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      in Movies

      How ‘Rocks’ Made Stars of Its Schoolgirl Cast

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      By casting first-time actors, the film tells a story rarely seen onscreen: what growing up is like for British women of color.LONDON — Bukky Bakray never thought acting was a real possibility for her. So she’s struggling to get her head around winning a BAFTA — the British equivalent of an Oscar — for her first role.“It’s kind of unbelievable,” Bakray, 19, said in a video interview recently, searching for the words to describe her win for playing the titular character in the coming-of-age movie “Rocks.” “I just didn’t expect it at all.”“It still doesn’t really feel real to me,” said Bukky Bakray of winning the Rising Star Award at this year’s BAFTAs.BAFTA, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAt the BAFTA ceremony on April 10, Bakray took home the Rising Star Award and was also nominated in the leading actress category alongside the likes of Frances McDormand for “Nomadland” and Wunmi Mosaku for “His House.”Bakray said, “Sometimes when I look back at the pictures I’m like, ‘Did this actually happen?’”“I just feel really blessed,” she added.“Rocks” — which was the most-nominated film at this year’s BAFTAs — was released in Britain last fall to critical acclaim, and is now streaming on Netflix in the United States. The movie was shot in the summer of 2018, when Bakray was 15 and a student at a school in East London. Like most of the cast, she was discovered through open auditions and workshops at schools and youth clubs in the city.In the film, Bakray plays Olushola Joy Omotoso, known as Rocks, a 15-year-old British-Nigerian girl whose life is upended when her mother, who struggles with her mental health, disappears, leaving only an apology note and some cash. Rocks is left to care for her 7-year-old brother Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu), doing whatever she can to evade an intervention by the social services.“Rocks” is equal parts joyful and heart-rending: an ode to friendship and the beauty of girlhood, but also a deeply affecting exploration of how external forces can threaten the blossoming of those things.For many women who have been educated in London’s public school system, the scenes in Rocks’ East London school will feel deeply familiar and authentic. The girls dance and make up raps, and treat each other with a mix of impertinence and genuine love and care. In the school’s bathroom, we see Rocks’ best friend Sumaya, played by the British-Somali actress Kosar Ali, talk her through using a tampon for the first time.The director, Sarah Gavron, said in an interview that the idea for the film had started to emerge when she was traveling for her 2015 historical drama “Suffragette.” At screenings, she said, she heard young women connecting women’s suffrage to their own lives and concerns, piquing her interest in what contemporary girlhood was like. So she approached the producer Faye Ward with an idea: What if they made a film about girlhood and built it with the girls themselves?Having such an open-ended idea bred collaboration at all levels, Gavron said. “Everybody sort of fed into it because it was a bit like, ‘We don’t have a road map, how are we going to do this?’”The director Sarah Gavron, center, on the set of “Rocks” with, from left, Tawheda Begum, Afi Okaidja, Kosar Ali and Bukky Bakray.Charlotte Croft/AltitudeThe research process was kicked off by Lucy Pardee, the film’s casting director, who has built a reputation for discovering talent and who also won a BAFTA for her work on “Rocks.” She spent time sitting at the back of classrooms trying to glean the rhythms of teenagers’ lives, she said in an interview. It was during this phase that Gavron and Pardee first met Bakray.“We didn’t want to do that thing that lots of adults do, which is project our own memories and sense of what being a teenager was onto modern teenagers,” Pardee said in a video interview. “We wanted to get a sense of what their dramas were, what their lives were.”Open auditions were held to find the cast (Pardee and her associate Jessica Straker saw about 1,300 girls), while workshops were run with teenagers to help build the world and characters around the story that Theresa Ikoko, a British-Nigerian playwright, and Claire Wilson, a television writer, had in mind. Out of those processes, the main cast emerged.While the young actors don’t play themselves in “Rocks,” they were able to feed into the development of the characters. Ikoko brought the scene breakdowns to the actors and asked them to complete exercises, such as writing a diary for their character and deciding what their character’s favorite songs were. That information then informed the script.The actors’ essence was also a big part of the writing process, Ikoko said in an interview. She recalled speaking to Anastasia Dymitrow, who plays a character called Sabina, about her pride in identifying as Polish Gypsy. The comment was ultimately included in the film, when Dymitrow’s character talks about her grandparents and their imprisonment in Auschwitz.Referring to the process, Bakray said, “I’d never felt listened to like that before in my life,” recalling that a stray comment she had made about how she used to ritually buy a cake after school with a friend had ended up in a draft of the script. “It made you feel like you had something of substance to say,” she added.During the script’s development process, the actors’ own lives and backgrounds became part of their characters’ stories.Altitude“Rocks” is unusual even among Black British films, which are more likely to follow the narratives of young Black men.For many British women of color, the opportunity to see their lives and experiences reflected so accurately in film is extremely rare. Tobi Oredein, the founder of Black Ballad, an online platform for Black British women, wrote last year, “For the first time in my life, I saw a girl who looked similar to me and my friends as we ran around secondary school trying to figure friendships, education and life at large.”Ikoko — who hadn’t co-written a film before “Rocks” — credited Gavron and Ward for getting the movie made.“I wouldn’t have been able to make this film if I said ‘I want to make a film about being a young girl from Hackney,’” Ikoko said.“There needed to be a first, and the way the industry is set up, firsts have to happen when people like Sarah and Faye use their power and their privilege and share that and open those doors,” she added.When it came to shooting, the filmmakers were aware of practices or “invisible” training that could make it easier for the first-time actors. During preparation workshops, the girls were filmed so that they would become accustomed to being on camera, and the movie was shot in chronological order to help them to get into the story.There were a lot of scenes that required vulnerability, and the production gave the cast space to try and display those emotions.Bakray said that putting such feelings out in the open was tough. “Pre-shooting, we had a lot of conversations, because they were getting young women that were from backgrounds where we weren’t necessarily emotionally available, that’s not how we grew up,” she said.“We grew up to be strong,” she addedBakray likened her time on the film to an education. “‘Rocks’ was a university,” she said. “They weren’t just preparing us to act for ‘Rocks,’ but they were preparing us to act for the foreseeable.”For many British women of color, “Rocks” offered an extremely rare opportunity to see their lives and experiences reflected accurately in film.AltitudeThree years after “Rocks” was filmed, members of the production team are still taking an active interest in the careers of the young actors they helped put onscreen.Bakray, who spoke from Birmingham, where she is currently filming her next project, said she had work through the end of the year. She said she planned to go to drama school and has auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.“I feel like kids are sponges,” she said. “And these guys caught me at my prime sponge phase.” More

