Kinds of Kindness – Yorgos Lanthimos’ fantasy triptych where the overall effect is less than the sum of its parts

Kinds of Kindness is a comedy/fantasy triptych, with thematic connections, shared cast members, and some pretty absurb goings on. It’s the latest release from director Yorgos Lanthimos (co-written by Efthimis Filippou) and it’s a disappointment.

The Lobster was absurd and satirical. The Killing of a Sacred Deer was long and unsettling. The Favourite allowed a young Emma Stone to barge into the strong womance between characters played by Olivia Colman and Lady Sarah. Poor Things was full of extraordinary performances, an astonishing piece of world-building that sought to be liberating but raised questions about male control, gaze and abuse.

Kinds of Kindness is simpler and much less over the top.

In part one, Robert Fletcher (Jesse Plemons) is given precise instructions by his boss (Willem Dafoe) to direct his day. Robert follows every order bar one to violently crash into a car and kill its driver. The full extent of the spider’s web of coercive control is revealed. The busted tennis racquet prop is exquisite. The ending of this section is violent but terribly satisfying. The opening track –Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics – is very well chosen: “… / Everybody's lookin' for something / Some of them want to use you / Some of them want to get used by you / Some of them want to abuse you / Some of them want to be abused / …”

The second story picks up a recurring ideas of hurt limbs, weight and food, and copious quantities of controlling behaviour. A missing woman (Emma Stone) returns home but she’s not the woman her husband (Jesse Plemons) remembered. Despite the conclusion, it’s a thumbs down from me.

The final part – by far the longest –imagines a couple of cult members (Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons) on a mission to find a woman with healing powers that can resurrect the dead. The cult leader, Omi (Willem Dafoe) is incredibly creepy. Margaret Qualley is great playing twin sisters Ruth and Rebecca. There’s an extreme close-up of snogging which would make a great video art exhibition. And Emma Stone’s final dance is nearly worth the ticket price alone.

Weaving the themes together and reusing the same cast is clever. But the overall effect is less than the sum of its parts. Jesse Plemons shows off his versatility. Emma Stone is an intriguing presence on screen. But there’s too much thinking and not enough entertainment.

Kinds of Kindness is being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre, Odeon, Cineworld and some Movie House and Omniplex cinemas.

  

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Five Year Stand – Twinbrook meets Malone Road in a coming-of-age play that eschews stereotypes (Brunswick Productions at Grand Opera House until Saturday 29 June)

This week has been a bit of a treat with two great shows to review at the Grand Opera House. One a well-established award-winning musical, Come From Away.  The other, Five Year Stand, is a new piece of writing with gripping performances and a lot of potential. Both wore their emotion very much on their sleeves.

When Shane collides with Úna in a nightclub, it launches an avalanche of spilt drink, spilt tears, and spilt home truths that stretch over their five-year relationship. Sarah Reid and Matthew Blaney play the two protagonists: an abrupt, feisty, straight-talking daughter of west Belfast, and a middle class, academically minded, south Belfast boy. At first the couple are delightfully awkward, with wind-up merchant Úna taking the lead before agreeing to give a long distance romance a try when Shane flies off to study law in London.

The audience first meet the couple who are in a pensive and reflective mood – as well as a tad sleepy and hungover – after a reunion that reeks of uncertainty. Episodic flashbacks fill in details of their earlier courtship, before and after Covid, as well as before and after Úna’s loss of a close family member. While socially loud, Úna is – at least at first – emotionally self-sufficient. But Covid and caring responsibilities flip that on its head. And then jealousy enters via a fissure in the friendship.

Director Ewan McGowan-Gregg (The 4 Worst Things I’ve Ever Done) creates a believable intimacy between the characters – and the performers – even though they barely ever touch. Devised by the cast and creative team in the rehearsal room (assistant director Beth Strahan, Rory Gray and Rosie McWilliams are credited along with the director and actors), the show conjures up a very neat ‘full circle’ ending that looks great on stage. However, it requires some agile jumping up and down the couple’s timeline to fit the parts together and that slightly distracted me from the action on stage.

Rory Gray’s bifurcated lighting design can split neatly the two sides of Shane’s sofa into light and shade, heralding flashbacks and scene changes in an instant. Reid acts with her fingertips and her shoulders, signalling confidence as well as anxiety and distress, and is forever catching the eye of audience members as she opens up Úna’s heart rather than simply staring through them.

