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    ‘The Agency’ and ‘Black Doves’: Spy Dramas in Touch With Their Feelings

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    ‘The Agency’ and ‘Black Doves’ are part of a new crop of espionage series whose biggest battles take place within the hearts and minds of their agents.Ukraine and Russia are at war. Political instability and civil war rage in Sudan. Iran is ramping up its nuclear capabilities. The world is basically a mess in “The Agency,” the new espionage series that inundates the viewer with rapidly intersecting story lines set on an increasingly complicated geopolitical playing field.The series, which premiered last week on Paramount+ (with the Showtime tier), is part of a surge in spy shows that also includes “The Day of the Jackal,” on Peacock; “Black Doves,” premiering Dec. 5 on Netflix; and “Slow Horses,” which wrapped up its fourth season on Apple TV+ this fall.True to the genre, these series jet all over the globe (though mostly Europe) and unfold in high-tech command centers and in dark urban alleyways, via thrilling shootouts and furtive meetups. Some operatives pursue sanctioned missions as others go rogue. Multiple cats chase multiple mice, and it’s not always clear who is which.The most pitched battles, however, happen within the hearts and minds of the individual players. Even as the new spy shows reflect a fraught, tangled and mercenary post-Cold War world, the existential threats and conflicts are more interior, intimate and, in many ways, timeless.“It’s the agency,” a Central Intelligence Agency honcho (Jeffrey Wright) tells a field agent (Michael Fassbender) in “The Agency.” “Nothing is personal.” Nothing, that is, except everything.Jeffrey Wright, right, with John Magaro, plays a C.I.A. boss in “The Agency,” based on the French series “The Bureau.”Luke Varley/Paramount+ with ShowtimeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Bluets’ Review: This Maggie Nelson Adaptation Is All About the Vibes

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      How do you bring an almost plotless book of elliptical fragments to the stage? The director Katie Mitchell has tried with three actors, four screens and three bottles of whiskey.When the Royal Court Theater in London announced it was staging an adaptation of Maggie Nelson’s prose poem memoir “Bluets,” my first reaction was head-scratching surprise. This largely plotless book, in which elliptical fragments of autobiography are entwined with meditations on the cultural history of the color blue and loosely coalesce around the theme of depression, doesn’t exactly scream theater.In Margaret Perry’s adaptation, directed by Katie Mitchell and running through June 29, a trio of actors — Ben Whishaw, Emma D’Arcy and Kayla Meikle — recite passages from “Bluets” and act out moody scenes of everyday life; these are combined with innovative use of video technology and melancholic music to generate a multisensory representation of the narrator’s consciousness. It’s an admirably ambitious undertaking, but a lack of narrative thrust or tonal variation make for a somewhat bloodless experience.The performers are stationed at three tables, each equipped with a bottle of whiskey and a tumbler. Behind each of them, a television screen plays prerecorded footage of everyday English locales: an ordinary shopping street, a subway carriage, a municipal swimming pool. Each actor is filmed by a ball-shaped camera, like a webcam, on a tripod in front of them; this footage is instantly relayed to a large movie screen, where it is superimposed over images from the TVs below, so that the actors and their backdrops merge to uncanny effect.Emma D’Arcy in “Bluets.” Throughout the play, the actors are filmed and the footage is instantly relayed to a large movie screen, where it is superimposed over other images.Camilla GreenwellThe gloomy aesthetic and lugubrious soundscape befit the morose timbre of the material as Nelson’s maudlin narrator reels off tidbits about her favorite color — referencing Derek Jarman, Joni Mitchell and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — while intermittently brooding over her ex-partner, whom she addresses in wistful and reproachful tones, and recounting the struggles of a close friend who was paralyzed in an accident. (The video design is by Grant Gee and Ellie Thompson; the sound is by Paul Clark). Onstage and onscreen, we see a lot of blue: blue props, blue outfits and blue-centric video clips, including one in which a bowerbird builds a nest with bits of blue detritus.First published in 2009, “Bluets” was reissued in 2017 after the success of Nelson’s similarly hybrid 2015 work, “The Argonauts,” which heralded a publishing fad for essay-memoirs that combined ambient erudition with diaristic introspection. But the very quality that some readers enjoy in these books — the weightlessness of the narrative, evoking an untethered, freewheeling subjectivity — makes them exceptionally ill-suited to the theater, which thrives on momentum, tension and conflict.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Britain’s Friendliest Bear to Hit the Stage in ‘Paddington: The Musical’

