New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Stephan Elliott.
Cast: Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth, Kimberley Nixon, Katherine Parkinson, Kris Marshall
Description: Prodigal son John Whittaker returns to his family's stately pile with his new bride, American racing car driver Larita in tow. His sisters Hilda and Marion are terribly impressed by the glamorous, out-spoken new addition to the clan, and his war-wounded father Jim seems charmed too. However, John's neurotic mother Veronica is horrified that her golden boy has married... an American, when he could have proposed to one of the neighbours' daughters, thereby ensuring their social standing within the local community. Tensions escalate as Veronica blatantly tries to drive a wedge between John and Larita.
Country: UK. 2008. 96mins
Meet the parents: John Whittaker (Ben Barnes) and his new wife Larita (Jessica Biel)
Noel Coward’s early play was written in 1924 when he was 23 and isn’t an overly obvious candidate for a 21st-century film revival. Undeterred, the Australian Stephan Elliott, the director of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, has festooned it with able players, made it look splendidly in period and hoped for the best.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work out. Some of the casting is odd, Elliott’s screenplay doesn’t have much of Coward’s baleful and ironic wit and the film-making itself lacks the required precision.
Jessica Biel plays a beautiful American racing driver who marries into the Whittakers, an aristocratic British family, visits the ancestral pile with her new husband John (Ben Barnes) and finds his cash-strapped mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) unable to cope with her. Everyone else views her more favourably, including the older Mr Whittaker (Colin Firth) and the butler (Kris Marshall), who both seem to fancy her.
Easy Virtue purports to be about the fading aristo lifestyle after the First World War and the injection into it of American flash. It is certainly dressed to kill. But we’ve seen this so often before that it has to be done exceptionally well to take hold. While Biel is fine, Scott Thomas is largely wasted as the nasty but rather desperate old bird who commands the family, while Firth does a kind of downbeat Mr D’Arcy as her war veteran husband.
The play hardly seems the “psychological study of sexual repression, guilt and revenge as the old certainties crumble at the advance of the jazz age” that one critic appraised in a recent theatrical revival. In fact, it amounts to much ado about almost nothing. But that may be the result of Elliott’s attempt to make it entertaining rather than plausible.
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