NT LIVE: The Fifth Step at Olympic Studios

While a play staring Martin Freeman and Jack Lowden was tempting it was not tempting enough to get me to pay west end prices so I skipped the run at Soho Place but it was tempting enough when it transferred to screen under the NT Live umbrella.

I chose my usual cinema, Olympic Studios in Barnes, where central seat F6 cost a modest £18.5.

The timing worked well with a matinee performance at Bush Theatre I was able to stroll down slowly to Barnes pausing for coffee and cake along the way before arriving at Olympic in time for an unhurried soup and a beer,

By chance, both plays were about therapy sessions though this one was framed around alcoholism and the AA 12 Step Programme where Step 5 is "Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.".

For me, The Fifth Step failed almost immediate in comparison to the earlier After Sunday as these sessions seemed contrived and unnatural. I also found it hard to care for either character.

Jack Lowden initially played the alcoholic going through the programme with a lot of nervous energy but as he went through the multiple sessions he gained composure and almost became his Slow Horses character.Martin Freeman play the session leader as a man who was never in control of the process with lots of hesitations and mumblings. It was almost as if he had not learned the part fully. 

The staging tried to stir some life into the production with some light effects and rearranging the chairs(!) between scenes but these were more of a distraction than an enhancement.

The Fifth Step was a disappointment with only Jack Lowden's acting in the early stages leaving a good memory.

Pink Floyd at Pompeii MCMLXXII

I have no idea why someone thought to update 1972's Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii in 2025, missing the fiftieth anniversary in doing so, but I welcomed the chance to see it again, this time on a big screen with big loudspeakers.

To save travel time, I chose to go to the Odeon in Kingston and duly paid £25 for my seat. There was some confusion on the day as it was moved to another screen, technical problems, and I ended up in the back row (K) of Screen 4, which was fine.

I am pretty sure that I bought Live at Pompeii at some point in some format now defunct , probably VHS, so I had not seen it for quite a few years and while I could remember some of the songs included I knew that there were gaps in my memory.

They opened with Echos which was an excellent start. A live version of Echos is on my iPhone and I play it several times a year. The sound quality was as good as expected and the video was as good as I should have expected which was good for its time but seriously behind today's standard. That did not matter though, I was there for the songs and they were great.

This was 1972 and Pink Floyd played a selection of their then most known songs including classics like Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, Careful with That Axe, Eugene, and A Saucerful of Secrets. They also played Mademoiselle Nobs!

Despite being described as "live" with some post production work in the studio the songs sounded very much like their studio versions, which was again fine.

The film did little other that show the band and the only surprising thing about that was the amount of time spent on Nick Mason who impressed with his casual virtuosity. There were also a few scenes of the band in the studio talking which did not add much except that it gave us a glimpse in to the genesis of Dark Side of the Moon which would change their world for ever and have a big impact on lots of other people too.

As a film, Pink Floyd at Pompeii was not great and was rescued by the copious amounts of music which made it a good experience of any Pink Floyd fan, like me.

Neil Young Coastal

The only question on the Neil Young Coastal film was where to see it and I opted for the comfort of Olympic Cinema in Barnes where my comfy seat cost me a reasonable £18.5. 

The film was taken on the road during his 2023 solo tour and featured some travel time in his electric bus, some backstage scenes and a decent amount of concert footage. It was all filmed by Neil's wife, Daryl Hannah , and in monochrome. It very much had a home video feel to it and there is nothing wrong with that, in particular the conversations Neil had with his driver were clearly genuine and while they were rarely deep they were also interesting.

The concert footage, which is what I think most people went to see the film for, was interesting for several reasons; there were none of the "greatest hits", a phrase Neil himself used and instead it was mostly new songs, i.e. ones I did not recognise. One song I did recognise was Vampire Blues, from On The Beach (1974), which I had never head Neil play live before.

I am not sure how deliberate it was but over the relatively few songs played Neil used a lot of different instruments and he told us stories about a couple of them, indeed he seemed quite chatty on stage.

Being a documentary of a solo artist playing unknown songs it was all rather low-key. Luckily that artist was Neil Young and he was playing typical Neil Young songs so everything was good. I bought a ticket for his Hyde Park show the next day.

Macbeth at Olympic Theatre

There were two major versions of Macbeth on in London in 2024 and I chose to see the Ralph Fiennes and  Indira Varma version rather than the David Tennant and Crush Jumbo one. There were various reasons for this including the unusual staging of the first at Dock X and having a David Tennant version of Macbeth freely available on BBC Sounds (something BBC does not make enough of). That decision proved to be good and I absolutely loved Macbeth at Dock X.

