Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: The chaotic magic of Rebecca Lucy Taylor

“Bolshy rock band plays posh gig”: thus does David Hare encapsulate his classic musical drama, now triumphantly revived by Daniel Raggett half a century after its London debut.

Inspired by a grumpy Rolling Stones performance at the Magdalen College Oxford ball in 1964, Hare transfers the action to Cambridge on the night of June 9, 1969, as rock band The Skins play three sets, shoot up, kill time with games, steal silverware, and go hunting for debauchery among the undergraduate revellers (“fuckin’ penguins”).

Two years after her acclaimed run as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, Rebecca Lucy Taylor (aka Self Esteem) is phenomenal as singer Maggie Frisby – the role made famous by Helen Mirren at the Royal Court in 1975. Loaded on booze and drugs, she oscillates between despair (“the thin filth of getting old, the thin layer that gets to cover everything”) and the unquenchable yearning to be a star (“I’m a Zeppelin. I’m 50 foot up”). 

Behind the scenes is her former lover and musical mentor Arthur (Michael Fox), fretful that she is heading for self-destruction. “God, the singing is easy,” she tells the band’s assistant, Laura (Aysha Kala). “It’s the bits in between I can’t do.”

Phil Daniels is great too, as veteran manager Saraffian, deeply cynical but still enchanted by the music business: “It’ll never get better than 1956. Tat. Utter tat. But inspired. The obvious repeated many times”. 

He delivers the play’s most famous speech – a recollection of the bombing of the Café de Paris on March 8, 1941 – with panache.

Though Teeth ‘n’ Smiles is often categorised alongside Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) Joan Didion’s The White Album (1979) and Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I (1987) as a reflection upon the end of the Sixties, its cultural DNA is more complex. As Hare writes in his memoir The Blue Touch Paper (2015), the play, which was completed as Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood were nurturing a new revolution on the King’s Road, now feels “far more punk than hippy, catching the particular moment at which musical joy turned to musical fury”. And Maggie is indeed closer in spirit to Debbie Harry or Poly Styrene than to Janis Joplin.

The original numbers written by Nick and Tony Bicât, with new material by Taylor, bring the house down. “The ship is sinking,” sings Maggie, “But the music remains the same.” Chaotic, elemental magic.

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Matthew d’Ancona

FILM

La Grazia (selected cinemas)

In a big week for movies, Paolo Sorrentino’s sublime portrait of fictional Italian president Mariano De Santis (Toni Servillo) is the pick of the bunch. Weighing upon him in his final days in office is a euthanasia bill which he must sign – or not – before he leaves the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome; there are also requests for pardons on his desk.

But within the framing of high politics nestles a much more intimate study of old age, moral audit and approaching mortality. Mariano frets about his children, especially his daughter Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti), a distinguished lawyer (like him) and his chief adviser. 

He worries that his nickname in the corridors of the palace is “Reinforced Concrete”. He relies upon Colonel Labaro (Orlando Cinque), his cuirassier, who slips him cigarettes and listens to him with the patience of a surrogate son. Above all, he misses his late wife Aurora and is haunted by an affair she had 40 years ago – with, he suspects, his old friend, justice minister Ugo Romani (Massimo Venturiello).

Thanks to cinematographer Daria D’Antonio, the film has tremendous aesthetic power: one extraordinary slow-motion sequence depicts the elderly Portuguese president arriving for a state visit and being caught in torrential rain as Mariano, frozen by protocol, stands stock-still. In another, he is moved as he watches a live feed of an astronaut floating in his space vessel and shedding a lone weightless tear.

The very hip Pope (Rufin Doh Zeyenouin) tells him that he is seeking leggerezza or lightness (“I feel lonely, Your Holiness”). As the title of this wonderful movie suggests, Mariano also hankers after grace, “the beauty of doubt”, and an answer to the greatest question of all: “Who owns our days?”

FILM

Dead Man’s Wire (selected cinemas)

Gus Van Sant’s first film since 2018 is a riveting dramatisation of a real-life kidnapping in Indianapolis in 1977. Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård, never better), convinced he has been swindled by the Meridian Mortgage Company, abducts its president, Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery), and demands compensation, immunity and a fulsome apology. He wants “some goddam catharsis, some genuine guilt.”