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      The star of a long-running book series and two films will hit the stage in a show currently being developed in Britain, producers said.Paddington, the well-traveled bear known for his floppy red hat and love for orange marmalade sandwiches, is taking on yet another venture in 2025: the theater.A stage musical about the friendly bear is in development and is set to open in Britain in 2025, the show’s producers announced on Tuesday. It will be adapted from the book series that made him famous, as well as the two live-action films, “Paddington” and “Paddington 2.”The working title is “Paddington: The Musical,” and it “is currently undergoing a period of development and workshops,” according to a news release.Paddington was first introduced in a book series by Michael Bond that follows the good-natured bear who emigrates from Peru to England and is taken in by the Brown family. Paddington is sweet, curious and prone to mishaps.The first book in the series, “A Bear Called Paddington,” was published in October 1958. More than 35 million copies of Paddington books have been sold worldwide.The live-action feature films, with Ben Whishaw as the voice of Paddington, premiered in Britain in 2014 and 2017. The first film depicts Paddington’s arrival in London and the early stages of his relationship with the Brown family. In the second film, Paddington attempts to get his Aunt Lucy a gift and ends up in prison, where, eventually, there is music, cake and dancing.A third film, “Paddington in Peru,” is set to be released in Britain on Nov. 8, 2024. Its U.S. release date is Jan. 17, 2025.The stage show’s music and lyrics will be written by Tom Fletcher, a founding member of the popular British band McFly and a well-known children’s author. The musical’s book will be by Jessica Swale, whose play “Nell Gwynn” won an Olivier Award for best new comedy in 2016.The musical’s director will be Luke Sheppard, who has worked on “Just for One Day,” “What’s New Pussycat?” and “Rent.”The musical is being produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, Studiocanal and Eliza Lumley Productions on behalf of Universal Music UK. The producers did not provide details on the plot and said the cast would be announced later.“The magic of Paddington is that, through his wide-eyed innocence, he sees the very best in humanity,” Ms. Friedman and Ms. Lumley said in a joint statement, “reminding us that love and kindness can triumph if we open our hearts and minds to one another.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Passages’ Review: A Toxic Triangle

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      In Ira Sachs’ latest wince-inducing romance, Tomas (Franz Rogowski) has wedged himself into a love triangle with Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos.“Passages” takes its name from a film-within-a-film that we get one glimpse of at the start of Ira Sachs’ latest wince-inducing romance. It doesn’t look very good — an airless, stylized period piece, the kind of movie Sachs would never make himself. Worse, its fictional director, Tomas (Franz Rogowski), is so fixated on imperceptible details, and so unable to articulate his desires, that he eventually explodes on set. “It’s not that you have to come down the staircase, you want to come down the staircase!” he rages, aggrieved that no one is able to read his mind.Tomas is whiny, needy, petulant and selfish. (TikTok users could slap him with a dozen diagnoses or just settle on “toxic.”) He’d make a great reality show contestant, but here he’s wedged himself into a love triangle with his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), and his girlfriend, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Viewers naïve enough to expect that an Ira Sachs movie might resolve happily will be disappointed.Sachs has formed his own unconventional family. He and his husband, Boris Torres (an artist, as Martin sort-of is), share twins with the filmmaker Kirsten Johnson. “Passages” feels like Sachs and his longtime writing partner, Mauricio Zacharias, are questioning what his life would be if he’d gone about it all wrong: if he hadn’t been sensitive to others’ emotions, if he’d been slippery and noncommittal, if he’d made phonier films. Perhaps Tomas, performed by Rogowski with swivel-hipped, sulky charisma, is Sachs’ shadow self. But he’s like a lot of other people’s bad exes, too, which means that the bleakest moments often trigger a snort-laugh of schadenfreude at the fix his characters find themselves in.The misery unfurls in a straight timeline of dramatic scenes that leap over the lived-in moments that make up a relationship. We only get fleeting seconds of Martin and Agathe without Tomas dominating the conversation, or lack of one, as he tends to mutely prod them into an extended sex scene. (The film initially received an NC-17 rating, but is now unrated.) As a result, we barely know his partners at all. Agathe, in particular, might look powerful in Khadija Zeggaï’s striking costumes, but she’s so vaguely written that she barely seems to exist when Tomas isn’t in the room. She reminded me of a moment in Caity Weaver’s 2016 GQ profile of Justin Bieber where she and the music superstar walk in on his future wife, Hailey, “doing nothing — no TV, no book, no phone, no computer, no music, no oil paints, nothing.”Some of this indifference is deliberate. Sachs frames one talk between the spouses with Tomas’s body eclipsing Martin’s until he’s invisible; the camera reflects how little Tomas sees his partners, too. But capturing these truths leaves a void in the film. Exhausted (as we also become) by their fruitless, repetitive attempts to set boundaries, the wounded lovers reclaim their independence by receding so deeply into themselves that even Tomas can’t reach them anymore — and by that time, we’ve already given up.PassagesNot rated. In English and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      In ‘Passages,’ ‘Sex Is a Huge Part of a Character’s Life’