Due to its obvious popularity the Tennant/Jumbo version returned to the stage and while I was more tempted this time, it being several months since I had seen a Macbeth, the pricing put me off what was not an urgent see.

Then it was broadcast in cinemas and paying just £20 was a lot more tempting than paying, say, £160 for a much worse view in a much less comfortable seat.

I have not yet found a regular pre-theatre place to eat in Barnes and on this evening I ended up having a plant-based burger in Coach and Horses which did the job.

From the start this was a radical version of Macbeth, staged in the round with a plain white stage and no props. The perimeter was black and in there lurked some of the cast, dressed in black, who provided off-stage voices. This included the three witches who we never saw.

The audience were wearing headphones and I never worked out why.

The final technology was the actors' microphones, an unexpected technology given the small size of the theatre. They were small and discrete and while they would have been hardly noticeable to the theatre audience they were very obvious to us watching in cinemas due to the many close-ups.

This was also a slightly abridged version running for about 90 minutes whereas the radio plays are almost 120 minutes. There is a lot of verbiage in Shakespeare so it is easy to cut stuff without impacting the story but while the text is unnecessary it is poetic and I find it hard to believe that it ever makes sense to ever cut any of it. And, rarely, the cuts here were large enough for even me to notice when some of it had gone.

All that said this was still a might fine production of a mighty fine play. The simplicity of the staging and the good lead performers, as at Dock X, allowed the play the space it needed to shine.

NT Live: Prima Facie at Olympic Cinema

Like many people I was tempted when I saw that Jodie Comer would be appearing on stage but the pricing quickly put me off.  This happens quite a lot and I though no more of it until it was broadcast in cinemas as part of National Theatre Live where paying £20 was a much more attractive prospect, as was a comfortable and wide seat in Olympic Cinema Barnes.

My almost non-existant research told me that Jodie Cromer was staring in the play but I had missed that she was the only actor in it. I had also avoided any clues as to the story.

Jodie Cromer plays a young rising barrister who understand well how to get witnesses to say what she wants them to say to get the outcome she wants. She narrates her story directly to us and while there is quite a bit of movement and a few props there is little need for either other than to lift it from a story to a play.

All is going well in her life until she is raped which gives her the role of victim in a judicial system she knew so well. The play makes the good point that victims have a hard time in rapes cases as there are usually no witnesses and the victim's sex life can be used to suggest that the incident was consensual. A good point but one which I think is well understood and it did not need a play to make it.

To make that point, and to contrast her role as barrister then victim, this case went to court but, as is also well known, the vast majority of cases do not and there was not enough evidence in this case to justify a court hearing.

With the story compromised, the play relied on the performance of Jodie Comer and while this was good it was severely constrained by the narrative style which took a lot of the emotion and drama out of the story.

I though that Prima Facie was good but not great and I was glad that I had not paid West End prices to see it.

Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake at Olympic Cinema

I have seen Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake several times, usually at Sadlers Wells, and when a chance Tweet alerted me to it being shown at cinemas I rushed to find a local showing.

Screenings had already started and so my choices were very limited but there was a morning slot at Olympic Cinema in Barnes. I had walked past the building several times and had admired the 1900's architectural style of it so welcomed this chance to go inside.

In less time than it has taken to write this I had booked my ticket for £10.

Getting there was fairly straightforward, two buses, a 65 and a 33, took me more-or-less door to door and in enough time to get a coffee from the cafe in the same building.

It turned out that, somehow that completely escapes me, I had booked for a Babes In Arms screening and the only other people in the cinema where a family with a toddler and a mother with a baby. There was quite a bit of gurgling, whispering and paper rustling but I have had children and am used to ignoring their distracting behaviour.

Besides, this was Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake and it would have taken something quite gruesome to spoil that.

Of course Swan Lake starts with the advantage of Tchaikovsky's sumptuous music and I was silently humming along to all the familiar tunes.

Swan Lake made Matthew Bourne's reputation and it is easy to see why. The choreography is busy with so much going on even in the quieter scenes. I spent a lot of time admiring the details of hand and head movements. This is unapologetic contemporary dance with intricate shapes and unusual movements, so unlike the traditional ballet with its jumps and spins.

And because there is just so much details dancing going on all the time a lot of it had been forgotten and could be enjoyed again as if new.

The story is better too with the fill-in dances in the original ballet being incorporated into the story. This is particularly true with the succession of national dances in the ball scene in Act 3.

It is hard to overstate just how much I enjoyed Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake even on film in a cinema shared with children.

