Lesley Manville

The Telegraph: “I trudged to this production with all the enthusiasm of a schoolboy making his way to a double maths lesson on a dank Monday morning.

One of the peculiarities of my job is that you are sometimes required to see the same play twice in close proximity, and it was only last week that I endured Stephen Unwin’s punishingly dour production of Ghosts (1881) at the Rose Theatre in Kingston. The idea of a second dose of a work that is grim even by Ibsen’s demanding standards felt almost unendurable.Read More »

Quote:
Phil (Timothy Spall) is an overweight taxi driver who gets up late in the day and works intermittently, barely communicating with his family except for a few grunts. His philosophy of life is expressed as “We’re all born alone. We die alone. There’s nothing we can do about it”. Mike Leigh has given us powerful portrayals of the underclass in his previous films Naked, Secrets and Lies, and Life is Sweet but none more powerful and moving than his latest, All or Nothing.Read More »

Quote:
Mike Leigh is often accused of talking down to his characters. With Another Year, this fan of the British auteur can see why. Leigh’s latest is a lovingly told but insufficiently nuanced story of four seasons, a year in the lives of a happy couple and their miserably single friends. It begins in spring with a close-up of a face locked in abject misery: Asked by a counselor how happy she is on a scale from one to 10, Janet (Imelda Staunton) says one, in effect setting the tone for much of the film. The only happiness here belongs to Gerri (Ruth Sheen) and her husband, Tom (Jim Broadbent), whose relationship is as organic as the vegetables they grow in their backyard, but what’s their secret? No one’s asking, including Leigh.Read More »