The fulcrum of the whole play comes about 60 minutes in when Shane makes the speech of his life, heartfelt and finally in tune with the woman standing in front of him. It’s a powerful moment that Blaney nails with a striking intensity and a sense of understanding Úna’s vulnerability.

A more modest story would have riffed off Shane’s rugby playing and turned him into a yobbish lad. A cheaper depiction of Úna would have used her ex-boyfriend as a means to seeking forgiveness. A less assured team of writers would have insisted on tying everything up with a saccharine-rich conclusion. Five Year Stand requires none of these old notions and instead crafts a tale where, despite their wonky bond, there’s a deep respect and active demonstration of consent on show. Very modern, and totally flying in the face of most theatre that requires the opposite to be true for dramatic effect.

Five Year Stand’s run in the Grand Opera House upstairs studio continues until Saturday 29 June. I’m so glad I got to see this during its first run. It’s a real treat and the sharpest piece of new writing I’ve seen in the first six months of 2024.

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Come From Away – hospitality, thankfulness and oddles of humanity (Grand Opera House until Saturday 29 June)

It’s as if Come From Away has been soaked in empathy and left to stew. The people of Gander and the passengers who unexpectedly camp out for five days when their transatlantic flights are grounded in Newfoundland in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, bond through friendship, food and faith, despite lingering fears. The population nearly doubles as air traffic controllers issue instructions to ground flights crossing the Atlantic on the first landfall.

As the confusion lifts and the everyday preoccupations dissolve as a town rises to the occasion, and small-scale acts of human kindness combine with community-wide acts of compassion. And there is spirit of thankfulness, not begrudging, but heartfelt as everyone comes to terms with their temporary situation and a world that changed for the worse between take-off and landing.

Irene Sankoff and David Hein’s musical, directed by Christoper Ashley, rarely drops the cracking pace it sets right from the word go: sitting in the stalls you certainly feel that “you’ve at the start of a moment”.

Howell Blinkley’s dense grid of lights over the stage bring a focus to individual chairs before the full beam of the side lights mounted on the tall tree trunks that populate the wings flood the stage for scenes in the local bar.

There’s a real Celtic feel to the production. The accents of Gander have a natural Irish twang. A talented band of eight musicians sit on stage and at times move among the actors with fiddles and whistles and pipes. The audience in Belfast feel at home with the Titanic gag(s).

As the individual character storylines develop, the songs – part sung part spoken – bring coherence back to the narrative. Lead Us Out of the Night is mellow and incredibly moving as passengers and crew see TV footage of the 9/11 attacks for the first time. Later on, the one-act production includes perhaps the most tuneful version of Make Me A Channel of Your Peace, a song that many a school assembly or congregation has killed. It’s melded together with another two religions songs of peace as people of faith reach for familiar words to express their lament.

The show honours humanity (mostly) at its best.

The storyline about a Muslim chef who is seen as threatening, whose offers of help are continually dismissed, is eventually able to be useful, and then reverts to being seem as a threat provides a timely reminder of the racism that 9/11 exacerbated. Hannah’s long wait to hear news about her missing son, a New York fireman, regularly reconnects the audience to the loss and destruction that precipitated the Gander landings.

While the UK touring version of Come From Away doesn’t include the dynamism of the revolving stage in the Broadway production (which can still be enjoyed on Apple TV+) the cast of 12 follow a tight choreography that almost casually – yet incredibly precisely – moves chairs across the stage to create new scenes, delivering jackets lying over the back of them to just the right place to be picked up and transform an actor from a townsperson and an airline employee and back.

Come From Away finishes its run in the Grand Opera House on Saturday 29 June. Get a ticket and bring more than one tissue. It’s well worth stepping onto this emotional roller coaster.

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Pirate Queen – site-specific theatre for all the family (Green Room Productions NI)

While beforehand I always worry about the effect of the weather on outdoor theatre performances, I should be more relaxed as shows like Tinderbox’s Sylvan worked in the drizzle and any number of perambulatory walking tours wearing headphones have survived extreme heat and damp conditions.

Leaving the weather aside, a better concern should be whether there’s an ice cream van near the stage. That was the case in the playpark outside Millisle, but may not be for next week’s sold out production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the Lyric Theatre.

