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Culture

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Entertainment

Caryl Churchill’s magnificent Cloud 9 reaches for the skies – the National Theatre has done it proud

National Theatre, London The experimental 1979 drama gleefully muddles roles in a century-spanning caper that bounces from colonial Africa to hippy London Caryl Churchill’s time-hopping 1979 drama is not revived as often as it might be, perhaps because it is so magnificently madcap. Bouncing from a first act satirising Victorian life in colonial Africa to a second act exploring sexual liberation in 1970s London, it could easily roll off-kilter in the wrong hands. There is also its complicated framework. Cloud 9 is a play in two distinct parts which follows some of the characters a century on,

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Entertainment

‘Like having your brain squeezed’: Succession’s Jesse Armstrong and more on the rollercoaster of TV writers’ rooms

As co-writer of new thriller Hunting Alice Bell, our film critic entered the hallowed Room – and was struck by its support, buzz, abrasion and chocolate snacks. He asks legendary showrunners about their experience ‘Write, write, write until your fingers break!” That was Chekhov’s advice to writers. Until I started writing for television I thought I understood what he meant. I thought I knew what writing was: the solitude, the making yourself do it, the finger-shattering pain of doing it seriously, on your own. As well as being chief film critic for the Guardian, I have written fiction and in s

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Entertainment

Prima Facie review – Cynthia Erivo’s brilliant barrister blazes in sexual assault drama

Adaptation of the international stage hit stars a commanding Erivo as Tessa, whose career defending rape suspects is undermined by experience A blazingly fierce, effortlessly commanding central performance from Cynthia Erivo, like something from classical drama, powers this movie adaptation of Suzie Miller’s international stage hit (which starred Sheridan Harbridge in the original Australian production, and then Jodie Comer in London’s West End). Miller has written the screenplay, with Susanna White directing. In the theatre, it is a bravura solo spectacle, a stream-of-consciousness torrent wh

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Entertainment

David Walliams: Power and Silence review – some of this footage will make your head spin

From the visceral accounts of those the comedian allegedly groomed to archive footage of Jonathan Ross joking about him taking 15-year-olds home, this is dizzying TV David Walliams and his lawyers fought to the last to keep secret the results of a three-year investigation by ITV and the Guardian into claims by multiple women of the comedian and author’s predatory behaviour dating back decades, but those attempts failed and now they have been laid bare before the public. Accompanying the Guardian’s reports, an hour-long documentary has been released – first on YouTube and now on ITVX. It largel

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Entertainment

NAZA documentary on Gaza killings becomes one of year’s most watched

The film, which details Israel’s surveillance of Palestinian civilians, has been seen by more than 1.5m people in less than two months NAZA, the award-winning documentary that details Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, has been seen by more than 1.5 million people since being released in cinemas across the world last month. The film, which is directed by the Oscar-winning Israeli film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by the Guardian, has reached a worldwide audience of 1,547,033 as of Friday 6 November, making it one of the most-watched documentary films with a theatr

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Entertainment

Jonathan Ross ‘horrified’ by David Walliams and Russell Brand revelations

TV presenter says he was ‘genuinely unaware’ of pair’s conduct despite joking about Walliams going home with 15-year-old girl in 2004 Read the full investigation: ‘It wasn’t long until he asked me if I’d ever had sex before’ Explainer: the key legal issues surrounding the case The TV presenter Jonathan Ross has said he is “as horrified by the revelations about David Walliams and the crimes of Russell Brand as the rest of the nation”, adding that he was “genuinely unaware of their conduct” despite making a joke about a 15-year-old “going home” with Walliams at the British Comedy Awards in 2004.

The Guardian
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Entertainment

‘We are dream-walking into a desperate situation’: the Booker prize winner on his sci-fi alien invasion wakeup call

He is a sci-fi titan but M John Harrison has just exploded into the mainstream – with The End of Everything, an apocalyptic novel set on the Kent coast. Does he really think we have no hope left? With his twinkling eyes and silver ponytail, M John Harrison doesn’t seem anything like his 81 years. The M stands for Michael, Mike to his friends. And last night he became the oldest author to win the Booker prize for fiction, for his 13th novel, The End of Everything. Our interview is delayed because of wifi issues, which is fitting given that the novel is about – among many things – what happens w

The Guardian
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Entertainment

There’s scurvy, mutiny and mystery in Dogstar – but like its icebound ship this drama goes nowhere

Hampstead theatre, London A bickering trio of trapped survivors who have lost their comrades are kept in an ominous stasis in Daisy Bell’s play The setup is strong in Daisy Hall’s follow-up to her debut, Bellringers. A few survivors on a whaling ship trapped in arctic ice are figuring out how to break free as the ice groans and explodes ominously around them. Babben (Justin Edwards) is an old hand who has whaled for almost 40 years; Gorey (Adam Rojko Vega) is a mischief-maker who walks around with a gun; the youngest, and most strait-laced, is Sam (Abdul Jalloh) who seems immobilised by anxiet

The Guardian
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Entertainment

Yabba dabba doo! Could these bulging, Flintstones-style towers be the future of eco-building?

Ruggedly good-looking and greener than bricks and concrete, Petra Heights are made of three-metre slabs of rough rock. Could they herald a new stone age? Our writer fires up his Flintmobile There’s been a geological eruption on London’s Finchley Road. Great chunks of pink basalt and igneous larvikite appear to have exploded from the railway cutting, shooting skywards to form teetering towers. Anyone trying to find Finchley Road & Frognal station need wonder no more: just look for the multistorey Stonehenge. Countless apartment towers have sprouted above London’s stations in recent years, a res

The Guardian
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Entertainment

Old Vic 2027 season to feature Damian Lewis in a ‘provocative’ Henry V and Milly Alcock as Miss Julie

Rupert Goold begins his tenure as artistic director with a version of Shakespeare’s history play, followed by shows starring Supergirl’s Alcock and Arinzé Kene Damian Lewis is to play Henry V at the Old Vic in London in the first production under the theatre’s new artistic director, Rupert Goold. Goold will direct what is billed as a “provocative” version of Shakespeare’s history play that challenges “what makes a leader a legend”. It will be Lewis’s first major theatre role since he starred in The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? almost 10 years ago. He has previously played Romeo and Hamlet on stage,

The Guardian
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