After the film there was only one sensible thing to do and that was to have lunch in the Olympic Restaurant. That was a little more pricey than I am used to, but their menu outside had warned me of that and it was well in the price range of a deserved treat.

I think I will be going back to Olympic Cinema and I will most definitely be seeing Swan Lake again the next time I get the opportunity to do so.

Good at Curzon Richmond

I have been lucky enough to see David Tennant on stage a few times so when he returned to do Good with much publicity I was happy to avoid the west end prices and give it a miss. When it came out on NT Live a few months later that was a very different matter and it went from missable to mandatory.

The NT Live website was not as helpful as it could be in showing me possible dates for local cinemas as it was missing the dates for Curzon Richmond that were on their site. To be sure it was on I took the unusual step of booking in person. The confusion helped me because while other cinemas I had checked had all but sold out this one had sold very few seats and I was able to go for on in the primary position, F11 for £19.5.

I have mixed feelings about seeing films of staged plays as the two media are significantly different but in this case I was glad I had gone for the screen rather than the stage as the play was mostly three talking heads and so the ability to zoom in on the speakers was very useful.

Those three heads were David Tennant as John Halder, a German professor, Elliot Levey as his Jewish friend and Sharon Small as several women in his life including his senile mother.

The story, a fairly simple one, showed how John Halder, a good man, gradually got dragged into Naziism and how he rationalised his decisions along the way, including the abandonment of his friend.

Of course there was a lot more to it than that and the story two engrossing hours to tell.

Obviously the key message was to show how easy it was for a good man to become engulfed in evil but the darker message was to compare the first steps with what is happening in Britain today. When Gary Linekar, and many other, point out the similarity between us and 1930's Germany they are exactly right. 

All three actors were very good and Sharon Small impressed most because of the different rolls she played.

I am still not convinced on films of staged plays but I will keep giving them ago when it lets me see shows like this at a reasonable price.

The Father at Curzon Richmond was superb

I like watching films but am not much of a cinema fan (for reasons that probably make no sense) and am usually happy to wait for them to hit the small screen so it takes something special to drag me out. The Father was certainly special enough to do that.

My primary interest was in the story and the story teller. I had seen the play at Richmond Theatre in 2016 and that had led me to see other Florian Zeller plays subsequently. If any further temptation was needed then the promise of an Oscar winning performance from Anthony Hopkins was more than enough.

It was towards the end of the run at Curzon Richmond before I got organised enough to book and so I found myself going at 8:30pm on a Friday evening.

A pleasant upside of that timing was the opportunity to make a first return visit to Wagamama for a year where a vegan Tofu Firecracker was exceptional. I also had time for a pint in The Olde Ship which was useful after the Firecracker.

This was only my second visit to Curzon Richmond and I had forgotten that I could get a real coffee  to take in, which was a much better option than another beer.

The Father did what I knew it would from having seen the play but it did it in a different way taking advantage of the things that films can do, like change locations quickly.

The simple, poignant, heart-wrenching story was the neurological decline of The Father. It was told from his perspective, though not in the first person, and that meant that characters changed their appearances, changed where they were living and changed what they had said. There were multiple actors playing the same role and also different roles, e.g. two played the daughter and one of those also played a nurse. We were always a little confused as to what was really going on and that gave us just a clue as to how The Father saw things.

Anthony Hopkins was brilliant as The Father as I knew he would be because he had played a similar role with great aplomb in Red 2. He is also a bloody good actor in everything else that I have seen him in.

The rest of the production, including the fabulously furnished flats and the gentle cinematography enriched the experience without ever detracting from the centrepiece of the drama, The Father.

Given the subject matter, neurodisability, it was never going to be an easy film to watch, and nor would it be to everyone's taste, but it held my full attention for an hour and a half and was very rewarding if not, in the usual sense of the word, entertaining. 

Young Marx at Michael Frayn Theatre was a successful experiment

Young Marx was something of an experiment for me as it was my first time at an NT Live broadcast. For some reason I had never been tempted to go to the local cinema to see shows but going to Michael Frayn Theatre, part of Kingston Grammar School's relatively new Queen Elizabeth II Performing Arts Centre, seemed more appropriate.

£10 was a modest price to pay for the experiment and that got me seat G3 which was more or less in the middle vertically and at the edge of the screen (not beyond it) horizontally. It was a perfectly good seat and the decent raking meant that the people in front of me were well clear of my sight line. In that respect the experiment was a complete success even before the show started.