As we stood around the boat-shaped climbing frame in the playground, a musical intro and some ‘parish announcements’ set the relaxed tone for the 30 minute performance of Pirate Queen.

It’s a child-friendly account of the life and times of Gráinne Ní Mháille (Grace O’Malley, often Anglicised to Granuaile) who was born in 1530 and unlike many of her children and husbands lived to the ripe old age of 73.

She picked up a love of the sea from her father and was initially disappointed to be married off to landlubber Dónal an Chogaidh Ó Flaithbheartaigh: good for building alliances between clans, but not so good for swashbuckling adventures on the high seas.

However, his death was followed by the opportunity for Granuaile to “defend her people against the English oppressor”, leading to a 1593 audience with Queen Elizabeth and a peaceful if not immediate resolution of hostilities (after a fashion).

The story zips along, never more than a few minutes away from another song – beautiful harmonies from the three actors who also played drums, fiddle, tin whistle and guitar – or the chance to walk around the climbing frame ship to view proceedings from another angle. Lots of interruptions, humorous asides, and very gentle audience participation. And only in a playground can actors ‘exit stage left’ down a plastic slide.

Cat Barter, Adam Dougal and Anna Keenan-Laverty weave in and out of English and Irish names and lyrics with ease, and managed to keep a twinkle in their eyes even as the sun burnt a hole in the bright blue sky and tried to melt them. Full of charm, yet not downplaying the treacherous times in which it’s set. Site-specific work can be challenging to write, perform, finance and produce. However, it can connect audiences with a place – even a wooden ship in a playground – in a way a traditional theatre space will take longer to achieve.

Pirate Queen was written by Clare McMahon, directed by Patsy Montgomery-Hughes and produced by Green Room Productions NI. It was performed in Ballywalter and Millisle, and will hopefully get a chance to set sail again.

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The Dead Don’t Hurt – Viggo Mortensen’s impressive tussle between romance and western (cinemas across UK and Ireland from Friday 7 June)

Shots are fired in a hostelry. Tick. An officer of the law is shot in a dusty town square, falling to the ground and lying face-down motionless. Tick. Someone rides off into the distance on a horse. Tick. The goat joins the townsfolk to watch an innocent man incapable of defending himself being hung. Tick …

The Dead Don’t Hurt initially has all the hallmarks of a western. Until Viggo Mortensen – who is writer, director, actor and composer – splices up the story and stitches it back together in a series of flashbacks and flash forwards, part romance, part western. (The delicate touch of film editor Peder Pedersen should take a lot of the credit for the success of this bold storytelling.) It’s almost like long hair being platted, weaving together the different strands to form a recognisable, neatly constructed pattern of beauty.

Soon we’re seeing a young French-Canadian girl who is fascinated with Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) and grows up into an independent spirited woman Vivienne (Vicky Krieps) who falls in (love) with a Danish immigrant carpenter Olsen (Viggo Mortensen). They set up home on the outskirts of a town in the state of Nevada. She grows flowers and gets a job in the local saloon. The romance builds. “You’re more handy with every passing day” … right up to the moment Olsen decides to go off to fight in the Civil War.

Then the western aspect takes back control. Solly McLeod plays Weston Jeffries, the violent and untamed son of a local businessman. The mayor is crooked. The local judge administers justice through the medium of preaching.

For the period of the war, Olsen is off-screen, fittingly because this is a portrait of Vivienne and a vehicle that shows off Krieps’ character acting. Before and after – that’s not a spoiler given the open five minutes of the film – he’s a man of few words and unsentimental. The couple can almost converse by facial expression. Her smile melts his heart. His loyalty is tested. Violence begets violence. And the western urges finally overcome the film’s romantic notions.

While the runtime is long, the teasing out of the key moments in Vivienne and Olsen’s lives is fulfilling. The Dead Don’t Hurt is being screened in the Queen’s Film Theatre, The Avenue and Cineworld Belfast from Friday 7 June.

 

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Docs Ireland – a 6 day, 108 film, celebration of documentary filmmaking (18-23 June) #docsireland6

Coming up in a few weeks time will be 108 films packed into six days of Docs Ireland, a festival of international documentary film. Local talent from this island will be celebrated along with worldwide examples from a whole range of styles of documentary filmmaking.

