Princess Diaries. It is a reality series about a girl nearing 18, trying to figure out what she wants her life to look like. Which is perfectly relatable. The girl is awkward and self-conscious, doing her best to navigate a world more complicated than she expected. Except the subject of The Princess Diaries is Princess Andre, AKA Princess Tiaamii Crystal Esther Andre, AKA the daughter of Peter Andre and Katie Price. This immediately makes things less relatable, because Princess has grown up under the spotlight, with the tabloid furore that her parents delight in whipping up on a daily basis. Would you be that well adjusted if newspapers flew drones over your bankrupt mother's mansion to show the world how unkempt her garden was? Or if your dad found himself in the middle of a cultural appropriation storm after wearing a dreadlock wig for a film called Jafaican? Or if one of your middle names was Tiaamii? This is the bind The Princess Diaries finds itself in. On the one hand, Princess desperately wants to appear as a regular teenage girl. But on the other, there is a distinct possibility that the show was made to capitalise on all the rubberneckers who want to see what sort of trouble Price has got herself into now. If you are one of those hoping for news of Price's exploits, you are going to come away disappointed. Because the main takeaway of The Princess Diaries is how relentlessly boring Princess's life is. She is a 17-year-old girl whose job involves being an influencer. This means that her entire life is spent on her phone. She has 'content days', when she roams about, attempting to look carefree, in enough outfits to eke out a month's worth of Instagram posts. She makes vague plans to launch her own beauty line, which at this stage means looking at pictures of other people's beauty lines. She intermittently screws up her nose because a middle-aged man has DMd her a grotty message about her feet. It is excruciatingly monotonous. Princess lives with Peter Andre and his second wife. Andre and Price do not get along. So while we do get glimpses of Price, they are via video chats (of which we get only the audio, not least because Price is undressed in some of them) and descriptions (such as when Princess reveals that Price got the date of her birthday wrong). There is an undercurrent of impenetrable sadness. A little like the recent Alec Baldwin reality show, in which the scrappily chaotic idealism of his home life kept dropping away in segments where he addressed the accident when he shot and killed his cinematographer, there is a deep vein of melancholy to The Princess Diaries. For every film premiere and Ibiza fashion show, there is an introspective cutaway where Princess tells everyone how unhappy her childhood was, how she was picked on at school, and the feelings of self-hatred she experienced. But as soon as these bubble up, they are brushed away, because, look, a dog has just dribbled sausage grease on her new Louis Vuitton flip-flops! Everything's fine again, promise! It was inevitable that Princess Andre would get her own show. After all, as she points out, reality TV is all she has known since she was born. She has been sucked along in the undercurrent of her parents' careers – she has either appeared in or been adjacent to Katie & Peter: The Baby Diaries, Katie & Peter: Unleashed, Katie & Peter: Down Under, Katie & Peter: Stateside, Peter Andre: Going It Alone, Peter Andre: The Next Chapter, Katie Price's Mucky Mansion, Peter Andre: My Life and Katie Price: My Crazy Life. However, on the basis of this series, it might have been worth waiting until Princess got her own gig. She is clearly smart and self-aware, and far better adjusted than you might expect. One day, when she has managed to clear the orbit of her ridiculous childhood, Princess Andre will be able to look back and put everything she has experienced into perspective. That day has yet to come. Instead, we have four hours of a 17-year-old girl looking at a phone. Surely that is too much reality for anyone. All episodes are available to stream on ITVX now.
