The Week’s best film, TV, book and live show on this weekend, with excerpts from the top reviews.
TELEVISION: The Nest
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“The Nest is a Glasgow-set surrogacy thriller which explores the life-changing consequences of a wealthy couple asking a teenage girl to carry their baby. Dan and Emily are madly in love and have been trying for a baby for years – with an enormous house in the poshest area of Glasgow, the only thing missing from their perfect lives is a child. By chance, the couple meet 18-year-old Kaya who lives at the other end of town and whose life is a lot more precarious than theirs. Kaya agrees to carry their baby, but there’s a mystery around who Kaya really is and what has brought her into the couples' lives.”
Episode one airs Sunday 22 March at 9pm on BBC One
MOVIE: Extra Ordinary
Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian
“There are belting laughs and great performances, and, unlike so many Hollywood comedies, the funny stuff doesn’t bleed out as the plot grinds into action for the increasingly sentimental second and third acts. And, unlike some British indies, it never sacrifices comedy to the easier mannerism of being “dark”; it just keeps being funny while at the same time weirdly touching…There’s pretty much a great line or visual gag for every minute of running time, some colossal ‘daemonic possession’ acting from Ward. Plus there’s an outrageously orgasmic ending. A treat.”
On Netflix UK from 17 March
BOOK: Machiavelli: His Life and Times by Alexander Lee
Michael Prodger in The Times
“The Prince is an instruction manual for 16th-century rulers detailing how they should grab and consolidate power and why unscrupulous methods — deceit, cunning, brute force, political murder — were not just useful but essential tools in the enterprise. By adopting a cynical approach to power, Machiavelli preached, a ruler could — with ‘manly’ courage — bend fortune and his subjects to his will. It was a case, however, of do as I say and not as I do…Love and lust were in permanent conflict, and there is a truly disgusting, if exaggerated, letter he sent to a friend after breaking his ‘conjugal famine’ while away on envoy duty and having sex with a laundress’s maid; when he saw her in the light, he claimed, ‘I threw up all over her.’”
Published 19 March
STAGE: The Show Must Go Online
“Robert Myles today announces The Show Must Go Online, an online group that will read the complete plays of William Shakespeare in the order they were written, livestreamed on YouTube. Bringing actors and audiences together to collectively enjoy and experience Shakespeare at a time when connecting in a traditional theatre space isn't possible... It's all over Twitter right now that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while quarantined by the plague - if he carried on, we can too.”
The first livestream will be of The Two Gentleman of Verona on Thursday 19 March, 7pm, on YouTube
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