Paul Mescal and Gracie Abrams aura cleansing at NYC Downlow: How the celebs do Glastonbury
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
3 hours ago
- Telegraph
Lily Allen proves any naysayers wrong with her biggest stage triumph yet
The irreverent pop star who has valiantly ventured into acting, to praise – but also sniffs of disapproval – Lily Allen's third project with director Matthew Dunster is her toughest gig yet, even though it is staged in Bath Theatre Royal's 120-seat studio. Following her West End shows 2:22 A Ghost Story and The Pillowman, she tackles the lead in Ibsen's masterpiece Hedda Gabler (1891), updated by Dunster. She stars as its titular vengefully bored 'trapped housewife' Hedda, a woman destructively indifferent to her flailing academic husband, and to the life and work of a brighter old flame, now his rival. It proves her biggest wow to date. From the moment she enters, pristine in chic blue pyjamas, hair scraped back, eyes glinting, to the devastating climax, passing through attitudes of comic brusqueness, mischief, viciousness and turmoil, she transfixes. The drawback of the production, in fact, is that, if anything, she eclipses those around her, including Ciarán Owens as her hapless hubby George and rising star Tom Austen as the visionary but vulnerable rival Jasper, a recovering alcoholic. So much is relayed through her icy gaze, her studied blankness, her surreptitious smile – that she often seems to be on a different plane of naturalism to everyone else. The cast could usefully follow her sometimes almost televisual lead (Imogen Stubbs as a clucking aunt is particularly fluttery). But everyone around Hedda is, in a way, doomed to seem extraneous and overblown. The anti-heroine's worldview – which we come to understand even if it perturbs us – is of the futility of pleasantries, and bourgeois creature comforts; she is in search of some elusive meaning. Her disgust at those who try to placate and animate her is a form of displaced self-hatred, too. Newly hitched, she has followed the path of least resistance to a place of deadly ennui. Dunster doesn't stint on modishness. Placing the action in a suffocating, nominally desirable living room lined by white curtains and wood panels (the inset doors of which are opened, distractingly, by unseen hands), the characters here consult mobiles, listen to pop (The Streets, saliently), and, in Allen's case, vape. The crucial manuscript of Jasper's masterwork that falls into her pitiless hands is now a laptop. It's a bit de trop to have her demanding a Tesla as a conjugal right, but the point is well made that, refusing to be a career woman but also rejecting old-school motherhood too (Hedda horrifically pummels her abdomen), she expresses a contemporary feminist nihilism; and is cryingly alone. Fans may enjoy discerning art meets life parallels, which seem to inform every canny theatre choice Allen makes. Besides the diva-ish behaviour, there are daddy issues (Hedda's late father was a record industry exec ruined by the advent of streaming). And aside from her own two marriage breakdowns, Allen has recently made controversial comments about the challenges of motherhood, saying it 'ruined' her career. Once again, she seems to be using creativity to explore her own experiences, and inner demons – and opening it all up to us – but the revelation is that the result works on its own terms too. Simply put, you need never have heard of Lily Allen to be impressed by this. Until Aug 23;
Daily Mail
10 hours ago
- Daily Mail
PATRICK MARMION reviews Lily Allen's Hedda in Bath: Singer just can't inject much empathy into this malignant narcissist
A GREAT actor can make us care about almost anybody. But Lily Allen, in her latest stage venture at Bath's tiny Ustinov Studio, has to cope with one of the dodgiest characters in all of drama. We are talking about Hedda Gabler, the alpha-narcissist creation of 19th-century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Hedda is an entitled madam who, in Matthew Dunster's modernised version, has the airs and graces of a spoilt supermodel. Fitted out with a modern backstory – Hedda is now the daughter of a late musician allegedly swindled by Spotify, and she moans that she 'misses her daddy and having it all' – she's also being dumped into 'middle class suburban poverty' by marrying a sweet but dull professor of something very obscure. Set in the West Country (or 'f***ing Somerset' as one character curses), we are in the realms of deep self-absorption. Hedda's ex, Jasper (Tom Austen, of Grantchester), returns, weeping that he doesn't want to be his partner's version of himself, but lacks the guts to be his own version of himself. And if you can unravel that, this show may well be for you. Hedda's thickly-bearded husband George (Ciaran Owens) is unsettlingly reminiscent of Allen's recently ditched real-life ex-husband David Harbour (Stranger Things). The difference is that George has had a personality bypass and she is without motivation for marrying this