To keep the cops at bay, he wires his shotgun from the trigger to Hall’s neck – meaning that his head will be blown off if Kiritsis is taken out by sharpshooters. And he wants to talk to his favourite radio DJ, the super-smooth Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), who is drawn into the hostage crisis as a reluctant mediator.

The trope of schmuck-as-rebel recalls many movies, but none more than Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975). So it is a nice touch that, as connective tissue between the two films, Al Pacino appears as Richard’s father ML Hall, on vacation in Florida and disinclined to say sorry to anyone – even though his son has the muzzle of a 12-gauge pressed against his nape. “We Halls are stoic people,” he drawls.

Local news reporter Linda Page (Myha’la) is first to the story, keen to maintain her edge in the growing media circus. As authentically rooted in the style, music and ambience of the 1970s as the movie is, Van Sant shows that all the elements of modern digital culture – narcissism, spectacle, grievance, violence – are nothing new, and have only been turbo-charged by today’s technology. 

When Arthur Miller gave the line “attention must be paid” to Linda Loman in Death of Salesman (1949), he wrote the script for the coming century. Attention is now a distorted form of justice. As Kiritsis protests that the Halls “lure in common folk, give them a taste of the American dream, and spit them out” and declares himself “a goddam national hero”, we hear a premonition of the MAGA “deplorables” and the loathing of elites that has transformed our own politics. 

Linda’s producers couldn’t care less about the content of the story, only that it will make blockbuster television: “Chop it up and put it to air prime-time!” As unsettling a movie as you will see this year and one that made me wonder when the first dramatised feature about Luigi Mangione will be announced: sooner rather than later, I suspect.

FILM

Project Hail Mary (general release)

There are countless reasons why this feel-good space epic, like the mission at its narrative core, should fail. Its sentimentality is ruthless, its plot preposterous and its mash-up of genres almost deranged. But, somehow, it works.

Ryan Gosling is Dr Ryland Grace, a brilliant molecular biologist banished from academia because of his heretical views on the nature of life, now teaching science to kids at a middle school. They ask him about rumours of imminent apocalypse – thanks to the so-called “Petrova Line” that is apparently causing the sun to cool. He seeks to reassure them that this alarming phenomenon is only a “small-to-medium whoop”.

Enter Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, excellent), a mysterious official who recruits Grace to her international task force. Unconvinced that he can bring much to the table, he nonetheless establishes how the alien microbes known as “Astrophages” are consuming the energy of the sun – and of all other stars. 

Only one, Tau Ceti, 11.9 light-years away, seems to be immune and so an against-all-odds mission is planned to find out what makes it special. Needless to say – for reasons I shall not spoil – Grace, who insists he puts “the ‘not’ in astronaut”, is assigned to the crew.

Indeed, the first time we encounter him he is emerging from a very long induced coma, his beard thick and shaggy, his muscles feeble and his memory hazy. He quickly discovers that the other crew members have died en route. The rest of the movie follows a dual timeline: his fortunes in deep space being spliced with flashbacks to his work on earth with Stratt (check out her show-stopping karaoke performance of Harry Styles’ Sign of the Times).

Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Project Hail Mary brazenly raids the cupboard of science-fiction classics. There are call-backs to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982), Armageddon (1998), Sunshine (2007), Prometheus (2012) and Interstellar (2014). A scene in which Grace spacewalks is shot in explicit homage to the psychedelic journey of Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) through the stargate in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). And if the movie reminds you of The Martian (2015), that may be because it is also written by Drew Goddard, again adapting a novel by Andy Weir.

Yet, in a nifty bait-and-switch, what starts out as standard astronaut-saves-the-earth story is really a buddy movie. To Grace’s understandable surprise, an alien ship draws up beside the Hail Mary; only for a docking tunnel to emerge, along which scuttles a stony, spidery creature whom the scientist names “Rocky”. Armed with a laptop, he is somehow able to translate his new acquaintance’s alien language and the two are soon essentially housemates, collaborating to save their respective worlds (Rocky’s home planet is called Erid).

In this respect, Project Hail Mary owes much more to Frank Capra and Preston Sturges than to Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg. It is a screwball movie in space, full of slapstick and shtick, about unexpected friendship and the insufficiency of solitude. All of which would be seriously cloying were it not for Gosling’s versatility, comic timing and star wattage.

“He’s growing on me,” Grace says of Rocky in a video diary. “At least he’s not growing in me.” Very entertaining.