The Week’s best film, TV, book and live show on this weekend, with excerpts from the top reviews.
TELEVISION: Glastonbury 2019
Will Hodgkinson in The Times
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“Michael ‘Stormzy’ Omari, 25, is an essential at this year’s festival chiefly because his astonishing ascent to the heart of the mainstream is so unprecedented... Hip-hop and grime doesn’t always work well at big festivals; who can forget the Kanye West debacle of Glastonbury 2015? Perhaps Stormzy has the charisma to fill not only his size 12 boots, but the Pyramid stage too. It could just go down in history.”
On BBC Two and BBC Four on Friday, Saturday and Sunday
FILM: In Fabric
Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph
“In Fabric centres on a beauty: a mysterious Thames Valley department store called Dentley & Soper, where witchy sales assistants glide around in gothic gowns and purr to prospective customers about the “panoply of temptation” that awaits them inside... A fusion of English class-driven retail comedy and European slasher scares – call it Are You Being Severed? – that is as funny and beautiful and troubling as anything I have seen this year.”
Out on 28 June
BOOK: I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution, by Emily Nussbaum
The New York Times
“Nussbaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic for The New Yorker, makes a case for the critical cultural importance of TV. The essays in this collection are far-ranging, touching on everything from creative ambition and the shows that shaped her (like ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’), as well as how to grapple with artists implicated in the #MeToo movement.”
Out on 25 June
SHOW: Present Laughter
Paul Taylor at The Independent
“There’s an abundance of laughter – present and deliciously incorrect – in Matthew Warchus’s glorious revival of semi-autobiographical play Present Laughter by Noel Coward (first produced in 1942). It focuses on a self-involved 41-year-old matinee idol, who finds his reputation for professional discipline undermined by the early stirrings of a midlife crisis. Playing this clever, economically revealing caricature of Coward’s real-life persona is Andrew Scott, best known to the general public for his drolly wicked turns as the priest in Fleabag and as flirty villain Moriarty in Sherlock. This production reconfirms, though, that he is a consummate stage actor. No one can elicit as many colours and tones as he can from operating at the comically frantic end of the psychological spectrum. Terrific fun; warmly receommended.”
At the Old Vic, London, until 10 August