Tuesday 18 June

The Flats // The opening night film promises to be a treat. Alessandra Celesia directed The Bookseller of Belfast, a 2012 film centred around John Clancy, a north Belfast man of letters who ran a second-hand bookshop in Smithfield and built a community around his passion for words. Celesia is a fabulous storyteller who can elevate the mundane to the memorable. Twelve years on, the filmmaker is the New Lodge, telling the story of tower-block dwellers whose lives continue to be impacted by how the Troubles devastated their neighbourhood. I’ll be there to find out if the Jolene featured in The Flats is the same Jolene who served up John’s fries in his local greasy spoon.

Wednesday 19 June

Two shorts by acclaimed broadcaster, documentary maker and musician David Hammond are being shown at noon at QUB: the playful Dusty Bluebells and Something to Write Home About (a meditation presented by Seamus Heaney). Another Hammond-directed film The Magic Fiddle is being screened on Friday 21 at noon in the Ulster Museum.

Thursday 20 June

I See a Darkness // A film essay that probes the historical relationship between photography, cinema and science using the lives and work of Irish chrono-photographer Lucien Bell, MIT professor and atomic test photographer Harold E Edgerton, and oceanographer/conservationalist Jacques Cousteau.

Home Invasion // An offbeat essay about the history of the doorbell.

Once Upon a Time in a Forest // Each generation lives with the consequences of it’s ancestor’s actions. A modern fairy tale in the enchanting embrace of a Finnish forest.

Saturday 22 June

Anatomy of the Cut // If you’re interested in non-fiction storytelling and the art of editing documentaries together, join a handful of editors in conversation with Mick Mahon (Gaza; I, Dolours; Nothing Compares) in the Black Box at lunchtime.

Hollywoodgate // Filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at spent a year observing the Taliban as they took over the Hollywood Gate complex (claimed to be a former Kabul CIA base) in the immediate aftermath of the US withgrawal from Afghanistan. [reviewed]

Sunday 23 June

The Ban // Roisin Agnew’s new film about British government’s ban on the voices of Sinn Féin and Irish republican and loyalist paramilitry representatives being used on televison and radio. Did the threat of terrorism justify censorship?

No Other Land // The festival closes with a film that follows a Palestinian activist who records the destruction of his region in the West Bank, with the help of an Israeli journalist who befriends him. Their across the divide friendship turns out to be unsettled and exposes divisions of security, freedom and living conditions.

Ahead of the main festival, it might also be worth catching The Moon Beneath the Water (Wednesday 12 June), a poetic trip full of magic realism through time and nature around Erto, one of the two villages in the Italian Alps that survived the Vajont Dam disaster on 9 October 1963. The landslide and flood killed almost 2,000 people, and destroyed five villages in the Piave valley, yet Erto and nearby Casso only sustained minor damage.

The full programme can be explored on the Docs Ireland website (and downloaded as a PDF).

Hoard – a soul-chilling coming-of-age debut about grief and neglect from Luna Carmoon (Queen’s Film Theatre until Thursday 6 June)

Within 24 hours of watching the film Hoard, I had filled the recycling bin to the brim and was making a plan to deal with the plastic Ikea boxes overloaded with USB cables of varying shapes and sizes. It’s a deeply-affecting film that’s hard to shake off.

The first half hour of Luna Carmoon’s directorial debut is a haunting depiction of a single mum Cynthia and her daughter Maria living in a house that is beyond cluttered. Cynthia’s compulsion to hoard means she heads out at night to hoke through other people’s bins to find wonderful curiosities. As a result, Maria is perpetually tired in school, having spent the previous evening being wheeled around the neighbourhood in a shopping trolley along with the collectables. No teacher ever thinks to stop and ask why she’s tired before scolding her.

Cynthia believes that her treasures are a sign of her devotion towards Maria. Vivid performances from Hayley Squires and Lily-Beau Leach firmly establish the bond between mother and daughter. Little baby rats and the sometimes-illusive household ferret add warmth to the squalor. Every aspect of their lives is obsessive: with a family song or rhyme for every occasion, long duration screams, and vivid imaginations. Hoard is a vision of what happens when someone loses control, with the devastating consequences playing out for those close to them.

Nanu Segal’s stunning cinematography makes a playful scene under a blanket feel like something straight out of Macbeth. Everything screams of the cast having a blast filming the scenes. While Maria’s homelife is distressing, much more upsetting is a man exposing himself to the young girl as she walks home one night. That moment allows the audience to begin to build a hierarchy of neglect and abuse that will be updated in the remaining ninety minutes.