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      in Theater

      'Living Newspaper' at the Royal Court Theater Stirs Up Stories of Our Time

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      Tired of reading the headlines? You can watch artistic interpretations of the stories of our era by trailing actors in a Living Newspaper production, section by section.LONDON — Have you had enough of wading through newsprint or scrolling online? The Royal Court Theater has a bracing online alternative that refracts current events through a vibrant and eclectic array of plays that give many of today’s hot-button topics a piquant spin.The self-evident inspiration for “Living Newspaper” is the project of the same name from Depression-era America, a federally funded response to the social concerns of the day that had its origins in the Russian Revolution and saw art as an agency for change.That immediacy tallies with the history of engagement at the Court, a theater that prides itself on taking the temperature of the times. Not for nothing is one of the makeshift spaces adapted for this collection of plays referred to as the Weather Room. (The idea was to reconfigure the Court so that its spaces, onstage or off, approximated the sections of a newspaper.)Kayla Meikle in the solo play “And Now, the Weather,” written by Nina Segal. Helen MurrayAnd what, you might ask, is the forecast? “Unpredictability, volatility and destruction,” announces the actress Kayla Meikle in a solo play by Nina Segal, her reply hinting at a sense of uncertainty, or worse, common to much of the writing here. Its tone cheerful, then chilling, Segal’s play runs less than six minutes and forms part of Edition 5 of an ambitious seven-part venture. The Court is due to reopen to the public in June.The playhouse in Sloane Square, long devoted to new writing, has put the pandemic to culturally productive use. At a time when theater professionals have been reeling from an absence of work, the Living Newspaper has employed over 300 freelancers, two-thirds of them writers and actors. The first four “editions” are no longer available, but Editions 5 and 6 are, with the final one to be available beginning Monday for two weeks. That one will be devoted to writers ages 14 to 21.How can a building work as a newspaper? Surprisingly easily. We experience the stories in different physical places much as we might flick through the news pages. Each “edition” comes with an obituary and advice “pages,” for instance, into which are slotted plays to match. The front page tends to be reserved for a larger-scale piece with music to get the proceedings off to a rousing start.The result has allowed as varied a range of expression as you could imagine, sometimes cheeky and satirical, just as often pointed and polemical. (The Living Newspaper of legend knew a thing or two about agitprop.) The writers include regulars like E.V. Crowe, whose teasing “Shoe Lady” was at the Court last spring just as London theaters were shut down, and Tim Crouch, a maverick actor-writer whose solo play “Horoscopes” shows him at his most wicked as he eviscerates the 12 signs of the zodiac.Nando Messias outside the Royal Court performing a work by Hester Chillingworth.Helen MurrayThemes of empowerment and self-identity recur, just as various forms of the word “apocalypse” betray a prevailing unease. Normalcy exists only to be upended, not least in Crowe’s “The Tree, the Leg and the Axe,” in which two women (Letty Thomas and Alana Jackson, both terrific) sit cozily in the theater bookstore and exult in being “safe ones” far removed from the virus — no masks for them! — only to reveal a landscape marked by savagery.Several plays embrace the environment of the Court. Maud Dromgoole’s witty “Museum of Agony,” a solo piece delivered with sustained brio by Jackson, folds its simmering anger into a discussion about what to order from the theater bar. Episode 6 features an arresting turn from the performance artist Nando Messias, whose “Mi Casa Es Su Casa,” by Hester Chillingworth, concludes with the elegantly clad Messias rising from the outdoor steps of the Court and entering the playhouse, an invitation for us to follow scrawled on the performer’s back.Any of these themes could fuel an entire season in nonpandemic times, especially at the Court, known for keeping an eye on the mood of the moment. It has a history of plays embracing political tensions (one was Jez Butterworth’s “The Ferryman,” set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland) and of casting a wide geographic net. The theater also introduced the notion of the “angry young man” in 1956 with John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger,” and it courses with palpable emotion here.Tensions in the Middle East fuel several of the plays, like Dalia Taha’s “A Warning,” about planting the seed for revolution in Ramallah in the West Bank. The renewed violence in Northern Ireland propels the bitterly funny “Flicking the Shamrock” by Stacey Gregg. At four minutes, it is beautifully performed by Amanda Coogan and Rachael Merry as women whose preferred forms of sign language (BSL versus ISL) indicate a power-sharing that may not be going according to plan.Cian Binchy in Amy Bethan Evans’s “Neurodiverge-Aunt.” Helen MurrayThe Living Newspaper offers a theatrical potpourri comparable to the Lockdown Plays, which were a highlight of pandemic-era writing and folded in many a recognized name from the Court. As with any newspaper, you can dip in and out, alighting on whichever play catches the eye. I would happily return to Amy Bethan Evans’s cheekily titled “Neurodiverge-Aunt,” in which the wonderful Cian Binchy, who is autistic, ponders the limits of compassion allowed by an advice columnist: “I can’t be your friend because that’s unprofessional.”I laughed out loud at Leo Butler’s “In Memoriam (With Helen Peacock),” in which the actress Nathalie Armin looks back dispassionately at a forbidding list of recent deaths that includes “nuance” and “debate,” which has made it all the way from ancient Greece only to surrender to modern-day trolling.And cheers for Rory Mullarkey’s “This Play,” which describes theater of all styles and structures, including those that have been impossible during the pandemic. At one point, the actress Millicent Wong demands, “Just give me plays again now,” her voice rising. Any devotee of the Court, and its downstairs bar, would surely drink to that.The Living Newspaper continues online through May 9. More

