Bono: Stories of Surrender review – megastar tries out humility in likable one-man show

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Cannes film festival The U2 singer’s solo stage appearance sees him reflect on his anguished family past and have a decent go at being an ordinary Joe The stadium-conquering rock superstar Bono finds a smaller arena than usual for this more intimate and much acclaimed “quarter-man” show, performed solo without his U2 bandmates Adam Clayton, David “The Edge” Evans and Larry Mullen Jr and filmed live on stage at New York’s Beacon theatre in 2023 by Andrew Dominik. It’s a confident, often engaging mix of music and no-frills theatrical performance, with Bono often coming across like some forgotten character that Samuel Beckett created but then suppressed due to undue levels of rock’n’roll pizzazz. Bono delivers anecdotes from his autobiography Surrender, starting with his recent heart scare and going back to his Dublin childhood, his musical breakthrough to global fame, his post-Live Aid charity work on poverty and famine relief (though no discourse on the question of whether Live Aid w...
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A Touch of Love review – Margaret Drabble’s single-mother drama is a vivid 60s time capsule

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This Drabble adaptation about a PhD student who gets pregnant is kitchen-sinky but without humour or even awareness. It’s an interesting curio

Waris Hussein’s earnest 1969 movie, adapted by Margaret Drabble from her own novel The Millstone, is a London-set drama about a young woman who has difficulties with men while researching a PhD in English literature – and as a result we get some tremendously nostalgic shots of the British Museum round reading room, when it was still a working library. American star Sandy Dennis puts on a stage-school English accent to play Rosamund, the graduate student who has well-to-do but insufferable bien pensant liberal parents, the kind of people who, as she explains to someone, “let the charlady sit down to dine with us, that kind of nonsense”.

Rosamund finds herself alone in her parents’ London flat while they are away doing good works in Africa and she exchanges brittle, knowing dialogue with chaps who take her out on dates: Joe (Michael Coles) and Roger (John Standing). However, she is only attracted to an oddly camp television newsreader called George, played with bizarre twinkly eyed condescension by Ian McKellen. (The 60s setting and the air of sexual loucheness put me in mind of McKellen’s performance as John Profumo in Michael Caton-Jones’s Scandal.) Rosamond loses her virginity in a single, unsatisfactory sexual encounter with George; she gets pregnant and resolves to keep the baby despite objections from family, friends and nurses.

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