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Telegraph
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Somerset Maugham's cheating husband comedy gets the Rivals treatment
The Constant Wife, Somerset Maugham 's neglected 1926 comedy about a marriage rendered wretched by infidelity might seem like an odd choice for the RSC. Yet, as revived by the company's co-artistic director Tamara Harvey – using a deft new script by Laura Wade, who wrote the recent steamy TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper's, Rivals – it lightly asks big questions about relationships and empowerment. A luminous Rose Leslie leads the fine cast as Constance, a woman who is being cheated on by her husband John, a Harley Street doctor, but stands by him the better to forge a different life. Wade tucks in new lines in keeping with Maugham's droll, Wildean dialogue. Her most daring move, though, is to restructure his plot: she brings forward a showdown (from Act II) in which the stoutish Mortimer (Daniel Millar) – whose wife has been having an affair with John (Luke Norris) – arrives to confront the adulterous pair. In its day, it must have been a pretty incendiary scene. Maugham has Constance counter-intuitively take up the cudgels on behalf of the duplicitous couple, protesting their innocence while indicating to the duo that she knows all about their betrayal. Adding another layer, Wade drops in a flashback, which shows Constance, unseen, witnessing the infidelity. This approach cuts more quickly to the fact that Constance is keeping up appearances, and putting on an act. At once, the evening gains more humour from this knowingness (there are added allusions to the theatricality of the tangled affairs, too) and further stabs of pain, as many lines, from early on, carry a subtext of concerted deflection and repression. Leslie (who starred on TV in Game of Thrones and, off-screen, married its heart-throb, Kit Harington) is terrific as a woman who – rather like Nora in Ibsen 's A Doll's House – has a nominally pampered life, but in fact is suffocating from a lack of agency. Clipped and clear-eyed, Leslie brings a winning insouciance to the aphoristic dialogue, as though merely arranging silverware, but it's serrated stuff. There are notable parallels with Maugham's life, which was dogged by marital unhappiness, stoked by the author's homosexual affairs. Constance turns to interior design as a route to independence – just as Maugham's wife, Syrie Wellcome, did. But there's something more broadly generational and lastingly pertinent, too, about this wronged woman's cool-headed strategy for survival. She must overcome the sexist, conformist attitudes of the age, many of them brazenly articulated by her interfering, Lady Bracknell-ish mother (a superb Kate Burton). She also has to reconcile a demand for true happiness with a recognition that even a marriage that has dimmed can still be worth the candle. This nuanced dilemma feels at once both wholly of its period and utterly modern – and fully warrants the further life that Maugham's play is given here.
Times
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The Constant Wife review — Rose Leslie is a jaunty cuckolded heroine
A frothily radical Twenties comedy rejigged for the modern palate? The omens were good for the RSC's Stratford premiere of Laura Wade's adaptation of W Somerset Maugham's 1926 play, which puts a cuckolded wife in the driver's seat rather than the dregs of despair. Wade is often a dab hand at mixing privilege, pain and humour: she writes for the TV version of Jilly Cooper's Rivals and wrote the play Posh. Her last work with her director, Tamara Harvey (also co-artistic director of the RSC), was the riveting domestic comedy Home, I'm Darling. However you split the credit here, though, The Constant Wife is a letdown. It's the sort of evening that is studded with sharp lines, where you can see the sharp ideas and the good intentions, but it simply isn't funny enough to take off for long. Rose Leslie is a fine actress in Game of Thrones and beyond. She makes no mistakes exactly as Constance, the Harley Street doctor's wife who takes an outwardly jaunty, peculiarly pragmatic approach to his affair with her best friend. And yet in her first stage role for nine years Leslie lacks the vocal power and shared sense of fun to make Constance relishable company as she lets loose. • Read more theatre reviews, guides and interviews Light comedy like this calls for an outwardly effortless quality in which everything and nothing matters. Leslie, like most of the