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      in Theater

      Setting the Stage Once Again for Shakespeare, and Live Theater

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      With coronavirus restrictions easing in England, several venues have plans to give classic plays new life.LONDON — Shakespeare is coming back, and I can’t be the only person who has missed him.There are signs of renewed activity at Shakespeare’s Globe, and talk of at least one star-studded production that is, after many delays, scheduled to be performed — can you believe it? — live. This comes after a year of a pandemic that has affected in various ways what has, and hasn’t, been staged, with Shakespeare a particular casualty.Understandably so. Amid a theatrical state of affairs dominated by Zoom and a brief return of live performances of small-scale shows in London that came to an abrupt halt in mid-December, the logistics of Shakespeare have seemed pretty daunting. How do you accommodate a writer whose capacious narratives depend on size, scope and dimension in these strange, socially distanced times? It’s far easier to return to the two-character environs of, say, “Love Letters” or “The Last Five Years,” to name just two titles that could be (and were) easily married to coronavirus rules.A lining of sorts to this bleak cloud came in the form of theatrical archives. With playhouses less inclined to revive Shakespeare, recordings of past productions were made available, giving theater fans a new chance to see or revisit notable performances. Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater were among the venues in Britain that drew upon a sizable back catalog. The Globe reported an increase of nearly 500 percent in its video-on-demand GlobePlayer service.What better chance was there to be reacquainted with the National’s thrilling 2018 production of “Antony and Cleopatra,” which remains among the few productions of this play in my experience with an Antony, in Ralph Fiennes, worthy of his Cleopatra, the sinuous Sophie Okonedo. The R.S.C.’s extensive archive offered up a 2015 “Othello” that, in a first for that company, cast a Black actor, Lucian Msamati, as Iago, opposite Hugh Quarshie as Othello; the result was both riveting and revelatory.The actress Rebecca Hall, right, rehearsing opposite Luisa Omielan for an online presentation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” directed by Hall’s half sister, Jenny Caron Hall.But it wasn’t until the start of this year that theatermakers appeared to find a way to present Shakespeare afresh, even if the same few titles seemed to be under consideration. (My visions of numerous anxious Hamlets subjecting their best “To be or not to be” to the vagaries of YouTube went unrealized.) Sam Tutty, who won an Olivier Award for the West End production of “Dear Evan Hansen,” widened his range in a newly conceived “Romeo and Juliet” that was streamed online in February. In accordance with pandemic-era requirements, the play was filmed with the actors in isolation for the most part, then joined up in the editing. For all its best intentions, this approach just couldn’t deliver the reactive thrill that comes from performers sharing a scene in real time and space.The Royal Shakespeare Company offered the tech-intensive “Dream,” which filleted the multiple plot strands of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into a brief if ambitious exercise in interactivity that was arresting to look at but didn’t reveal much about the oft-revived play itself. The result may have suggested new ways of looking at Shakespeare, but it didn’t help us hear him anew.A direct contrast was the rehearsed reading this past Wednesday of the same play, directed by Jenny Caron Hall, whose father, Peter Hall, founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and was Laurence Olivier’s successor running the National Theater. As might be expected from such a lineage, Jenny Hall’s emphasis on her starry reading of the play via Zoom lay very much with the text, which looked to be in safe hands at a rehearsal I eavesdropped on the previous week: It helped, of course, to have doubling as Titania and Hippolyta the supremely accomplished Rebecca Hall, Jenny Hall’s younger half sister, who brought clarity and a welcome playfulness to some of Shakespeare’s most ravishing verse. (Rebecca Hall played Viola in her father’s final production for the National, a mortality-inflected “Twelfth Night,” in 2011.)Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor as the young lovers in a coming screen version of “Romeo and Juliet.” Behind them is Lucian Msamati as Friar Laurence.Rob YoungsonLooking ahead, audiences have every reason to anticipate a marriage of sumptuous visuals and textual expertise from a new screen version of “Romeo and Juliet.” For this heavily cut rendering of the play, Simon Godwin, the director of the National’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” is refashioning on film a production that had been intended for the National stage. The change means that the leads, Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley, will be joined by a heady lineup that includes Tamsin Greig, Adrian Lester, Deborah Findlay and Msamati — deft Shakespeareans all. (This “Romeo and Juliet” will air on Sky Arts in Britain and PBS in the United States.)As for breathing the same air as the actors, even through a mask, that enticement draws nearer daily. Shakespeare’s Globe has announced a mid-May reopening, albeit with a capacity of up to only 500 in a popular auditorium that can hold as many as 1,700. The coveted standing places that allow the so-called Globe groundlings to jostle one another, and on occasion the actors, will be replaced by seats; a lack of intermissions will further limit unwanted contact. The idea is to return to normal practice, assuming restrictions ease as the summer season continues.Not to be outdone, the West End’s most recent Lear, Ian McKellen, is opening his deliberately age-blind Hamlet in a repertory season that will include “The Cherry Orchard” and is due to start at the Theater Royal Windsor, west of London, on June 21.That’s the very day long earmarked as the end to the social restrictions in England that have been in place to varying degrees since March 2020.Will these productions go ahead, returning actors and spectators alike to the mutual discourse and interplay upon which the theater thrives and that no degree of technical finesse or Zoom-era sophistication can replace? As ever, time will tell. But the London theater seems poised for action, and the readiness, as Shakespeare knew so well, is all. More