impecunious deadbeat who's pathetically jealous of her ex. Nor is it clear why George is marrying Hedda — a woman who's very touchy, but not at all feely (around him at any rate). And yet, even though she belittles and assaults an old friend, and urges her ex to shoot himself, we never really fear what Allen's Hedda is capable of. Other actors get more traction out of Dunster's hyper-realistic dialogue, rooted in tortured inertia. Austen oozes rizz as the chronically intense Jasper, who is an expert on the future (albeit not his own). Julia Chan as his new love (and Hedda's old friend), Taya, is an alarmingly vulnerable addict on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Imogen Stubbs is emotionally urgent as a gushy aunt, while Brendan Coyle (Downton's Mr Bates) is a soporifically insouciant MP and sugar daddy to Hedda. Hedda is not without quality, but it is almost entirely without empathy. No actor can survive that. Thankfully, Najla Andrade puts the neurotic swamp in perspective as the bashful Brazilian housekeeper, fearful of everyone's volatile mental state. Anna Fleischle's set design, meanwhile, embodies the play's soullessness, with a minimalist interior that looks like an upmarket funeral parlour with floor to ceiling net curtains. Dunster's production is fully crewed with understudies and clearly hoping for a West End transfer. And Allen's name will surely sell tickets. But where she may get away with playing a motivelessly malignant character in this theatrical boutique, Shaftesbury Avenue will be a steeper test of fan loyalty. Hedda is not without quality, but it is almost entirely without empathy. No actor can survive that.
The Guardian
10 hours ago
- The Guardian
Hedda review – Lily Allen leads a helter-skelter take on Ibsen's tragedy
It is not through any shortcomings of the cast that Matthew Dunster's modern-dress reimagining of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler is so peculiar. Lily Allen is convincingly brittle as the bored newlywed who has just returned from honeymoon with her plodding academic husband, George (Ciarán Owens). His loyal aunt, Julia, is exquisitely played by Imogen Stubbs. Julia Chan shines in the part of Hedda's old school friend, Taya, who has left her controlling husband and is in the throes of a love affair with the alcoholic academic Jasper (Tom Austen, all earnestness here). He is Hedda's former lover who sparks her destructive jealousy, which leads to the play's explosive ending. The setting is a cool, Scandi-style living room with long billowing curtains, beautifully designed by Anna Fleischle. But as well-acted and stylish as this production is, why does it not convince in its story? Perhaps because it seems neither of our time nor of Ibsen's. Dunster's adaptation sticks to original events on the whole and this fidelity jars against the modern context. The playwright's Hedda is a female Shakespearean antihero, of sorts, an arch manipulator who seeks freedom from the confinement of her marriage and position in high society. Allen plays the daughter of a music label mogul brought low rather than a woman of aristocratic lineage. But when stripped of the specific confines of her time, she is less coherent as a character. Her refusal to work, for instance, is harder to understand, so Hedda seems like a spoilt princess rather than a woman trapped by, but also resisting, patriarchy. George does not transpose into this world convincingly either: he is not adoring nor pliant and you wonder what he is doing with a wife as conspicuously unloving as Hedda. There is psychological realism – characters speak as they feel – but the language sounds odd and artificial in this setting: Hedda implores Jasper to make his suicide 'beautiful', as in Ibsen's script, and speaks of her 'disgust' when she is told the bullet that killed him was shot into his bowels. Again, it jars. Dunster, also directing, creates good intensity in some scenes but the pace of events gathers a speed that brings out the melodrama of Ibsen's plot. Allen shows you her character's power and rage more than her vulnerability but you do not feel her sense of narrowing choices, maybe due to the rush of events. It grows fevered, not keeping a pace with the psychology of its characters, and by the end, events come thick and fast, from Jasper's drinking binge to trouble with the police, a visit to another woman's home and his misplaced book manuscript (here on a laptop). Characters' emotions swing in one direction and then another. The play's tragedy rests on Hedda's fear of scandal, after the powerful figure of Brack (Brendan Coyle, an MP rather than a judge and compellingly creepy) blackmails her. It does not quite chime – maybe scandal does not carry the same threat for a woman like Hedda today or perhaps this plot point is just not given enough space to grow in its threat. There is tension in the earlier acts and some taut moments, but it ends up seeming like a domestic thriller rather than a grand tragedy. At Ustinov Studio, Bath, until 23 August