cast, handles its demands rather than excels at them. Luke Norris, say, as her husband John, is too fixed in his dashing demeanour for his massive hypocrisies to intrigue. Only Kate Burton — daughter of Richard, star of Grey's Anatomy, a Constance herself on Broadway in 2005 — really has those sort of effortless chops. She owns every barb as Constance's OTT mother, Mrs Culver, who thinks that men are natural rogues and women should accept their lot. Wade adds jokes, moves lines, merges two characters and expands another, cuts liberally and acutely. Her bigger structural intervention of putting one scene a year in the past, though, makes Constance's subversiveness drag. It ascends into farce a few times, and the plot recap at the start of Act II earns its laughs, but this take on Maugham's feminist fun lacks the ease about itself to segue between high comedy and Shavian earnestness. The Twenties set, by the usually excellent Anna Fleischle, is starkly modernist enough to make it feel as if the characters are rattling around the big thrust stage. An ending that mixes revenge, forgiveness, deception and realism about dwindling marital passion is spoilt by being so laboured. Imagine Ibsen's A Doll's House, only this time Nora has a lucrative side hustle as an interior designer with which to aid her emancipation.★★☆☆☆140minSwan Theatre, Stratford, to Aug 2, Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
Forbes
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
2015 Vin Diesel Critical Flop Debuts Big On Netflix's U.S. Top 10 Movies Chart
NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 13: Actor Vin Diesel attends the "The Last Witch Hunter" New York premiere ... More at AMC Loews Lincoln Square on October 13, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Jim Spellman/WireImage) A Vin Diesel action fantasy movie from 10 years ago is finding a new audience on Netflix. Diesel, of course, is known for the Fast & Furious movie saga, which evolved from muscle car-themed movies to include big machines of all shapes and sizes. However, in 2015, Diesel went the fantasy film route The Last Witch Hunter. The logline from Netflix for the film reads, 'When a powerful coven aims to unleash a deadly plague on New York, an immortal witch hunter, a priest and a young witch must thwart the lethal plan.' Diesel stars as the immortal witch hunter Kaulder in The Last Witch Hunter. Directed by Breck Eisner, the film also stars Rose Leslie, Elijah Wood and Michael Caine. The Last Witch Hunter arrived on Netflix on June 16 and according to streamer, the film debuted on the streamer's chart of the Top 10 U.S. Movies for the week of June 16-22. The film arrived on the chart at No. 4, ahead of the streamer's new original documentary Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem at No. 5. The Last Witch Hunter debuted behind 2023's Plane, the Netflix Original documentary Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy and the Netflix Original movie Straw, which placed No. 1, 2 and 3 respectively. Unlike Netflix's Top 10 Global Movies chart, the streamer's U.S. Movies chart does not disclose viewership numbers. How Did Audiences And Critics Receive 'The Last Witch Hunter'? The Last Witch Hunter was released in 3,082 North American theaters on Oct. 23, 2015, by Lionsgate. The film went on to earn nearly $27.4 million domestically and $130.4 million internationally for a worldwide box office tally of $130.8 million against an $80 million production budget before prints and advertising, according to The Numbers. The Last Witch Hunter was a critical disaster, however, earning a lowly 18% 'rotten' rating from Rotten Tomatoes critics based on 138 reviews. The RT Critics Consensus for the movie reads, 'Grim, plodding, and an overall ill fit for Vin Diesel's particular charms, The Last Witch Hunter will bore and/or confuse all but the least demanding action-fantasy fans.' RT users weren't nearly as harsh on The Last Witch Hunter, but it still received a 44% 'rotten' score on the site's Popcornmeter based on 25,000-plus verified user ratings. Rated PG-13, Vin Diesel's The Last Witch Hunter is new on Netflix.
Belfast Telegraph
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Belfast Telegraph
Rose Leslie says she and husband Kit Harington ‘do not feel famous at all'
©Press Association Game Of Thrones actress Rose Leslie has said she and husband Kit Harington do not feel famous 'at all'. The 38-year-old Scottish actress played Ygritte in the fantasy HBO series, with Harington as her primary love interest, Jon Snow.