The Sun
a minute ago
- The Sun
Cooking with the Stars viewers rage ‘that's not cooking!' as the slam ITV show's latest challenge
COOKING With The Stars viewers fumed 'that's not cooking!' as they hit out at the latest challenge. The ITV show sees eight celebrities paired with a professional chef who acts as their mentor. 4 4 4 Fans were left very unimpressed by episode three's opening challenge. The six remaining stars cooked Roast Beef and Yorkshire Puddings - by using an air fryer. One viewer wrote on X: "Banging stuff in an air fryer isn't cooking.#cookingwiththestars." Another added: "Bring on the battle of the Air fryers #CookingWithTheStars." A third penned: "F*****g air frying? Are you joking." While a fourth chimed in: "Nope, #cookingwiththestars I don't think roast beef & Yorkshire pudding is an air fryer thing. "How are you going to get a decent gravy?" After further challenges, Hugh Dennis and Shaun Wright-Phillips ended up in the bottom two. Outnumbered star Hugh, 63, was eliminated after receiving less votes from the judges. Last week, Love Island legend Ekin-Su Cülcüloğlu faced author and interiors expert Kelly Hoppen when they both landed in the bottom two. Cooking with the Stars viewers want to vomit as Ekin-Su and Kelly Hoppen serve up 'dog poo' The women were tasked with creating chocolate eclairs alongside a strawberry and champagne granita, as their fellow celebrities and professionals watched on. They only had 50 minutes to create their dishes and seemed like disaster from the outset. However, both stars failed to gradually add the eggs for the choux pastry which would go on to make the body of the chocolate eclairs. "That was like choosing between dog s*** and cat sick," wrote one fan on X, Another added: "Jesus those 'eclairs' are the worst thing I've ever seen." A third commented: "I don't envy the chefs having to deal with those eclairs...." Love Island star Ekin-Su became the second celeb eliminated from the competition. 4
Times
an hour ago
- Times
‘His beauty was a curse' — Terence Stamp's five best films
Terence Stamp, who died on Sunday, was a gorgeous and gifted acting anomaly. His professional prowess was somehow lived backwards, with his best movies and his strongest roles arriving, belatedly, in his knockout autumnal years, while the glossy burst of stardom that defined his early career was often just that — glossy, admittedly beguiling, yet always hinting at a maturation that had yet to come. His beauty, of course, was the curse. He tended, early on, to be shot by enthusiastic directors in long glacial close-ups, where cameras and audiences alike could swoon before that famous blue pellucid gaze (one that was making waves off screen too as a 'Swinging Sixties' icon, arm in arm with Jean Shrimpton). When he eventually spoke, sometimes haltingly, stiffly, from the back of his throat, still only in his early twenties (was he nervous? Shy?), it seemed as if he was breaking that magic. In Billy Budd, in 1962, his choice of a broad Somerset accent was surprising, but also oddly distracting. He was better, seemingly calmer and more assured, when paired with the great beauties, and so bounced sweetly, joker-style, off Monica Vitti in Modesty Blaise in 1966. And he found his perfect screen partner in Julie Christie in 1967's Far From the Madding Crowd. Their standout scene foregrounds delicate comedic timing when her dress is snagged on his spur and he stares deeply into her eyes and cheekily purrs, 'I'll unfasten you in no time!' • Read more film reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews When the work famously dried up for Stamp at the end of the 1960s and he retreated from cinema he said, 'It was a mystery to me. I was in my prime.' And yet this wasn't true. His prime began in 1994, at the age of 56, when he donned a wig and a frock to play the trans cabaret performer Bernadette in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. He was utterly commanding in the role, and heartbreaking too, hiding a lifetime of grief beneath lipstick and one-liners. He was still, of course, striking looking, but the wrinkles, the thinning hair and the heavier, harsher delivery allowed him access to instant gravitas, as if he had returned from the professional wilderness with supercharged performance powers. He was remarkable too in The Limey, playing a Cockney criminal in LA, out to avenge his daughter's murder. In that film's endlessly re-watchable and effortlessly iconic moment, after eliminating some enemy heavies, Stamp's antihero emerges bloodied from a warehouse and yells aloud to anyone in the vicinity associated with his mobster nemesis, 'You tell him, you tell him I'm coming. I'm f***ing coming!' It played like a clarion call, or an announcement to anyone who had underestimated a once forgotten Swinging Sixties poster boy. Tell them he's coming! And he did, and was always interesting, always the character that captivated on screen, in everything from Bowfinger to Full Frontal, The Adjustment Bureau, Song for Marion and Big Eyes. A gifted and richly rewarding performer, till the end. This is the one, the role. Stamp had already proven his 'returning' chops on Priscilla, yet here he adds layers and depth, wit and humour. As a criminal from London over to wreak havoc in LA, he is funny and self-deprecating, even in constant deadpan. And he's gentle in places too, and always impeccably cool. But mostly he's scary, and brilliantly so. He somehow, repeatedly, turns the simple introductory statement 'My name is Wilson' into a terrifying threat. This is Stamp at his most expressive, and yet controlled, and with nothing to lose. He's come back, effectively, from the professional doldrums, and plays the role of trans cabaret performer Bernadette in defiant deadpan throughout, even when she's kneeing a local bigot in the crotch and quipping, 'Now you're f***ed!' Stamp played Superman's nemesis, General Zod, as a leather-clad intergalactic aristocrat. And yet the role really works because Stamp's tougher, angrier, east London accent keeps bursting out during key scenes. Such as, 'Come to me, Superman! If you day-are!' This is later-era Stamp at his most assured. He plays the grumpy, maudlin husband of a woman dying from cancer. And yet, midway through the film, he begins to crack open emotionally by singing his pain. Have hankies for the scene where he launches, unaccompanied, into The Most Beautiful Girl. Leave it to Ken Loach to pull the most moving and impactful performance out of Stamp's early career. He plays Dave, the dream boyfriend to luckless single mum heroine Joy (Carol White). He's also, alas, an ex-criminal, and so when the law catches up to him he must remain, in Joy's heart (and in the hearts of cinema-goers everywhere), an unattainable phantasm. Stamp here also does a deeply lovely rendition of the Joan Baez song Colours.
