Entertainment News Los Angeles Times. Sheri Linden. The best thing about Maya Dardel, a prickly character study posing as a provocation, is the chance to see Lena Olin dig into the title role. A formidable intellectual who, for amusement, chews up and spits out perceived lightweights, Maya growls and taunts, disdains and dismisses, and Olin could. Charity dedicated to helping stray and feral cats in downtown Toronto. Arranges foster homes, vet care and adoptions. Whats On at the Palace Theatre, Manchester your definitive guide to all shows and productions currently showing and coming soon. Http 40 Years of Disco Tour 2018. L. A. Times entertainment news from Hollywood including event coverage, celebrity gossip and deals. View photo galleries, read TV and movie reviews and more. Libby Purves and friends review. THE LONELY HEARTS OF WARTIMEIf you need relief from the current outbreak of extreme social primness about male behaviour, youre going to love the bit with Clive Francis, as the elderly Mr Thwaites, going batshit bonkers on pickled walnut Martinis when tempted by the generous Teutonic cleavage of Lucy Cohus MIss Kugelmann. The first act of this deceptively entertaining play certainly ends with a bang. I say deceptively, because although there is some wonderful sly comedy from the start, its strength is in a humane, rueful, oddly hopeful understanding of loneliness and of the way we try to make real connections through what one of them calls the glass wall of our separateness and suspicion. Tim Hatleys design elegantly underlines this theme, its elegant sliding changes offering momentary chiaroscuro glimpses of aloneness. No character is all bad, nor all good even the most minor of them, in fleetingly sketched moments, reveal both their handicap and their hope. Its lovely. This was a novel by Patrick Hamilton, whose famous play GASLIGHT was an enjoyable cod Victorian melodrama. His novels, though, are different moodier, their important events internal and they are set in the world he knew seedy 1. London, bedsits and boarding houses, scruffy pubs and parties. This late one, with more comic vision and a bit more hope, is now brilliantly transformed for the stage by Nicholas Wright. In a boarding house in Henley we find our heroine Miss Roach Fenella Woolgar, perfect in every thwarted, eager, scrupulous move and expression. A former teacher who couldnt control the boys, she saw her flat blown open in the Blitz and fled to this sanctuary, reading manuscripts for a publisher, regretting an affair with her married boss, barely tolerating the elderly company. Miss Barratt and Miss Steele are amiable enough this play is full of glorious moments for maturer actors playing long formed characters but from his separate table, over the spam fritters, Clive Francis Mr Thwaites is gloriously nightmarish. Hes xenophobic, mocks Roachs socialist principles, and rarely deviates from coy, codgerish Wallace Arnold archaisms Dost thou foregather in the Rising Sun etc. He is far from welcoming her new friend, the dangerously charming American Lt Pike Daon Broni. Artfully, Wright has made the Yank a black GI, thus enabling sarky Thwaites remarks about our dusky combatant from distant shores. Perfect. On the other hand, despite his hatred of Germans, the old man is very much taken with Miss Kugelmann, a German emigre. Cohu wickedly gives it her hipswivelling all as a rapidly maturing but determined party girl with whom the prim Roach has unwisely made friends out of kindness, and introduced in to the boarding house. The sometimes beautiful delicacy of Miss Roachs romance with the American is rudely shattered by what Thwaites might call the frolicsome Fraulein, and things escalate disastrously. Indeed Kent has given us a sly flash forward at the start, which makes us expect something even worse than what happens. But the joy of it is that not only their denouement but everyone elses isolation and cures are evident. All the cast catch the Hamilton, period, mood perfectly, not least Richard Tate as the elusive Mr Prest, deemed a mere drunk by the old ladies, but who wisely stays sane by nipping up to the Leicester Square pubs to meet his old showbiz friends. Or theres a seventeen year old soldier Tom Milligan who remembers Miss Roach as his old teacher an extraordinarily moving, transformative moment between them is again delicate, fleeting. There is a sense of each characters past, and potential redemption theres Miss Steele the Oxford classicist, unwillingly retired after a 3. Mrs Barrett. And the latters sister Gwen Taylor plays both, in a cheeky twin sister twinning becomes a dea ex machina, a GP more than pleased to be back in harness for wartime. She delivers, indeed, the briskly important line If one is lonely at a time like this, one deserves to be. Ah yes. It is as if Hamiltons moody 1. Hangover Square grew in the rough soil of wartime into something more purposeful. Maybe much of Britain did. After a fragmenting Christmas chaos in several lives, Miss Roachs final vision is that life trudges on There will be more love, more hate, more goodbyes, more sudden deaths God help us every one. The dry echo of Dickens Tiny Tim is no accident. Box office 0. 20 7. Novrating five. Because I cant resist it.
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