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      in Television

      For Eddie Izzard, a ‘99’ Ice Cream and a Waterloo Sunset Are Wondrous Things

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      The star of “Six Minutes to Midnight,” opening Friday, tells why Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, “Great Expectations,” David Bowie and London landmarks hold meaning for her.Eddie Izzard, the British comedian-actor-writer-activist-endurance runner, tends to push herself to the limit. And then some.“I do find — because I had my sort of 10 wilderness years before things took off — that I’ve tried very hard to stay four steps ahead of where I need to be,” Izzard, who is transgender, said in a video interview from London.She performs stand-up in English, French, German and Spanish. She channels 21 characters in a one-person show of Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations.” She runs multiple marathons for charity — clocking 32 in 31 days in January, each followed by a comedy routine, for her Make Humanity Great Again campaign, which supports global unity and tolerance.And still, Izzard found time to co-write, executive produce and star in “Six Minutes to Midnight,” set in 1939, about a teacher at a finishing school in the south of England whose students include the daughters of high-ranking Nazis. The film, out Friday, based on a true story she learned about from a museum curator in Bexhill-on-Sea, where her family is from, was a 10-year process: five to develop the characters and five to get her acting to a level where she could play a lead, alongside stars like Judi Dench.Catch her while you can: Izzard hopes to go into politics in the near future as a member of Parliament for the Labour party, during which she’ll take a hiatus from performing.With her career in high gear, the timing may not be perfect, but she’s not worried. “There’s the critical momentum you need when you’re going in,” she said, “but that will stick around for when you come out.”Izzard channeled her trademark whimsy into her list of 10 cultural essentials — from the fantasy world of the Narnia books to the simple delights of an ice cream cone — which she wrote herself. KATHRYN SHATTUCK1. Edward Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations My mum used to love to listen to classical music. My mum and dad were married in ‘Adan (Aden) in Yemen and Dad talked of her liking to go up onto the roof of a local hotel and play classical music from a gramophone record as the sun set. I think that, amongst others records, she would have played Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, as it was one of the classical albums that was often played in the house. My mum died when I was only 6 years old, but I do remember hearing different albums played at home in the years she was alive, and this one stuck with me from an early age. The fact that he was called Edward, and so was I, didn’t hurt.2. “30 Rock” “30 Rock” is just gold dust. If you have a brain and a sense of humor, just buy the first episode. If it grabs you then just do what I did and download the whole box set. The height of great comedy is to be as intelligent as it is bonkers, and this is it. It’s the kind of sitcom that probably only could exist in a post-“Seinfeld” America, and it probably had to fight just as hard as “Seinfeld” did for its own existence over its first few seasons.3. “David Bowie: Finding Fame” The key thing in this documentary to take home to your brain is that it shows the 10 wilderness years before Bowie took off with Ziggy Stardust in 1972. One needs to know that he was in his first band in 1962, when the Beatles were just taking off. So the stamina that 10 years adrift taught him, and also the few times when it looked like things were taking off but then didn’t, must have informed the rest of his career. I didn’t realize until I watched this that he was at times, in the early days, way off course but he kept regrouping and coming back.4. