Women Talking is very powerful. It was adapted by writer-director Sarah Polley from the novel that Miriam Toews, raised a Mennonite in Canada, based on terrible events that took place in an isolated Mennonite community in Bolivia between 2005 and 2009.
Playing our monarch and her husband in The Crown has made actors Claire Foy and Matt Smith into TV drama royalty, so reuniting the pair onstage guarantees a hot ticket. What’s less clear is why Lungs, Duncan Macmillan’s rather thin 2011 play, merits a major revival at the Old Vic.
The enthronement of Claire Foy has been quite a spectacle. Perhaps some of Her Majesty’s mystique has rubbed off, as she is now entering that territory known to few young actors, where you’ll happily pay to see her in anything. Should that policy extend to her newest incarnation?
Steven Soderbergh has always been capable of a big Hollywood moment – Magic Mike, Oceans etc. But much of his filmography consists of curious sideways glances. He’s particularly drawn to the shifting distribution of power between the genders. From sex, lies and videotape to Haywire, by way of Erin Brockovich and Out of Sight, he has rifled through the genres to find fresh and intriguing stories about men and women. It comes up again in Unsane, a sort of horror comedy satire that makes great use of Claire Foy’s vertical rise to bankability. It also, for the record, features a fun cameo from Soderbergh regular Matt Damon as an adviser of domestic security.
Foy plays Sawyer Valentini, whose very name suggests a split personality. She’s a single young woman who has moved from Boston to Pennsylvania to take up an office job and, seemingly, escape her nagging, needy mother. The new job is no panacea. The clients at the end of the phone test her patience and her boss is soon hitting on her. But deeper anxieties assail her. She hooks up with a hot guy on a dating app and, having promised him sex, thrusts him away in disgust.
Distraught, one lunchbreak she drives over to a hospital to talk to someone about her history of being stalked which, she concedes, has brought on bouts of suicidal ideation. Barely is the session over before she has unwittingly signed a form consenting to her forced hospitalisation. When she objects, agggressively, the period of what feels like incarceration is extended from 24 hours to seven days. The creepily long and empty corridors and impassive white-coated staff inevitably evoke One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Sawyer's fellow patients would all seem to be as psychotic as Violet (Juno Temple, pictured above, very different from her wide-eyed turn in Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel), who occupies the next-door bed. But she forms a bond with Nate (Jay Pharaoh), who counsels her to accept that everyone in Highland Creek Behavioral Center is being milked for their insurance money. When that runs out, they will be released. This would be reassuring if Sawyer hadn’t spotted her stalker from Boston wearing a nurse’s uniform and handing out the daily cups of medication. The nurse (Joshua Leonard, pictured below) insists he’s called George, not David Strine as she claims.
The script by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer has no great truck with plausibility. How David/George could have landed this job and fetched up in Sawyer's life is not examined. The plot flirts with the idea that Strine is a figment of her imagination: is she hallucinating a beard, glasses and a lovelorn gaze onto every threatening male? But gradually scales fall from eyes as Sawyer is slipped her mind-bending medication, offering Soderbergh a chance to work up some woozy visuals (incredibly, he shot the whole thing on an iPhone). Then, after Sawyer summons her mother (Amy Irving) to rescue her, more disturbing things start to happen.
This is a robust breakaway for Foy, who has spent two years rei(g)ning it in as Her Majesty. She’s blonde, brittle and not altogether likeable here, and yet connoisseurs of her Queen Elizabeth will recognise her face’s powerful facility for exuding hurt and offence. She gets plenty of practice at that before the latter part of the film moves into new realms and calls for different colours. Unsane stops being a Kafkaesque satire of Big Pharma and the medical insurance racket, and mutates into a horror riff on the psychosis of delusional male sexuality. Perhaps insurers and stalkers are even cut from the same cloth. It’s all a bit bonkers, though nothing if not timely.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Unsane
Beneath the creamy overlay of gowns, crystal chandeliers, palaces, uniformed flunkies and a sumptuous (albeit CGI-enhanced) Royal Yacht, a steely pulse of realpolitik fuels The Crown, returning to Netflix for its much-anticipated second series.
It was a good night for British thespians at the 2016 Golden Globes. The stars of The Night Manager – Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman – all visited the podium to collect awards.
Peter Morgan can't get enough of Her Majesty. Ten years ago he wrote The Queen (with Helen Mirren starring), in 2013 he brought us the stage play The Audience (Dame Helen, again), and now he's written all 10 episodes of this first series of Netflix's royal juggernaut, The Crown.
Wolf Hall divided viewers from the off. It mesmerised many and left a vocal minority cold, for whom apparently - mystifyingly - it has all been a bit dull. The dialogue was too elliptical, the politics tricksy and convoluted (who is this Holy Roman Emperor anyway?), there was a surfeit of men called Thomas and women stitching in bay windows and big dresses.