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      The three stars of Ira Sachs’ new movie — Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos — discuss the graphic film’s approach to sexuality and intimacy.When Ira Sachs’ new movie “Passages” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, critics couldn’t stop talking about the sex scenes. The movie, a drama set in Paris about a film director who leaves his longtime boyfriend for a young woman, featured an all-star European art-house cast — Franz Rogowski (“Transit,” “Great Freedom”), Ben Whishaw (“The Lobster,” “Little Joe”) and Adèle Exarchopoulos (“Blue is the Warmest Color”) — negotiating infidelity and betrayal. And having graphic sex.Those scenes led the M.P.A. to give the film a surprise NC-17 rating. The filmmakers opted to release the film in the United States without such a classification, a move that may limit the number of theaters willing to show the film when it comes out on Aug. 4.There has been fierce debate in recent years about the role of sex scenes in movies. Following the MeToo movement’s reckoning with gender inequality and sexual misbehavior, some have asked whether it is still possible to film such intimate acts without putting performers into precarious situations. More recently, some Gen-Z social media users have argued that sex scenes are unnecessary and should be excised from cinema more broadly.In two joint video interviews, between Whishaw and Rogowski, and Rogowski and Exarchopoulos, the actors discussed their experiences making the movie and its approach to sexuality and intimacy. (The interview with Whishaw, who is a member of SAG-AFTRA, was conducted before the actors’ strike began.)Exarchopoulos noted that her career had been shaped early on by the depiction of sex onscreen. One of her first films, “Blue is the Warmest Color,” a portrait of a lesbian relationship that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013, faced pushback from some critics who argued that the film’s graphic sex scenes objectified its stars. Exarchopoulos and her co-star, Léa Seydoux, later said that the director’s treatment of them during the shoot had made them feel uncomfortable and disrespected.Nevertheless, Exarchopoulos said she believed that sex scenes — and those of “Passages” in particular — were often crucial to movies for depicting relationships. “Sex is a huge part of a character’s life,” she said. “Blue is the Warmest Color” had taught her “how having sex, or not having sex, and your relationship with your body, is a conversation and says a lot about who you are and who you are trying to be,” she said.Her character in “Passages” — a schoolteacher named Agathe who embarks on an affair with Tomas (Rogowski), after meeting him at a wrap party for his film — wants to “test her limits,” she said. As an actress, the biggest challenge was finding new ways of depicting intimacy onscreen, given her early performance in “Blue is the Warmest Color” and its emphasis on sex: “I don’t want to bore people, showing myself the same way,” she said.Ben Whishaw, left, plays Martin, a graphic designer who Rogowski’s character abandons.SBS ProductionsRogowski is also no stranger to revealing roles: He said he had felt pressured into appearing naked in previous film and theater projects to add what he described as an “edgy” element to a production. He felt ambivalent about those experiences, he said. “The problem wasn’t the sex scene; it was that these movies were pretentious and flat, and you can’t turn it into something real just by taking off your underwear.”Perhaps the most talked about sex scene in “Passages” occurs when Martin, Whishaw’s character, and Tomas end up in bed together after a series of betrayals. Rogowski said that the sequence was notable beyond its graphic nature, for its emotional depiction of two long-term partners negotiating power and pain through sex.