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” by C.S. Lewis It is a great mystical adventure story to feed the imagination of kids. You have to understand that I’m dyslexic and so read very few books, but I read all of the seven Narnia ones when I was young. I later found out that Lewis was lacing in religion to the series, and this made every feel a little hoodwinked about the whole thing. But later, I realized you could just ignore the symbolism if you wanted to.5. “The Great Escape” A classic war film and one I’ve watched many times. The fact it is based in truth, when a lot of war films in those days were not, makes it even better. I like the film so much, I’ve even watched it in German. As I do my stand-up in German, I was playing Berlin, and I bought the DVD of the film there. If you switch on the German audio track and just have English subtitles, it is a different film. Suddenly they’re all talking German, and so it just becomes a battle between an extreme right regime and people fighting for a return to humanity.6. “Waterloo Sunset” Written by Ray Davies of the Kinks and performed by them. It’s a song that I’ve always thought was accidentally perfect for me as I knew exactly where to see a Waterloo sunset. Waterloo Bridge is my favorite London bridge (we have many). When I was a street performer at Covent Garden, I used to walk across the bridge to perform in front of the Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. And at some point soon after Covid, I will perform inside the Festival Hall. And then I’ll watch another sunset and I will play “Waterloo Sunset” again.7. “Pogles’ Wood” If you search for “Pogles’ Wood: Honey Bees” on YouTube, you can see an episode of this early animated TV series that I was mesmerized by when I was about 5 years old. Normally if you watch back at TV shows that you found entertaining at that age, you will find them tired and old-fashioned in modern times. But “Pogles’ Wood” still holds up with its mixture of animated characters, weirdly beguiling music and short pieces of live-action documentary that showed and taught you things from the real world.8. The “99” Ice Cream What did people do before ice cream? Nobody knows. But the “99” is a staple of the British ice cream world. It is just a basic wafer cone with soft white vanilla ice cream swirled on top of it, but the crowning difference that makes it a thing of genius is a chocolate Flake stuck diagonally (always diagonally) into the side of the vanilla ice cream.Once you buy your “99,” experienced users will have their own eating ritual to perform. Mine is always to push the chocolate Flake with one finger so that you push it down into the center of the cone. Then you close the hole in the ice cream over with your tongue and carry on eating the cone as if it never had a chocolate Flake. Then, when you are down to the final handle part of the cone, you have a heady mixture of wafer, vanilla ice cream and flaky chocolate to feast upon.9. “Great Expectations” Charles Dickens was born on Feb. 7, 1812, and slightly bizarrely, I was born on Feb. 7, 1962, 150 years later. Having never read a great work of literature, I thought I should start with a work of Dickens due to the weird link. I chose “Great Expectations” to firstly read and record it to become an audiobook (which I have now done), and then I thought I should turn it into a solo show. So I commissioned my older brother, Mark, to adapt it down from over 20 hours of book into a 90-minute solo performance.Apart from it being one of Dickens’ more mature books and a great story of Pip, Magwitch, Miss Havisham and Estella, “Great X” is also interesting for me as it starts off down to the South East of London, along the river Thames towards the mouth of the river. This is the Chatham, Kent area of England and was where Dickens grew up, and the book starts here in about the 1820s, which is when he was there as a child. So you hear about “the marshes” direct from his childhood, a place that was barren in the winter and glorious in the summer.10. The Parks of London I do find them a joy. Are they culture? I think so, for they can inspire. Two of our biggest are slap bang in the center of London. They are Hyde Park and Kensington Park. They are essentially one large park, but they have West Carriage Drive running between that separates them. The ancient Serpentine River runs through them, which was long ago turned into a boating lake. Speakers’ Corner, where anyone can pull up and hold forth on any subject, is in the northeast corner of Hyde Park — which is right by the beginning of the old Roman road of Watling Street. I encourage anyone to take a walk from the bottom corner of one park to the top corner of the other park on a warm and sunny day, and it will feel like a walk in the countryside. More