Daily Mail
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Rose Leslie reveals the ONE Game Of Thrones scene she hopes her children never see as she credits Iceland's brutal winter for sparking off-screen romance with Kit Harington
As career-defining moments go it doesn't get more dramatic than a racy sex-scene in a cave on a snow-capped mountain with the man who will ultimately become your off-screen husband. But despite its obvious personal resonance, actress Rose Leslie has singled it out as the one Game Of Thrones scene she would rather her children avoid once they're old enough to watch the hit HBO show. Leslie, 38, was a relative unknown when she was cast as Ygritte, a flame-haired wildling 'spearwife' who begins a sexual relationship with Kit Harington's Jon Snow during the show's second season. But while she's happy for her two children with Harington, who she married in 2018, to 'celebrate' the role Game Of Thrones played in their relationship, the Scottish actress admits she's reluctant to let them watch a pivotal scene in which Snow's virginity is claimed by the feisty wildling in a remote cave. Speaking to the July issue of Tatler, she said: 'I don't think it's our decision. I think if they wish to see Mum and Dad do their thing – I mean, I'm not talking about the cave scene, I'd rather not – but the other scenes and whatnot... there is something celebratory about it.' From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the Daily Mail's new showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. Rose Leslie has discussed her iconic role in Game Of Thrones and why she's reluctant for her children with husband Kit Harington to watch their sex scene in the show Leslie, 38, was a relative unknown when she was cast as Ygritte, a flame-haired wildling 'spearwife' who begins a sexual relationship with Kit Harington's Jon Snow (pictured) With Iceland's sweeping tundra chosen as the inhospitable and largely uninhabited northern territories documented in author George R.R. Martin's fantasy book series, Leslie and Harington were instantly thrust together by virtue of a difficult shooting schedule. She recalled: 'It was my first time going to Iceland, and what an introduction. It was in the winter, which meant we only had four hours of daylight to shoot. 'So we'd wrap at 2:00pm and then we'd have the rest of the afternoon and the evening. 'Because it was in the middle of nowhere, we were all sitting together in the same hotel, so you got to know everyone, there was a real camaraderie.' The couple subsequently married in a ceremony attended by Game Of Thrones co-stars Sophie Turner, Emilia Clarke and Peter Dinklage. Leslie and Harington travelled two miles from Wardhill Castle, the sprawling estate owned by her family, to Rayne Church, in Kirkton of Rayne, for the service conducted by Benedictine monk father Chad Boulton. An ostentatious affair, the ceremony was reflective of Leslie's affluent upbringing as the daughter of Scottish aristocracy; her father is Sebastian Arbuthnot-Leslie, Chieftain of the Aberdeenshire branch of the Scottish Clan Leslie, and her mother Candida Mary Sibyl Leslie, of Clan Fraser of Lovat. Leslie and Harington were instantly thrust together by virtue of a difficult shooting schedule on location in Iceland, with the crew only able to film for four hours a day before it got dark Read the full feature in the July issue of Tatler available via digital download and on newsstands from Thursday 5th June The Leslie Clan had worshipped at Rayne Church for hundreds of years and its walls are adorned with plaques to their many ancestors. Their graves fill the small church yard which is surrounded by a high stone wall. Leslie attended the tiny Rayne Primary primary school down the road as a young girl. 'God I felt so elated that day,' she recalled. 'It was the culmination of marrying the love of my life, in the home that I was incredibly happy in, bringing all my friends to Scotland and the joy of that day was just fantastic… because it was at home in the garden, we carried on [all night].' And the actress says she feels fully 'anchored to her Celtic roots' after growing up in rural Aberdeenshire with her four siblings. She said: 'The Scottish Highlands evoke hope, and with the wind – and the rain – in my face, I feel very anchored and secure. 'I had an incredibly privileged childhood. It was very remote, I felt very loved, I had space to go outside and play and I had siblings to play with. 'We had lots of dogs, it was all about being outside and making dens in this big rhododendron bush. 'I think that helps with the imagination of 'play' and that was really kind of instilled in all of us.' Read the full feature in the July issue of Tatler available via digital download and on newsstands from Thursday 5th June. Leslie and Harington (pictured in 2021) married in a ceremony attended by Game Of Thrones co-stars Sophie Turner, Emilia Clarke and Peter Dinklage
