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Exe Men review – entertaining rugby drama tackles triumph of underdogs Exeter Chiefs | Theatre

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Driving to this theatre, I passed signs to Sidmouth and Tiverton, more known for West Country charm than sporting supremacy. They are namechecked early in a play about the region’s recent rugby union history to make the point that, in the early 80s, Exeter used to lose to neighbourhood clubs considered minnows.Exe Men is adapted by Ashley Pharoah from Guardian rugby writer Robert Kitson’s 2020 book. It shows how an ambitious investor, Tony Rowe, and enterprising coach, Rob Baxter, renamed the club the Exeter Chiefs and made them the best in England and then Europe. The Chiefs were the Seabiscuit…

Emma Doran: ‘When I was growing up, a woman’s biggest compliment would be that she was immaculate’ | Stage

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How did you get into comedy?I was on maternity leave and, looking back, I may have been having a manic episode. I’d had a long string of admin jobs that I hated. Usually, it was the case that I didn’t know what my job was and nobody else did either. When I was 29, I thought: “I haven’t really done anything creative or put myself out there. Here I am with two kids, what am I doing?” So I signed up for an open mic night. I wasn’t going into comedy for the money – I wanted to see if…

‘I’m going to write about all of it’: author Chris Kraus on success, drugs and I Love Dick | Books

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Chris Kraus regards the late success of her first book, I Love Dick, with ambivalence. A work of autofiction, first published in 1997, it chronicles Kraus’s infatuation with a cultural theorist named Dick, a doomed, one-sided love affair that nonetheless pulls Kraus, a depressed, 39-year-old failing film-maker languishing in a sexless marriage, out of her personal and artistic rut. After a slow start, the book became a cult classic and in 2016 it was made into an Amazon Prime Video TV series, with Kraus played by Kathryn Hahn. “To me, success would have been like a long review in the…

‘Rock stars would be like, Yeah, bring the kid in’: Cameron Crowe on his wild years as a teenage music journalist | Cameron Crowe

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Cameron Crowe has a vivid memory of the day he began filming his own life story. It was the summer of 1999 and he was back in his home city of San Diego, on the same streets where he had spent his surreal teenage years, flitting between suburban domesticity and his new life as a prodigious music writer, spending long weeks in the company of such 1970s gods as David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, the Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin.Shooting was about to begin on a scene in which his 15-year-old self – renamed “William Miller” and played by the unknown actor…

‘Verging on unwatchable’: Guardian writers on their most stressful movies | Film

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FallThe only movie I have literally had to take breaks from in order to give my sympathetic nervous system time to downshift out of flight or flight mode, Scott Mann’s 2022 psychological thriller Fall is brilliant in its simplicity. Thrill-seeking climbing influencer Hunter convinces her bestie Becky to do a little immersion therapy after her husband Dan’s sudden death during a climb leaves her fearful, depressed and suicidal. The goal: to climb a decommissioned TV transmission tower deep in the California desert that’s roughly twice the height of the Eiffel Tower. When the rickety ladder that gets them to a…

TV tonight: a French psychological thriller about a ‘perfect’ nanny | Television & radio

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The Intruder9pm, BBC FourA claustrophobic “don’t trust the perfect nanny!” psychological French thriller from the creators of Paris Police 1900. When wealthy mother of three Paula (Mélanie Doutey) returns to work, she and her husband hire Tess (Lucie Fagedet) to be a live-in au pair. But too-good-to-be-true Tess soon starts to unsettle Paula, who is left feeling – and looking – like she can’t handle being a working mother. Hollie RichardsonThe Celebrity Inner Circle5.20pm, BBC OneA gameshow in which celebrity-civilian pairings are put through convoluted rounds containing impossible-to-follow rules, while host Amanda Holden screams “You little shafters!” at them. This…

Operation Pope review – hard-bitten thriller about a true-life papal assassination plot | Film

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‘You want me to shoot the pope?” This is undeniably a fab jumping off point for a any film, based on real events or not, and in fact this gritty Polish thriller is a dramatisation of the 1981 attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II. But you don’t need to be much of a history buff to know that that this particular crime would be on the JFK level of momentousness if it had actually succeeded. As it is, we follow Bogusław Linda as Konstanty “Bruno” Brusicki, a former intelligence agent who is offered a compelling carrot and threatened with…

‘We were the original punks’: the rebel women revitalising local music scenes | Punk

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Ask Cathy Loughead the most punk thing she’s ever done, and she doesn’t miss a beat: “I went on stage with my neck broken in two places. I couldn’t bounce around, so I blinged the brace up instead. That was a great gig.”Loughead is part of a growing movement of women redefining punk. When Riot Women, Sally Wainwright’s new BBC drama spotlighting female punk, airs this Sunday, it will reflect a scene that’s already thriving far beyond television.That energy is being felt most viscerally in Leicester, where Ruth Miller’s 2022 Unglamorous Music project – now known as the Riotous Collective…

Taylor Swift scores second-biggest UK charts opening week ever with The Life of a Showgirl | Taylor Swift

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Taylor Swift’s 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, has given the US pop star her biggest-ever opening week on the UK chart.It is her 14th No 1 album (she has also scored No 1s with the Taylor’s Version rerecordings of previous albums), moving 432,000 combined units in its first week on the Official Chart. It is second only to Ed Sheeran’s ÷, released in 2017 to 672,000 first-week sales.Only the Beatles and Robbie Williams have had more UK No 1 albums than Swift, with 15 apiece. At a concert in London last night, Williams admitted that he had pushed…

Moss and Freud review – Kate meets Lucian and they get on brilliantly with absolutely no funny business at all | Film

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When Lucian Freud met Kate Moss turns out to be the encounter of a sweet, cuddly old gentleman and a guardedly opaque hedonist. Both look defanged.Freud’s sensational Naked Portrait 2002 is a nude study of the supermodel, to whom he had been introduced by his daughter, the fashion designer Bella Freud. Moss was pregnant when she sat for him – which lent a fierce, additional frisson to the painting’s candour and intimacy. Ellie Bamber plays Kate and carries off the unclothed moments with great directness and aplomb. Freud is played with Germanic R sounds by Derek Jacobi (who incidentally played…