Categories Lucky Jim Print Media Reviews

Masterpiece Theatre cracks a smile with the charming “Lucky Jim”

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Get “Lucky”

by Don Dale | January 1, 2003 | Style Weekly

PBS-TV’s next “Masterpiece Theatre” broadcast, “Lucky Jim,” is a winsomely charming comedy, likeable for a number of solid reasons. Chief among them is the story, based on a book by Kingsley Amis; the two main characters, played by Stephen Tompkinson and Keeley Hawes; and the nostalgic 1950s soundtrack.

Amis created quite a stir in British literary circles when “Lucky Jim” was published in 1954. First called an angry young man, Amis quickly established himself instead as a master of satire, malcontented rather than irate. His target was the intellectual milieu and those who wallowed in it, and the eponymous hero of “Lucky Jim” was something new: a working-class man, well-educated but unapologetically middlebrow.

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Categories Media Print Media Reviews Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night at the Donmar Warehouse – Review

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Harrowing hilarity

By Paul Taylor | October 28, 2002 | The Independent

He looks as though his copious blubber has been constrained from birth in a wing collar and buttoned-up pinstripe suit and that he must have emerged from the womb with that self-important beard and punctilious moustache. His gait is an effeminately officious cross between a march and a scamper; his tone is a prissily sibilant sneer; and he is forever consulting his watch with righteous impatience. At night, his locks are lovingly protected by a lady’s hairnet.

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Categories Print Media Reviews Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night at Donmar Warehouse – Review

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Mendes bows out brilliantly

By Charles Spencer |

As Shakespeare wrote elsewhere, parting is such sweet sorrow, and I am not ashamed to admit I had a lump in my throat as the cast took their calls at the end of Sam Mendes’s farewell production at the Donmar.

It was partly because of the moving depth of his staging of this most bittersweet of Shakespearean comedies, but it was also the memory of Mendes’s tremendous achievement here over the past decade.

It is 10 years to the day since he reopened the Donmar with the British premiere of Sondheim’s Assassins, since when he has scarcely put a foot wrong. The theatre became fashionable under his directorship, but the buzzy atmosphere was always founded on excellence. From Friel’s Translations to Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room, from Electra to Privates on Parade, the Donmar has an unparalleled track record in great shows brilliantly staged.

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Categories Dead Gorgeous Print Media

Dead Gorgeous Review

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Wartime Friends Trapped in Loveless Relationships

by Owen G | The Guardian | October 22, 2002

ITV’s heavily promoted one-off wartime drama, Dead Gorgeous, starring Fay Ripley, left viewers cold last night with 1.5 million switching off during the course of the programme.

The two-hour epic, in which Ripley co-starred with Helen McCrory as a pair of wartime friends trapped in loveless relationships, started off with 6.6 million viewers at 9pm.

But by 10.15pm, the number watching had dipped to 4.8 million, leaving the drama with an average of 5.5 million viewers, one in four of all those watching.

Read the rest of the original article at The Guardian