“It’s a couple having sex, it’s someone in a position of a victim taking over,” Rogowski said. “I think if someone only sees the film’s sex scenes as just explicit scenes of intercourse, then they should just watch another movie.”In recent years, Whishaw said, the more widespread use of intimacy coordinators — experts who help performers negotiate their potential discomfort during sex scenes — has created a healthier atmosphere for actors, including himself. Before “this development, the actors were sort of left to do it for themselves, because the director was embarrassed, or didn’t know how to talk about it.”For “Passages,” he added, the cast opted not to use such a coach. “I think it’s OK if the group of people filming a scene are cool with doing it among themselves,” he said. “It’s about respect and trust and sharing creative goals.”The film is also notable for the unremarkable way it treats Tomas’s apparent bisexuality as he negotiates relationships with Agathe and Martin. That approach, Exarchopoulos said, played a large part in attracting her to the part. “It’s very normal in my own life and circles,” she said, for people to have relationships with either sex. Rogowski added that such love affairs were also commonplace in Berlin, where he lives. “I know it’s a cliché about Berlin, but some clichés are true,” he said.Rogowski’s character, a tyrannical film director prone to on-set outbursts who frequently manipulates others to suit his own needs, reminded Exarchopoulos of colleagues she had encountered on movie sets, she said. “During the shoot, people in the production can sometimes be childish and have an ego, because they have power,” she said. “I have a lot of empathy for them.”Tomas’s headstrong nature is reflected in his character’s gender-forward fashion choices.MUBIAt first, Rogowski said, he struggled to identify with Tomas. “When I read the script, I thought, ‘This is a tough one, how am I going to justify his behavior?’” he said, adding that he eventually found the character’s lack of conventional morality to be liberating.“A moral code is a kind of costume, and it’s interesting to change this costume,” Rogowski said. “For me personally, morality is a shady friend. It is related to religion and power structures, and it is, in many ways, a way of avoiding having your own opinion and exploring life.”Rogowski said he believed that the notion of labeling film directors or actors as egocentric, or narcissists, is often a way of dismissing the value of their work. “Most of us have lost our relationships with ourselves, and don’t have enough time to be inspired by ourselves,” he said. “Most of us should be a bit more narcissistic.”He added that Tomas’s headstrong nature is reflected in his character’s gender-forward fashion choices, which include some of the more memorable looks in recent art house cinema. Rogowski said was pleasantly surprised by his high-fashion outfits — which include a see-through sweater, a snakeskin jacket and a sheer crop-top — chosen by the film’s costume designer, Khadija Zeggaï. “I still have some of those items in my wardrobe,” he said.The crop-top makes a particularly memorable appearance in a tense scene midway through the film, when Agathe invites her button-down, middle-class parents to meet her new boyfriend — a meal that grows increasingly disastrous by each passing minute. “It’s a nightmare,” Rogowski said. “I would have put on the most heteronormative T-shirt I could have found, just to make sure they are happy.”Whishaw chimed in: “But what a wonderful thing that he does that.” Even though “there is a lot of pain in the film, there is joy underneath,” he said. “Everything is mixed up in this intricate way, and I think that’s what gives the film its soul.” More

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      in Television

      ‘This is Going to Hurt’ Finds Dark Humor on the Maternity Ward

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      “This Is Going to Hurt,” a dramedy starring Ben Whishaw, kindled debate in Britain about hospital care for pregnant women and the pressures on doctors.LONDON — In December 2010, Adam Kay was working on a British maternity ward helping a more junior doctor to perform a cesarean section. Kay had successfully delivered well over 1,200 babies, but this operation was a disaster.The mother had an undiagnosed condition affecting the placenta, and she should not have been allowed to go into labor. The doctors only just managed to save her life — she lost 12 liters of blood — but they couldn’t save the baby.“You want healthy mum plus healthy baby, and it was the first time I’d had neither of those things and was the most senior person in the room,” Kay said in a recent interview. He said that he had felt traumatized but that the reaction from the hospital “was like I’d sprained my ankle or something.”Adam Kay, who created the show and wrote the book it is based on, said its central character was supposed to be reprehensible.Charlie CliftAfter that incident, Kay left medicine. A scene revisiting the operation does not appear in “This Is Going to Hurt,” a medical drama written by Kay and starring Ben Whishaw that premieres on AMC+ and Sundance Now on Thursday after being a hit in Britain. But plenty of other episodes from his six years of working in hospitals do, in fictionalized form.Given that the show tries to show the reality of life on a maternity ward, some moments are harrowing. But many are also funny, including a moment when Whishaw’s character, an overstressed and underpaid doctor called Adam, has to retrieve, from inside a woman, a toy egg containing an engagement ring — the woman had inserted it as a surprise for her boyfriend.The show was commissioned shortly after Kay published a warts-and-all collection of diaries (called “This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor”) documenting his life in British