Skip to main content

A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Mezzotint review – a glittering half-hour nugget

You’ll be in thrall to Mark Gatiss’s smart, snappy and utterly hammy ghost story within seconds. What a creepy Christmas gift to us all

Oh, the warm, expansive joy to be had from a chilly, compact ghost story! And A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Mezzotint (BBC Two), an MR James short story adapted by aficionado Mark Gatiss into a glittering half-hour nugget, is an absolute treat. These two masters of their forms can nudge even the most committed sceptic into willingly suspending their disbelief for a tight 30 minutes, especially when the plot runs like clockwork and is as stuffed with actors as a stocking is with gifts.

There is Rory Kinnear as Edward Williams, the curator of a university art museum who spends most of his days politely declining offers of unsuitable Delftware from local ladies. We are in Victorian Times so he has a Victorian Moustache and sometimes plays Victorian Golf, wearing Victorian Plus Fours. His friend Binks (John Hopkins) likewise (I assume there was a terrific two-for-one offer on in the BBC costume department). A dealer sends Williams an unremarkable mezzotint engraving of an unidentified manor house somewhere in Sussex or Essex – the label is torn.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mxkW2y
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more