What’s on this weekend? From Hail Satan? to Fleabag’s return to the stage

(Image credit: Dogwoof)

By The Week Staff

last updated 23 August 2019

The Week’s best film, TV, book and live show on this weekend, with excerpts from the top reviews.

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“The beauty of this show is the way their chuntering evolves into profundity and then back again, without changing tone. Paul is in dad mode, telling off Bob, who plays the recalcitrant child… ‘Paul, please don’t strike me,’ Bob says, later, when they pore over childhood photographs, ‘but your right foot would appear to be...a trotter? Or a hoof?’ At the end Paul says he has brought his father’s ashes and wants to scatter them in the stream. ‘Oh that’s nice,’ Bob says, lightly, and leaves him to it.”

“Documentarian Penny Lane presents a hilarious, timely and thought-provoking look at an underground, self-constructed religion that aims to stir controversy while offering sanctity to those who fall outside the worldview of typical all-American Christian values. Satan, the Temple argues, has always been portrayed as ‘evil’ by those who believe that the God of institutional Christianity is inherently good. But if the Devil is merely a dissenting voice against authority who feels that humanity deserves to have freewill, is he really that bad?”

“From its opening anecdotes, Mehta makes clear that the book was born in ‘sorrow and rage’ after the election of Donald Trump. He argues that immigration needs to be reframed as a matter of global justice. Immigrants from poorer countries are creditors, here to rightfully collect the debts owed to them by the richer nations of the West that have shattered their political and economic futures. It is a provocative and seductive polemic by design, buttressed by statistics, reporting and a powerful personal narrative. For this immigrant reader, the results are variable.”

“The eponymous tragicomedy centres around a wickedly funny, desperately sad, sexually unapologetic millennial woman living in London. Despite cracking laughs all the way, it becomes clear she is riddled with a malignant guilt and her sexual liberalism has grown into a deeply unhealthy replacement for kind human interaction… Waller-Bridge was able to amplify her knowing looks to reach the back rows of a West End Theatre without appearing to break sweat.”

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