hospitals. That collection, released in 2017, sold more than 2.5 million copies and was translated into 37 languages.Kay described the book as a “confidence trick,” where silly anecdotes were used to sell a book that contained serious comments about health care and about how politicians treat doctors and nurses (it was published the year after doctors in England went on strike over working conditions). The book’s success led to Kay’s meeting Matt Hancock, the British health minister at the time, to push for more funding for doctors in need, and to his writing columns in newspapers.Kay said that the current health minister, Sajid Javid, had also sent a note, saying that his wife liked the book. Kay’s reaction, he said, was to wonder about the minister, “Have you read it? It’s you who needs to read it.”Whishaw and Michele Austin, who plays a midwife in the show. Anika Molnar/AMCDespite his prominence, when “This Is Going to Hurt” appeared on the BBC in February, Kay didn’t get a universally positive reaction. Milli Hill, founder of the Positive Birth Movement, which tries to combat negative ideas around giving birth; and some users of Mumsnet, an influential parenting website, labeled both Kay and Whishaw’s acerbic character misogynist for mocking women in his care. There was also criticism over the absence of pregnant people’s voices in the show, while Hill said that the birthing scenes would be unpleasant to watch for anyone expecting a baby or who had gone through a traumatic birth.Sitting in a London hotel bar recently, Kay, 41, seemed confused by those responses. “I heard criticism that the show should be about mums,” he said. “But that’s someone else’s program. I’m a bloke who used to be a doctor.”Whishaw’s character was also meant to be reprehensible, Kay added — a doctor so under pressure that his life falls apart, affecting others around him. Once a few episodes had aired, Kay said, the public debate changed and he started getting emails from doctors thanking him for raising awareness of the mental health struggles that medics can face.The show wasn’t really about the ward at all, Kay said, but about the pressures doctors are under at work, including unsustainable hours, bullying bosses and patients, low pay and often disintegrating home lives — with little way out. Whishaw’s character can be seen as passing his troubling behaviors onto a colleague, Shruti (Ambika Mod), a younger doctor meant to be under his wing.Those mental strains are still “a taboo topic” in many hospitals, Kay said. “Doctors are not meant to get ill, and they’re specifically not meant to get mentally ill,” he noted, adding that a doctor dies by suicide every three weeks in Britain.The pressure on doctors in the country is only getting worse, he added. There is a severe shortage of workers in the N.H.S. — the service has around 100,000 vacancies — and staff were already suffering burnout long before the pandemic. “When I left, I was a total outlier, as no one ever stopped being a doctor,” Kay said. “Now everyone’s got one eye on the exit sign as the workload feels absolutely unsustainable.”Ambika Mod plays Shruti, a younger doctor on the maternity ward. Mod said that she received a “crash course” in obstetrics and gynecology before filming.Anika Molnar/AMCDespite the message at its heart, Kay and the show’s two lead actors — Whishaw and Mod — said in interviews that the series was a joy to make. Whishaw said in an email that when he got the script it immediately “rang out with a truth.” The dark comedy “was exactly the type of humor people use when faced with awful things,” he added, “and I liked the awkward, flawed, troubled person at the center of it.”Mod, in her first major role, said that the two actors received a “crash course” in obstetrics and gynecology before filming, including learning how to deliver babies with forceps and how to perform cesarean sections. On set, real doctors, scrub nurses and anesthetists appeared as extras, she added, while prosthetics helped give the show its realism.She said that she was surprised by viewers who called the show’s operations gory and intense in posts on social media. “I didn’t think about that at all when we were filming as we would just be surrounded by pools of blood and amniotic fluid talking about what we were going to have for lunch,” she said.Kay said that, despite the show’s focus being on Britain’s health service, he hoped it would touch a nerve in the United States, too. He imagines that “a labor ward’s a labor ward, wherever it is,” he said. After his book came out in 2017, he got messages from doctors in countries including Chad, Belarus and Venezuela, he added, saying that the themes also rang true for practitioners in those countries.“This Is Going to Hurt” was written as a one-off series, and Kay said that he had no plans to do a follow-up. He knew he would hit his “shelf life as a writer” at some point, he said, and when that happened, he expected to return to medicine, to teach or to try and change health policy.“I’ve got a lot of guilt about leaving,” Kay said. “Obviously, I believe the arts have enormous value, but you’d have to have quite some ego as a writer to think it was anything other than 10 steps away from saving someone’s life in an operation.” More