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      in Theater

      Dench, Smith, McKellen, Jacobi: On a Vanishing Era of Theater Greats

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookDench, Smith, McKellen, Jacobi: On a Vanishing Era of Theater GreatsWith British venues closed and years advancing, there’s even less time to see some of the finest actors in their 80s onstage.From left: Maggie Smith attending the 65th Evening Standard Theater Awards at the London Coliseum in November 2019; Derek Jacobi and Judi Dench at the world premiere of “Murder on the Orient Express” in London in November 2017; and Ian McKellen at the Evening Standard awards in 2018.Credit…Ian West/Press Association, via AP Images; Rune Hellestad/Corbis, via Getty Images; Associated PressMarch 11, 2021, 3:53 a.m. ETLONDON — I’ll say this for the pandemic: It’s brought acting talent together — and into your living room — in ways that might not have seemed possible previously. That sense was probably shared by many on a Sunday night in November when Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi, Maggie Smith and Judi Dench participated in a Zoom event titled “One Knight Only,” which was facilitated by another, younger member of Britain’s acting nobility, Kenneth Branagh.There, sharing a single screen, were four octogenarians — each a knight or a dame and a winner of Tony and Olivier Awards and heaven knows how many other accolades. Gathered for an online conversation in aid of charity, the quartet embodied a lifelong devotion to the theater that has found time for screen renown as well. The realization that the pandemic and advancing age have significantly reduced the already scarce opportunities to see these actors onstage again gave the occasion an underlying piquancy.How glorious, then, to clock their interplay, McKellen taking the reins as a raconteur, with a puckish Jacobi, nattily dressed, not far behind. Dench leaned into the screen as if Zoom were some inconvenience keeping her from sharing an actual space with friends, while Smith, notably more reticent, seemed to pull back from her screen. The conversation ranged from life during lockdown (McKellen has been painting) to their attitude toward critics and on to embarrassing onstage moments and roles they might like to play now. “Anything,” Dench said. “I would be pleased to be cast in anything.”All four belong to a tradition in British acting where theater was what you did and anything else was a happy add-on. Smith, alone among them, won the first of two Oscars (for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”) when still in her 30s, while the others took far longer to become known overseas the way they had long been at home. Whether in college and drama school or covering the expanse of Britain’s once-storied network of regional theaters, these players cut their teeth on theater and waited for the screen to recognize the gifts already well known to live audiences. (More than once I have taken a seat aboard a trans-Atlantic flight only to find a smiling McKellen on video, advising me on in-flight protocol.)Whether as Gandalf, the stammering Roman ruler Claudius or the tart-tongued Dowager Countess in “Downton Abbey,” McKellen, Jacobi and Smith, respectively, boast screen roles with which they will forever be associated, especially for those who haven’t seen them chart a course across the classics, and many a new play as well, onstage. (Smith’s Professor McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” movies found her a following among preteens, too.) More people probably saw Dench’s inimitably brisk M during just one of the weekends her seven Bond films were in cinemas (she also made a cameo in an eighth) than saw her onstage during a theater career spanning 60 years and counting.Judi Dench, left, and Maggie Smith in the 1985 film “A Room With a View.”Credit…Cinecon, via Everett CollectionDench and Smith in David Hare’s play “The Breath of Life” in 2002.Credit…Geraint Lewis, via AlamyIan McKellen as Freddie and Derek Jacobi as Stuart in the British television series “Vicious” in 2018.Credit…via ShutterstockThe joy of hearing their reminiscences came with an appreciation of how often these actors’ lives and work have overlapped: Think of them as a continuing Venn diagram from the start. McKellen and Jacobi acted together as students at Cambridge, where McKellen has spoken of harboring a crush on his classmate. The pair reunited a half-century later as the waspish elderly couple in the British sitcom “Vicious.” Jacobi and Smith were integral to the early glory days of the National Theater under Laurence Olivier, and McKellen and Dench played the Macbeths for the Royal Shakespeare Company in a 1976 production that exists on disc and is still spoken of in reverential tones.Dench and Smith, longtime friends, have appeared several times together onscreen, in “Tea With Mussolini” and “A Room with a View” among other titles, and in 2002 made up the entire cast of the David Hare play “The Breath of Life.”Surely, there are plenty of younger actors who are no less committed to the stage, and as we saw at this year’s Golden Globe awards, there’s a direct path in Britain from theater training to screen acclaim. Jude Law is a star who loves the theater, as are Benedict Cumberbatch (TV’s “Sherlock”) and George Mackay (the fast-ascending leading man from “1917”).The difference has to do with career paths that no longer require, or even suggest, the lengthy apprenticeship in Britain’s flagship subsidized theaters — the RSC and the National — that gave these senior practitioners an established perch early on. An actor nowadays may do a play or two only to be siphoned away to TV and film. Some return a fair amount (Matt Smith, a former and popular Doctor Who, is one example), whereas others vanish from in-person view: When’s the last time you could see Colin Firth in a play? Not since 1999, when he starred in Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain” at the Donmar Warehouse here.From left, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Eileen Atkins and Judi Dench in “Tea With the Dames,” a 2018 documentary directed by Roger Michell.Credit…Mark Johnson/IFC FilmsIan McKellen in his one-man show “Ian McKellen on Stage: With Tolkien, Shakespeare, Others … and You” in New York in 2019.Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBy contrast, McKellen even now is visibly rejuvenated whenever he takes to the boards. In 2019, he toured a physically demanding one-man show the length and breadth of Britain (and for one night in New York) to mark his 80th birthday, and he has begun work on an age-inappropriate stage production of “Hamlet” that was put on hold by the coronavirus. Attending a Sunday matinee of the solo show, I was especially moved by his presence directly afterward in the lobby of the theater. Energy undimmed, he seemed ready to engage his public in chat well into the night.That same year found Smith onstage for the first time in 12 years not in the more-anticipated realms, perhaps, of Wilde or Coward but going it alone as Goebbels’s secretary, Brunhilde Pomsel, in “A German Life,” a bravura solo performance that by rights should travel to New York. (The plan now is to adapt the play into a film.) Dench has spoken candidly of her waning eyesight due to macular degeneration and her desire to nonetheless carry on acting. How exciting it would be to see her once again on a London stage, perhaps as the agelessly witty and worldly grandmother in “A Little Night Music,” a musical in which she once played that same character’s daughter, Desiree.Dench and Smith were part of a separate, scarcely less distinguished quartet when they joined Eileen Atkins and Joan Plowright in “Tea With the Dames” (called “Nothing Like a Dame” in Britain), a lovely documentary that was aired in the United States in 2018 and lets the camera roll as the four great ladies of the stage take stock, gossip and reflect. To see this generation of talent in any iteration is to applaud their longevity while pausing to note the inevitable passing of a collective kinship with the stage that will live on well after it’s no longer possible to enjoy their talents in person.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      BAFTA Nominations: ‘Nomadland’ and ‘Rocks’ Lead Diverse List

