3 h. ago The Lady from the Sea review – Andrew Lincoln and Alicia Vikander make waves in magnificent rewrite

Bridge theatre, LondonIbsen’s mysticism and mermaids are thrown out as director Simon Stone amps up the 1888 play’s psychological intensity with his eco-focused updateWriter-director Simon Stone is known for his rock’n’roll takes on the classics. This is a characteristically high-octane version of Ibsen’s play: loud, modern and led by screen stars Alicia Vikander and Andrew Lincoln. Yet his script, again created in the rehearsal process, retains all of Ibsen’s layers and adds some of its own in the updating.All mystical talk of the sea and mermaids is excised. The production brings a sharply lit realism to the privileged yet complex family at its heart that seems to be slowly drowning: Ellida (Vikander), as the young, second wife of neurologist Edward (Lincoln), is caught between life with her husband and a long lost, formative ex-lover, Finn (Brendan Cowell), who makes a reappearance. Ellida’s stepdaughters, Hilda (Isobel Akuwudike) and Asa (Gracie Oddie-James), are trying to stay ...

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4 d. ago Coldwater review – Andrew Lincoln’s wild Scottish thriller is top quality nonsense

The Walking Dead star plays a total berk who stumbles into a terrifying confrontation in the woods. It’s like Deliverance in the HighlandsAndrew Lincoln has been Rick Grimes – the leader of a group of survivors of a zombie plague in Frank Darabont’s at first mesmeric and then mesmerically dull post-apocalyptic series The Walking Dead – for 15 years. Off and on (and in a spin-off) but mostly on. Now, at last, he is free. He’s had a shower, a haircut and – thank God – cleared his throat after a decade and a half of rattling phlegmily through increasingly ropey scripts and pretending to care about his son Carl, and is appearing on stage in The Lady from the Sea at the Bridge theatre, London and on our screens in the fairly bananas thriller Coldwater.You can see what attracted Lincoln to the part. John is the anti-Grimes. We meet him (once the obligatory opening scene of the character covered in blood and running through some woods is over and we’ve flashed back to “Two months earlier”)...

Politics

4 d. ago Coldwater review – Rushed, schlocky and like so much other underwhelming TV

Andrew Lincoln returns to British TV with a manic performance as a man whose life falls apart after a violent incident

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4 d. ago Coldwater on ITV review: stylish thriller that properly confronts PTSD

A gripping and beautifully realised examination of trauma starring Andrew Lincoln and Ewen Bremner

Culture

7 d. ago Alicia Vikander: "I'm rehearsing my play with an AI Andrew Lincoln!"

The Oscar-winning actor is making her theatre debut in a new version of Ibsen at the Bridge. It’s still a work in progress — and she’s freaking out

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9 d. ago Alicia Vikander rehearsed with 'AI Andrew Lincoln' before West End debut

The Ex Machina star admitted she used an AI version of her co-star to prepare for her role in The Lady from the Sea

Politics

1 week ago ‘It will be frightening but you have to do it’: Andrew Lincoln and Alicia Vikander’s nerve

Can two world-famous actors and auteur Simon Stone bring 19th-century Norway screaming into the modern world? They talk mean directors, bathtub revelations and reinventing Ibsen’s The Lady from the SeaEntering the almost silent rehearsal room, I fear I’ve blundered into a private moment. The Lady from the Sea cast are seated in a tight circle and at least two of them have tears in their eyes. The quiet murmur of conversation suggests something heavy has just gone down. So I’m relieved when I realise they’re reading a scene – and stunned to discover the scene was written only yesterday.Simon Stone’s modern take on Ibsen’s play is still under construction, and he has had his actors together for less than a fortnight. “Most people really take six weeks to connect to scenes,” the Australian writer-director says during the lunch break. “Often an entire rehearsal process can be the slow marking out of stuff, and it takes until your first run-through to feel anything at all. We are connect...

Politics

2 w. ago After the Hunt review – Julia Roberts faces a dilemma in Guadagnino’s muddled campus accusation drama

Venice film festivalLuca Guadagnino’s latest – also starring Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield – is clenched in its own sense of relevance, as a desire to find complexity in a scandal at Yale becomes a noncommittal jumble of ideasLuca Guadagnino misfires with this bafflingly overlong, overwrought #MeToo campus accusation drama from screenwriter Nora Garrett, broadly in the tradition of David Mamet’s Oleanna or Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things. It is worryingly muddled and contrived, perhaps in need of further script drafts to excavate a clearer and more satisfying drama inside.Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri star, with Andrew Garfield and Michael Stuhlbarg in supporting roles; they are all doing their considerable best, each frankly hampered by the unfocused and uncertain characterisation in the material itself, which, by the time it finally reaches its coda-finale of confrontation, is almost bizarrely inert, anticlimactic and incoherent. The movie is clenched with its own sense of con...

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