For weeks and weeks, the BBC has been borrowing Anne Boleyn’s tactic of seduction. Henry VIII was vouchsafed occasional access to his future bride’s breasts, but no more until she was queen. It’s felt rather like that being fed Wolf Hall trailers for the past few weeks: teasing snippets of promised treasure, but there has been no way of knowing precisely what goodies lay in wait under the skirts. Has it been worth the anticipation?
In a word, yes. And for one overpowering reason: Mark Rylance, the complete actor. This is his first return to television in more than a decade. For all his glorious capacity to monster a stage as Johnny Rooster Byron or Richard III, as Thomas Cromwell he travels far in the other direction to play a puppeteer who does little but watch and listen and, above all, think. You can all but watch the cogs whirring, the butter not melting in his mouth as he plots his rise from the bottom of the heap. Television drama has rarely supplied such a hypnotic spectacle.
Where occasion demands Rylance's Cromwell can show a different side: he swears at ambassadors, is stern with Protestants, plays the loving paterfamilias at home and, in the showdown held back until the climax of the episode, even boldly faces down Damian Lewis’s Henry VIII. But above all he is a prowling, dead-eyed cardsharp. Rylance’s Cromwell is first glimpsed whispering an inaudible legal casuistry into the ear of Jonathan Pryce’s doomed Cardinal Wolsey (pictured). It’s an apt introduction: here is a man who will move mountains behind the arras, out of earshot, in the margins. “Never mind who that is,” said Wolsey. “He’s nobody.”
Some nobody. Wolf Hall reunites Rylance with Peter Kosminsky, who directed him as dodgy dossier fallguy David Kelly in The Government Inspector. Much of Kosminsky's career has been in investigative documentary/drama, shining a torch into the darker places of public policy, and he feels very much at home in the world of Tudor power plays. In his royal romantics he has two more actors who know his meticulous methodology from previous collaborations: Damian Lewis was in Warriors (1999) and Claire Foy (pictured below) in The Promise (2011). For Kosminsky, emotional truth rises out of the facts. So when their set-to scenes with Cromwell came along, both felt rooted in actuality: here, you sense, are characters who, unlike us, haven’t a clue what’s going to happen next. So there’s everything to play for.
The plot, for those who have somehow dodged Mantel and countless other versions of the birth of the Church of England, began with the downfall of Wolsey. The cardinal had failed to secure a papal annulment of the king’s first marriage. Cromwell thus entered his service at the wrong moment – even the house musician had jumped ship to play for Anne Boleyn. Things were no better at home: the plague claimed his wife (Natasha Little, a bit modern) and two of his children, rendering him paterfamilias of a much reduced household. And yet he used the patronage of the Cardinal to make himself known – and potentially indispensable - to both Anne and Henry.
There may be other visual inaccuracies, but the only salient one is in the casting of the tall, lean Pryce as the cardinal, referred to sneeringly as the “fat priest”. And yet the lubricious Pryce is a treat. So too are Bernard Hill as the thuggish Duke of Norfolk, Mark Gatiss as waspy cleric Stephen Gardiner, the never fruitier Anton Lesser as Thomas More and Saskia Reeves as Cromwell’s stricken sister-in-law.
As for the script by Peter Straughan, who spun such a fine piece of work with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, there are one or two gauche moments of exposition and you sometimes wish you’d been paying more attention in class when the Sack of Rome came up. But he hops back and forth deftly to weave the threads of court politics and Cromwell’s domestic world, and repositions the first book’s brutal opening, in which the young Cromwell is kicked to a pulp by his blacksmith father, as a flashback. It looks splendid enough too - all braziers and panelling and lashings of burgundy livery. There's only one sign of the times: the king who once displayed his immense wealth at the Field of the Cloth of Gold seems to have a bit of an understaffing issue.
MARK RYLANCE’S BIGGEST HITS ON STAGE AND SCREEN
Bridge of Spies. Spielberg's warm-hearted Cold War thriller is lit up by Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance
Endgame. In Complicite's homage to Beckett, Rylance's Hamm is an animated, self-lacerating lout
Farinelli and the King. A witty and moving new play is a timely reminder of just why art matters
Jerusalem. Rylance is unforgettable as Johnny Rooster Byron in Jez Butterworth’s smash Royal Court hit
The BFG. Rylance lends moments of the sublime to standard issue Spielberg
La Bête. Rylance dazzles in astonishing opening monologue, but this callow play coasts on the performances
Nice Fish. Rylance is waiting for cod-ot in this absurdist West End trifle
Twelfth Night/Richard III. Rylance doubles up as Olivia and the hunchbacked king (pictured above) for Shakespeare's Globe
PLUS ONE TURKEY
Much Ado About Nothing. Rylance Old Vic staging of Shakespeare's romantic comedy with elderly leads gets lost in translation
OVERLEAF: CLAIRE FOY’S CV
The last time James McAvoy played the Scottish king, it was in a scintillating reworking of the play written in the modern idiom by Peter Moffat, for the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told season in 2005. McAvoy was Joe Macbeth, a Glasgow chef passionate about his work, the restaurant kitchen where he worked a fitting place for the play's blood and gore.