The transition from young Maria to adolescent Maria (Saura Lightfoot Leon) is beautifully handled. Now living in care, we watch the vulnerable teenager adapt to how her foster mum Michelle (Samantha Spiro) runs a household. Watch out for mirroring in the costume palettes. An extended visit by a former foster child Michael (Joseph Quinn) disrupts and thoroughly disturbs as Maria finds ways to reconnect with her birth mother while growing up into adulthood.

Over two hours long, Hoard slightly overstays its welcome. The brilliance of the taut opening setup contrasts with the sprawling analysis of grief and self-harm. But it’s a coming-of-age film that will chill your soul and preoccupy your thinking for days to come.

Hoard is being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre until Thursday 6 June.

 

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Chronicles of Long Kesh – a harrowing dip into painful history (GBL Productions at Grand Opera House until Saturday 8 June)

Belfast is awash with harrowing theatre at the moment. Over in the Lyric, Keith Singleton leads a cast who are delivering stellar performances in Prime Cut’s The Pillowman. Tonight, it was the turn of the Grand Opera House with a restaging of Martin Lynch’s 2009 play Chronicles of Long Kesh.

Over two and half hours we’re reminded of the violent events on the streets of this place, carried out by – and in the name of – paramilitaries and state forces, as well as examples of the violent events inside prison, specifically the Maze Long Kesh, again carried out by paramilitaries and officers.

At the start, Oscar is the Commanding Officer in his compound. Marty Maguire revisits this showman with his great voice and staggering falsetto, bringing to life the upbeat character who drills the other men on the wing. The contrast between the beginning and the moment Oscar loses his mojo is stark.

Toot was interned – wrong place, wrong time, though he’s no saint – the first time he ends up behind bars. Gerard McCabe has great fun with this soft-headed clampit who has a fixation with seagulls and provides much of the light in an otherwise shady story. Shaun Blaney’s Eamon is drawn further and further into the republican movement, eventually ending up as a ‘blanket man’ and considers volunteering for the hunger strike. He also teaches Toot to read.

Jo Donnelly excels as the loyalist supremo Thumper, a man who misses the boat on getting an education and ultimately fritters away the opportunities that might have turned his life around. Bob Dylan-loving loyalist Hank is played by Warren McCook. But the real drama is always over in the republican compounds.

Lisa May co-directs Chronicles and her stylised frozen action choreography along with James McFetridge’s focussed lighting allows prison officer Freddie to step forward and provide the context – for much is needed as we speed through history – of who the characters are and what’s happening inside and outside the prison. Like all the characters, Jimmy Doran’s Freddie life is affected by what happens at work. The darkness of the black set and props echoes the depression that falls over the inmates and their officers.

A long first act reaches its crescendo with the beginning of the first hunger strike. After the interval, the drama switched from stage to the stalls, with phone calls galore, someone answering a call from their taxi firm, taking a photograph with their phone’s flash on, and constant loud side conversations with deep voices that distracted from key moments on stage. Lots of shushing from those seated around them was ignored: in fact, this all came from a group who had moved forward to empty seats at the interval and were joking about having been shushed on the way out. If only the Grand Opera House had a slammer to throw them in …

The second act is caught in a conundrum. Early on, a lot of Tamla Motown music is used – all performed with beautiful a cappella harmonies by the cast with only the beat of a stick on the wooden set to accompany them – to inject pace back into the performances. But the oppressive events inside and outside the prison mean that even music can’t lift everyone’s mood in the audience.

The cast’s rendition of Long Time Coming after the republican inmates hear about the death of Bobby Sands is a beautiful moment of theatre, absent of romanticism, but thick with grief, loss, pain and pity.

While Martin Lynch’s play doesn’t teach us anything new about the Troubles or the prison system, and it defiantly ignores victims to focus on the experience of the perpetrators – most of whom also qualify as victims in one sense or another – it does creatively mark a passage of history that should not be forgotten. Like the heavy black boxes that form the set, the constant sense of separation that rains down on the prisoners and officer Freddie can shift around but can never leave the stage.

Chronicles of Long Kesh continues its run at the Grand Opera House until Saturday 8 June before continuing its NI tour. 

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