Young Marx was broadcast live from the new Bridge Theatre. I had already booked to see a couple of shows there but Young Marx had not quite appealed enough for me to fork out theatre prices to see it in Central London. That was despite it coming from the team behind One Man, Two Guvnors and it starring Rory Kinnear. That combination was more than enough for me to pay cinema prices to see it locally.

Michael Frayn Theatre also had the advantage of being within walking distance though the early, 7pm, start time meant leaving the house around 6:25pm and walking briskly. That early start was to allow time for an interview with the director, Nicholas Hytner, to be broadcast before the show started. That was an interesting feature and it was also good to see a little of Bridge Theatre before my first visit there.

Young Marx was set in 1850 when a penniless Karl Marx and his family and maid were living in Soho. He was supported financially by Friedrich Engels but still hid from his many creditors, usually in a cupboard. Each welcome visitor to their small lodgings had their own distinctive knock that gave them access. These many visitors included their son's doctor and a syncopathic follower. Engles was keen for Marx to write but Marx was more interested in a visiting the eighteen pubs on Tottenham Court Road.

The story continued with lots of humorous dialogue and a fair smattering of slapstick. It was consistently funny if not outrageously so being constrained by historical facts from taking too fanciful liberties with the situation. The politics at times was used as a source of humour, such as in the opening scene where Marx questions the meaning of the word "value" with a pawnbroker, and at other times it was used to give us serious insights into Marxist philosophy, e.g. a worker is paid 1s but creates 3s value giving the exploitative capitalist 2s (he is right, of course). The accurate historical and political context gave the play an intellectual backbone that made it more satisfying than a simple comedy.

Young Marx was a lot of fun and and my experiment with NT Live was a great success. Future visits are being planned.

Thor: The Dark World

Thor: The Dark World follows on from the first film with all of the same ingredients intact.

It has the same characters and the same actors playing them. This time introductions are dispensed with in the safe assumption that everybody has seen the first film. This brings the action to the fore faster and so is a good thing.

The story is rooted in Norse mythology, that is the mood and characters of the myths rather than the actual stories.

This heritage is particularly helpful in building the city of Asgard which is both ancient and modern at the same time.

The modern dialogue and characterisation add a continual layer of humour on top of a world-threatening plot.

There is nothing heavy or difficult about the story and there are large chunks of it that have been seen before (alignment of celestial bodies, etc.) but it does enough to carry the film along while the little touches, like the dialogue, add the texture.

It is all very watchable and it easily kept me entertained for the best part of two hours. I could ask for no more though having seen it at the cinema I'll not be rushing out to get the DVD. I'll watch it again when it hits TV in a couple of years though.

Kick Ass 2 lived up to expectations

I do not venture to the cinema so often these days, mainly because films get to DVD so quickly now, so it was a little strange to find myself back there watching Kick Ass 2 so soon after watching Red 2.

There are a lot of similarities between them, and some notable differences too. Both are based on comics (Red much less so) and both feature comic violence and comedy. Red is not Die Hard and Kick Ass is not Batman.

Both sequels copied the mood and style of their originals and, therefore, gave their fans just what they expected and what they wanted.

Whereas Red 2 just reused the characters from Red, Kick Ass 2 continued to retell the story of the comic. That made Kick Ass 2 more like Kick Ass Chapter 2 than a Second Kick Ass as it continued where Kick Ass finished off and took the main characters in some new directions, such as Mindy coming to terms with being an orphan and a teenage girl.

The story is a key part of Kick Ass 2 but I'll not say much about it because that's what spoilers do.

Otherwise it is much the same as Kick Ass with ludicrous violence, none of which feels remotely real, and strong language, though I only spotted one c-bomb and that was in Russian (with a helpful English text translation).

That there is more of a story this time around makes the film more gripping and engaging, there were several threads where I really cared about what happened next.

Jim Carrey is (almost) the only name actor in it, taking this role from Nicholas Cage who died in Kick Ass. Carrey is surprisingly good and un-Carrey-like, a view derived from only seeing him previously in films like The Mask and The Grinch. This Carrey may be a little weird but he is not wacky. There is also a brief spot for Iain Glen, which was a pleasant surprise having seen him on stage earlier this year staring in a Chekhov play.

Hit Girl provides some of the best moments as there is something enchanting and cute watching a young teenage girl cut a team of tough baddies in to shreds (literally).

Kick Ass 2 builds on Kick Ass with skill, flair and a story. That makes II better than I and raises the bar for III.