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Nomadland’ and ‘Rocks’ Lead Diverse BAFTA NominationsBut the nominees include many independent films, after BAFTA overhauled its voting processes to rectify all-white, all-male shortlists.Frances McDormand in “Nomadland,” which won the award for best motion picture, drama, at the Golden Globes in February.Credit…Courtesy Of Searchlight Pictures/Searchlight Pictures, via Associated PressMarch 9, 2021Updated 12:56 p.m. ETLONDON — “Nomadland,” Chloé Zhao’s drama about a middle-aged woman who travels across the United States in a van seeking itinerant work, scored the biggest number of high-profile nominations for this year’s EE British Academy Film Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars.On Tuesday, the film, which stars Frances McDormand and won the Golden Globe for best drama in February, picked up seven nominations for the awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs.It will compete for best film against “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” “Promising Young Woman,” “The Father” and “The Mauritanian.”The best-film nominees are almost the same as the titles that competed for best drama at this year’s Golden Globes. (Only “Mank,” David Fincher’s revisiting of “Citizen Kane,” is missing, replaced by “The Mauritanian.”) But in the talent categories for this year’s BAFTAs, the nominees are more diverse than the Golden Globe lists. Many come from low-budget, independent films, such as “Rocks,” a British coming-of-age tale about a Black teenager in London, that also received seven nominations. This appears to be the result of a recent overhaul of BAFTA’s voting rules to increase the diversity of the nominees after recent criticism. Last year, no people of color were nominated in the BAFTAs’ main acting categories, and no women were nominated for best director. Those omissions prompted a social media furor and criticism from the stage at the award ceremony. “I think that we sent a very clear message to people of color that you’re not welcome here,” Joaquin Phoenix said when accepting the best-actor award for his performance in “Joker.”BAFTA required all of its 7,000 voting members to undergo unconscious bias training before voting on this year’s nominees, as well as requiring them to watch a selection of 15 films to stretch the range of titles viewed. Among dozens of other changes to the voting procedures to increase the diversity of the nominees, they were selected for the first time from “longlists” prepared by BAFTA, with the input of specialist juries.In contrast to the male-skewed nominee lists of previous years, four of the best-director nominees announced on Tuesday are women; four of the six nominees in both leading actor categories are people of color. In the best-director category, for example, Chloé Zhao has been nominated for “Nomadland” and will compete against Lee Isaac Chung for “Minari”; Sarah Gavron for “Rocks”; Shannon Murphy for “Babyteeth”; Jasmila Zbanic for “Quo Vadis, Aida?” a retelling of a massacre in the Bosnian War of the 1990s; and Thomas Vinterberg for “Another Round,” a dark comedy about Danish attitudes to alcohol.In the best-actress category, Frances McDormand, the star of “Nomadland,” will compete against Radha Blank for her role in “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” Wunmi Mosaku for the horror film “His House,” and Bukky Bakray, the teenage star of “Rocks.” That list includes fewer recognizable star names than previous years: Rosamund Pike and Andra Day, who won the main actress awards at this year’s Golden Globes, are missing.Pippa Harris, BAFTA’s deputy chair, said in a video interview that the most important change that shaped this year’s nominations was the requirement that voters watch more films than usual, rather than letting them simply see those with the most buzz from other awards or marketing campaigns. “Time and again, people have emailed in, written in, phoned in to say that made a massive difference, and they watched films they would never have come to normally, and found work they absolutely loved,” she said. Movie awards are generally dominated by five or six highly touted films, said Marc Samuelson, the chair of BAFTA’s film committee, in the same interview. “If we’re disrupting that a bit, it’s a good thing,” he added.Some 258 films were submitted for consideration for this year’s awards, and they were watched over 150,000 times on a viewing portal created specifically for voters, he said.This year’s winners will be announced on April 11 at a ceremony in London. Samuelson would not explain how the event will be held, but he said it would conform with Britain’s coronavirus rules. Indoor events are not allowed in England until May 17 at the earliest. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is scheduled next Monday to announce nominations for this year’s Oscars.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Making Black Lives, Not Just Black Deaths, Matter Onstage

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookMaking Black Lives, Not Just Black Deaths, Matter OnstageThe tragedy of racism is only part of the story in two very different plays from London that carry a dimension of meaning not usually seen in this country.Richard Blackwood in “Typical,” about a man who died while in police custody after a night out.Credit…Franklyn RogersPublished More

