Variety is a form of entertainment most usually seen on Saturday night television these days, but Wonderville is an attempt to bring it back into the West End. It's mostly a magic and illusion show, with a hefty slice of comedy, a bit of song and dance, and a speciality act thrown in for good measure.
As this review goes live on the internet – an invisible medium even more pervasive than coronavirus – we’ve just enjoyed All Hallow’s Eve with not only a Blue Moon but October’s Hunter’s Moon, too, gazing down upon us from the constellation of Taurus, while today is All Souls’ Day, when the spirits of the dead are abroad and life is celebrated and decorated with skulls and skeletons.
Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God covers every angsty young woman’s favourite subjects. Witchcraft, heavy metal, viscera, and hatred. It’s a book in the grand tradition of Kathy Acker and women surrealists everywhere, dancing through space and time into different dimensions.
Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman is a powerful invitation to rethink, to doubt and to engage. Beginning among the Diggers’ tilled earth in 1649 and the eco-socialist "watermelon" juices that soil still stirs, the book makes an urgent argument for recognising our uneasy intimacy with the nonhuman.
The man called Piranesi lives in a House (he likes Capital Letters, and he tells the story). This House consists of an endless labyrinth, like “an infinite series of classical buildings knitted together”. Each of its Halls measures “approximately 200 metres in length and 120 metres wide” (pretty much the Golden Ratio of classical art and architecture). Alcoves and niches in each Hall contain a multitude of symbolic Statues that resemble Baroque tableaux of ancient myths.
It hasn’t been an easy ride for Josh Boone’s New Mutants. Delayed production, reshoots, the acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney, Covid-19, and accusations of whitewashing, have all contributed to it being dubbed a ‘cursed’ film.
Fate: commonly understood to mean the opposite of chance or, more narrowly speaking, a theological concept. Often synonymous with predetermination – an idea which might be used to justify a set of unfortunate or fortuitous events, whether you are religious or not – it gives a shape for Jorge Consiglio’s novel Tres Monedas. A poet and an academic, Consiglio wrote this novel over the course of a ‘single scorching summer’ in his hometown of Buenos Aires. It is a book that moves toward a vista of overlapping concepts, saturated by the desire to transcend the rigidity of circumstance.
It’s taken over 18 years for Artemis Fowl to reach the big screen, with Miramax originally buying the rights in 2001. Finally, Disney have brought the world’s youngest criminal mastermind to life, but was it worth the wait? Well, the fact it’s appearing on streaming service Disney+ rather than waiting for a cinematic release probably answers that question.
The world might have changed drastically in the wake of Covid-19, but thankfully those hyperactive, candy-coloured Trolls haven’t. Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake are back as the delightful odd-couple, Poppy and Branch, for round two of pop-infused peppy animated adventure in the land of felt and feelings, where music can solve a myriad of problems.
The latest in Sadler’s Wells’ Digital Stage programme – an impressively assembled online offering to keep audiences entertained during the shutdown – is balletLORENT’s family-friendly dance-theatre production Rumpelstiltskin. It was streamed as a "matinee" on Friday afternoon, and is available to watch for free on