It’s been a week of extremes – the best of jaunts, the worst of jaunts. As a still recovering Christmas overenthusiast, someone who used to schedule a fortnight of forced larks, I only have myself to blame. While there’s been improvement, I can’t help having a few recidivist puffs on Santa’s big cheroot. So, booking-page adrenalin rush, frantic WhatsApp coralling of company, then the feeling of creeping doubt as the dates approach. Will the outings be Christmassy enough? Will the stragglers make it? Is everyone I’m dragging along secretly wishing they were at home with Heated Reality, the trashy new TV drama about sexy ice hockey players? Will I shoot my Christmas puck into the goal or will it go wide?
Sentimental Value, a new film by Joachim Trier exploring messed up families and the healing power of art, slid right in. It was the present you buy for your friend but love so much you keep for yourself. It’s now my favourite film of 2025, a particular thrill to discover at the dark end of the year.
Stellan Skarsgard plays a film director who has been better at making movies than being a good father to his two girls. Despite prompts from all sides he continually avoids trips to the theatre to see one of his daughters, an accomplished stage actor, perform. She dismisses him – such is her pain – and craves his approval. One of his lines touched a nerve. The director, when confronted about his absence from her first night, says: “It’s not that I don’t like going to the theatre, I just don’t like watching it.” It reminded me of a cartoon by Mel Calman showing a couple in conversation. “Shall we go to the theatre?” asks one of them. “Or shall we just enjoy ourselves?”
I hate to be that person, as my kids would say, not least because it’s incompatible with being a Christmas Pollyanna, but Calman’s words turned earworm throughout The Importance of Being Earnest at the Noel Coward theatre last Thursday night. In fact, I became so infuriated by the production that I began fantasising about Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde, like a well-groomed Statler and Waldorf, giving it their best bitch in the box above my head.
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The performances were hideously overblown, making the current, big-bloused Cinderella at the Hackney Empire look like a Japanese Pinter.
Tickets for the family cost the price of a decent sofa (Heated Reality!). At one point I thought the usually excellent cast of actors, pumped with hot air, might explode, like those AI videos of puffer fish. In this case the puff was poor directing. Wilde’s wild lines were rushed or shouted out in self congratulation, and, call me a traitor, but Stephen Fry made Lady Bracknell so one note I thought I was at a mid-70s’ John Cage and Brian Eno concert.
Talking of Eno, are you Team Kylie or Team Brian? Kylie may have nabbed the Christmas No 1 slot, but surely Lullaby, Eno and Together for Palestine’s reimagining of an Arabic folk song is the true victor. Profits go to the charity Choose Love, and it has English words from professional spinetingler Peter Gabriel, who conjures images of bone bridges in his lyrics which include the simple, soul-tugging refrain: “Sing for me mama”. Which is something I’ll admit my lot haven’t requested since my 2007 half-assed, bedside version of Little Donkey.
Photograph by Marc Brenner