Handsome Devil

For a film whose theme is about being yourself and not hiding things, the title is somewhat misleading but this is a subtle coming of age drama that travels familiar roads but has a refreshing tendency to veer off when you least expect it to. What you think is going to happen doesn’t and by the end you may well find yourself getting excited over the result of a rugby match and, you know, that’s not something that normally happens. Writer / director John Butler gleefully plays with tropes that anyone whose watched any American high school film will recognise but imbues each with something more.

True Faith

Emperor and Galilean @ Olivier Theatre, London
Reviewed by John Newman

Set between 351 and 363 AD Emperor and Galilean concerns the Roman ruler Julian the Apostate and his attempts to revert the empire to pagan religion. Originally written as a two part ten hour epic by Henrik Ibsen which premiered in 1896 it has rarely been performed since and never staged in the UK. That is until this summer when Ben Power’s lean three hour twenty minute long adaptation was staged at the NT Olivier Theatre. Ibsen subtitled the work “ a World- Historical Play” and it is described by American academic Toril Moi as raising “the question of whether human beings have the power to shape history or whether history has a will of its own” . Ibsen described it as his most important work yet it is probably his least known.