Skyfall is the Bond film you always wanted to see

If I am not mistaken, the last Bond film that I went to the cinema to see was The Man with the Golden Gun and that was back in 1974. I would normally wait for the DVD these days but I was tempted in to the Odeon Richmond by the overwhelmingly positive reviews, mostly from friends on Twitter, and a free Monday evening.

The reviews are essentially right. Skyfall is a positive restart for Bond. Gone are the sillier gadgets and the incessant womanising, though these are not lost completely, this is still Bond after all.

Similarly a lot of the action takes place in the UK rather than gratuitous foreign beauty spots, not that they are completely absent either. There is a believable baddie and a coming-of-age plot that kills off a few current themes and sets up some new ones.

It is all rather neat and tidy and sets Bond up nicely for the next fifty years.

All that is very good but there is one serious drawback. This is Bond as Batman. To be specific this is Bond as Batman in The Dark Knight. If you do not want to know why then stop reading!

Raoul Silva is the Joker. He thinks and moves like the Joker and, more importantly, he makes the "two rats" analogy just like the Joker claims that he and Batman are like each other and so are natural opponents. Bond's mother, M, is killed. Bond's ancestral home is destroyed.

The deliberate copying, and it is hard to believe that it could be anything else, is a negative that the film struggles to overcome. It does that well enough for the copying to be forgiven if not forgotten. It is still a very good film and I will be buying the DVD.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Films escape on to DVD so quickly these days that it takes something pretty unusual to entice me in to the cinema.

Previously that has been things like Avatar in 3D and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, the final instalment of the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson (the original version in Swedish, of course).

This time it was just the happy circumstance of being near a cinema, on a free afternoon, when I film I quite fancied watching was just about to start.

Having the Odeon iPhone app to hand helped make this happen.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (a.k.a. MI4) arrived five years after MI3 which is a long time to wait for another chapter.

MI4 acknowledges its place in the canon. Some characters from previous stories appear, including one of the core team with Ethan, and we also hear what happened to Ethan's wife who played a large part in the previous film.

The Ghost Protocol is a simple but clever device to simplify the technology deployed which (mostly) takes us away from the high-tech stunts that have characterised some of the previous films.

This helps to make the film less episodic and more continuous with the stunts supporting the plot rather than the other way round. Overall the feel is more like the old TV series where there is more drama from the possibility of their schemes being detected than from them going wrong.

Of course there are stunts and the main one is the climb of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the worlds tallest building.

This was a little overpowering for someone with my vertiginous tendencies and I found myself sliding back in my seat so that I would not fall of it.

And that was typical of the film; tense, dramatic and exciting. The plot twisted nicely a couple of times too, sometimes to twist again in another direction.

I went in to the cinema expecting something classy and clever but essentially superficial. What I got was a lot more. This is a really good film and leaves you panting for MI5.

The only thing that let it down was the end. The very end. As Ethan walks towards the camera for the last time he has clearly got his iPhone earphones on the wrong way round. Somebody should tell him the microphone goes on the right.

Feasting on Avatar in 3D

I do not tend to go to the cinema that often but it is the holiday season and Avatar 3D is on so it seemed like a good way to spend a Saturday evening. Preceded by the usual visit to Pizza Express, of course.

Apart from the graphics I was not sure what to expect. What Avatar delivers in spades is a visual feast with just enough of a plot, simple and obvious though it is, to hang it all together for a thrilling two and a half hours.

The CGI is stunning, so much so that I was not sure at times if we were looking at real faces or computer generated ones.

But if the faces were good then the scenery and animals were even better.

The alien flora and fauna reminded me of the alien worlds that sprung from Philip Jose Farmer's fertile imagination, and that's a compliment to the creative minds that devised them.

The landscapes were also fantastic but floating mountains and large stone archways reminded me of Roger Dean's fantasy art that adorns many of my favourite albums for the 1970s when prog rock ruled (and rightly so).

I've shown here just a couple of examples of Roger Dean's work that are similar to scenes in Avatar but there are twenty eight examples at io9.com.

Roger Dean's own website also recognises the issue without making a direct comment; it simply suggests that you do a google search for "avatar roger dean" and draw your own conclusion. I'm convinced.

I'm less convinced about the 3D. There were no spears thrown into the audience or other such extreme effects but there did seem to be a greater depth to the image and some objects, such as the airborne seeds, did seem to hover above the audience.

I will just have to watch it in 2D next time to spot the differences. Hopefully they will not be that big otherwise I'll be forced to buy a 3D home entertainment system before too long!

But, the minor quibbles do not detract from what is a great cinematic experience. Avatar 3D has set a new standard for visual impact and I am delighted that I have had the opportunity to savour it.