California Literary Review

Web Site:

http://quiteirregular.wordpress.com/

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

• Sherlock Recap: ‘The Reichenbach Fall’
  Posted on 21 May 2012 in Mystery, Television, The Fourth Wall
  

  Now, this is the premise of the episode. What it asks us to accept in order for the story to get going. So it seems unreasonable to carp. But am I the only one who feels that if you can use a mobile phone to break into three of the most secure places in Britain in the first five minutes, then we should probably all pack up and go home?

• Sherlock Recap: ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’
  Posted on 14 May 2012 in Television, The Fourth Wall
  

  The whole episode seemed to revolve around questions of perception and memory, and the way recognising something as impossible can’t stop it hurting you. Could that be the real terror at the centre of this version of Gothic: knowing it’s all a nightmare without that knowledge giving you any power to stop it?

• Sherlock Recap: ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’
  Posted on 06 May 2012 in Television, The Fourth Wall
  

  Sherlock sits humming at the intersection between our sulky obsession with the Victorians, our fascination with the idea that information is in the very air we’re breathing, and our fear that other people could use that information to harm us. There’s a lot to be beguiled by in this series.

• Less Than Kind by Terence Rattigan: Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, England.
  Posted on 15 Feb 2012 in Blog-Theater, Theatre
  

  It’s Rattigan’s attempt to take the basic Hamlet situation and write a play which is both funnier (more jokes and stronger sense of the ludicrous in life) and more serious (more realistic and less willing to solve everything with corpses.) If you’ll allow him the chutzpah, it’s much more fun than it sounds.

• Neighbourhood Watch by Alan Ayckbourn. Pre-West End Tour.
  Posted on 10 Feb 2012 in Blog-Theater, Theatre
  

  Neighbourhood Watch never feels like an “issue” play, but the London riots, the increasingly draconian Law and Order rhetoric from the Conservative-led government, and a series of police shootings make it exceptionally timely.

• Hamlet, starring Michael Sheen at the Young Vic, London
  Posted on 27 Jan 2012 in Blog-Theater, Theatre
  

  The psychiatric setting also forces – or helps – the production into a particular vision of the play. In some ways this is quite an old-fashioned take, with Hamlet framed as a study of a mind in disintegration.

• Book Review: The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex: What’s Wrong With Modern Movies? by Mark Kermode
  Posted on 09 Jan 2012 in Books, Movies, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  His opinions, though held intensely and vocally, are often unpredictable: he has long maintained The Exorcist to be the greatest film ever made, but has also in the past championed the work of Zac Efron and the Twilight franchise, and has recently taken to insisting that Jaws is actually a movie about adultery rather than, say, a large shark.

• Book Review: The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco
  Posted on 04 Jan 2012 in Books, Fiction Reviews, Historical Fiction
  

  So for those who may have been a little lost amidst the religious politics of The Name of the Rose or the Byzantine byways of Foucault’s Pendulum, this latest might seem to offer a more secure footing from which to enjoy Eco’s intellectual gymnastics. If the endpoint of the novel is The Protocols and mid-century European anti-Semitism, that’s handy. We know what we think about that.

• Dance Review: The Nutcracker, English National Ballet at The Coliseum, London
  Posted on 31 Dec 2011 in Blog-Dance, Dance
  

  For once the Mouse King is a genuinely compelling villain: his mask is a giant rodent’s skull with red eyes, his costume is murkily tatty and his dancing has a blend of exuberance and creepiness which makes him a joy to watch. James Streeter is the first Mouse King I’ve seen that Clara should be afraid of.

• Book Review: The Hillary Effect by Taylor Marsh
  Posted on 20 Dec 2011 in Books, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics
  

  There may not be space in a blog post to let the reader weigh the words and come to their own conclusion, guided by your discreet commentary, but this habit of GLOSSING EVERYTHING IN ALL CAPS grates across two hundred and fifty pages. There’s little rhetorical virtue in having the last word in your own paragraph.

• One Man, Two Guvnors, Adelphi Theatre, London
  Posted on 16 Dec 2011 in Blog-Theater, Theatre
  

  For this show is funny. I mean, it is really funny. Not the kind of funny you might associate with a National Theatre adaptation of an eighteenth-century Italian play. It’s splutteringly, potato-throwingly, unreasonably hilarious.

• Ross Noble and Friends, Cranleigh Arts Centre, England
  Posted on 16 Dec 2011 in Blog-Theater, Humor, Theatre
  

  It showcased all of Noble’s best points: the delight in the ludicrous, the ideas tripping over each other to get out and the revelling in how foolish he may look to an audience. And of course The Voice.

• Theatre Review: Noel Coward’s Star Quality, Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, England
  Posted on 09 Dec 2011 in Blog-Theater, Theatre
  

  There’s a feeling you get about ten minutes into a Noel Coward play. The lights have come up, the set has been admired, the opening salvoes exchanged and then – whether it’s Hay Fever, Present Laughter or Private Lives – you realize that we’re in here for the duration. It’s like a moment of mild claustrophobia.

• Theatre Review: The Holly and the Ivy, Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, England
  Posted on 02 Dec 2011 in Blog-Theater, Theatre
  

  The characters are built with that terrific assurance of some mid-century writers (C.P. Snow and Anthony Powell spring to mind), which balances the need for them to represent social types or attitudes to life, whilst also allowing them rein to be individual and surprising.

• Theatre Review: Three Days in May, Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, England
  Posted on 28 Nov 2011 in Blog-Theater, Theatre
  

  Clarke certainly made good on his obligations. He barked, he grunted, he rumbled, and, once you got used to the fact that he was acting on a slightly more heightened plane than the rest of the cast, he gave a surprisingly subtle account of a figure who was larger than life even during his life.