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      How Britain Is Reacting to ‘It’s a Sin’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Britain Is Reacting to ‘It’s a Sin’The show, which aired last month in the U.K., has broken a viewing record and revived conversations about how the country handled the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.From left, Omari Douglas, Lydia West, David Carlyle, Calum Scott Howells and Nathaniel Curtis in “It’s a Sin.”Credit… Ben Blackall/HBO MaxFeb. 22, 2021Updated 12:39 p.m. ETLONDON — In what may be a perfect formula for helping a well-made TV show go viral, all five episodes of “It’s a Sin” arrived on a British streaming service in late January, on the Friday before a snowy weekend, during a national lockdown.Since becoming available on HBO Max on Thursday, viewers in the U.S. have been binge watching the show, but in Britain, the show has dominated national conversations over recent weeks.The drama, created by Russell T Davies, tells the story of a group of friends navigating gay life in 1980s London, as AIDS moves from a whispered American illness to a defining aspect of their young lives. Episodes aired weekly on television on Channel 4, and the show broke records for the channel’s accompanying streaming service, with 16 million streams.Below is a roundup of how people in Britain have been reacting to “It’s a Sin,” including sharing their own experiences of the AIDS crisis, improving understanding of the H.I.V. treatments available today and lamenting the epidemic’s absence from school curriculums. This piece contains some spoilers.A critical successDavies has had a long and celebrated career in British television, including the relaunch of “Doctor Who” and making other hit L.G.B.T.Q. shows like “Queer as Folk” and “Cucumber.”“It’s a Sin” earned numerous five star reviews from British critics, along with praise for Davies’s writing. In The Telegraph, Anita Singh noted that he makes viewers “care about these characters from the first minute we see them,” adding that “as in so much of his work, he switches seamlessly between tragedy and humor.”In the show, activists stage a “die in” in London to protest the government’s handling of the AIDS crisis.Credit…Ben Blackall/HBO MaxWriting in The Times of London, Hugo Rifkind said, “It is a drama that could only have been made once stories of gay love and gay lives had become an uncontroversial fixture of mainstream popular culture, and it’s obviously thanks in large part to Davies that they have.”There was also praise for the actors’ performances, and how relatable many of the characters felt. In the TV magazine Radio Times, David Craig saw himself in multiple characters.“I remember feeling the same timidity as Colin (Callum Scott Howells) when I first attempted to explore my sexuality,” he wrote. “Likewise, I can recall making fraught phone calls home while still closeted, unable to discuss that which was truly weighing on my mind, similar to Ritchie (Olly Alexander).”Discussions of H.I.V. today“It’s a Sin” has also sparked a renewed public focus on H.I.V. prevention and treatment. The Terrence Higgins Trust, an H.I.V. and sexual health charity, said it had seen a huge boost in donations through its website, a boost to the number of H.I.V. tests requested at the start of H.I.V. Testing Week and a 30 percent increase in calls to its help line.“It’s genuinely been phenomenal,” Ian Green, the chief executive of the charity, said in a telephone interview. “It’s rekindled the narrative around H.I.V. in the United Kingdom.”On the popular daytime show “This Morning” a couple of weeks ago, Dr. Ranj, one of the show’s contributors, took an H.I.V. test live on air. Nathaniel J. Hall, who plays Donald in “It’s a Sin,” talked about living with H.I.V. on the chat show Lorraine. “I’m on medication and my viral load is what is known as undetectable,” he said. “That means I can’t transmit the virus on, so my partner, Sean, remains H.I.V. negative.”After concerns were raised that the drama could lead to misconceptions around contemporary H.I.V. treatments, Channel 4 now advises viewers after each episode on where to find further information.A celebration of ‘Jills’“It’s a Sin” has also sparked praise for the allies of people affected by the disease: friends who visit people in hospital when their families failed to turn up, march in protest and campaign on behalf of H.I.V.-positive people.The character of Jill (Lydia West) embodies these loyal friends, and is loosely based on a real woman, Jill Nalder, who lived in London in the ’80s and is a friend of Davies. On the show, Nalder plays the character of Jill’s mother. Remembering the period in the Metro newspaper, she wrote: “The L.G.B.T.Q. community ought to be remembered as trailblazers because not only were they fighting for their lives, they were medical guinea pigs — sometimes taking 30 pills a day just to survive.”Jill (Lydia West), right, is a loyal friend to Ritchie (Olly Alexander) throughout the years. Credit… Ben Blackall/HBO Max“If you are a gay man, I hope you have a Jill,” wrote Guy Pewsey in Grazia.However, some viewers have been frustrated at the lack of representation of women affected by AIDS in the show. Lizbeth Farooqi, a fictional Muslim lawyer played by Seyan Sarvan, is one example, but is a relatively minor character. “It infuriates me that a lot of coverage of the show has concentrated Jill as the avatar of good womanhood and being this lovely, soft, supportive person,” Lisa Power, a co-founder of the British L.G.B.T.Q. charity Stonewall, told The Guardian. “I want to hear more about the stroppy lesbian solicitor, who most people have not even managed to read as a lesbian.”Institutionalized stigmaThe drama also touches on legislation around the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Britain at the time. In particular, the consequences of Section 28, a 1988 law introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government banning teaching that promoted the “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.”In one scene, Ash (Nathaniel Curtis) is asked to check a school library’s books to make sure they comply with the law, only to find that they did. “I looked at all the vast halls of literature and culture and science and art,” he said. “There is nothing.”Section 28 was repealed in 2003, but some say its consequences are still being felt in Britain today. Speaking to The Telegraph, Howells, who plays Colin, lamented that the AIDS crisis was not taught in schools. “Why? How? How can this thing happen, literally kill millions of people, and yet they can’t even implement it in education?” he asked.Some people have also drawn parallels between the stigma that gay, lesbian and bisexual people received in the 1980s and the experience of trans people in Britain today. On Twitter Michael Cashman, another of Stonewall’s co-founders, wrote that some lesbian, gay and bisexual people who lived through that period “are now visiting the same stigmatization, misrepresentation and dehumanization of trans people particularly trans women.”The power of ‘La’During the first episode of the show, Ritchie steps in front of a crowd at a house party, dressed in drag, to sing just one syllable: “La!”“Is that it?” someone in the crowd shouts back. His friends react in hysterics. From that point onward, the characters say “La!” as a greeting and a goodbye. Speaking to “It’s a Sin: After Hours,” an accompanying Channel 4 show, Davies said that “La” was a joke among his friends when he was growing up in Swansea.Philip Normal, a London artist, decided to make and sell a T-shirt emblazoned with the word, with proceeds going to the Terrence Higgins Trust. “For me, it really underpins the love the characters have in the show and the respect and love that I’ve experienced in the L.G.B.T. community when I moved to London as a young gay man,” he said in a telephone interview.He said he had now raised £200,000 for the charity, adding: “I didn’t think it was going to take off! I thought I would sell, like five.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More