Crossfire (2022) Ep1

Jo's world shatters when gunmen attack the luxurious Spanish hotel where she's holidaying with family and friends. The ensuing horror puts lives at risk and exposes secrets.

I’m reading A Body in the Bookshop by Helen Cox (I haven’t read the one that comes before it because I’m an idiot and didn’t realize it was a series), and I can’t help but think that if there was a series adaptation that Perry Fitzpatrick and Anneika Rose would be perfect for Halloran and Charley respectively.

Anneika Rose and Zubin Varla star in this retelling of Ali’s bestseller about a young Bangladeshi woman who makes her life in east LondonWhen Nazneen is born prematurely in 1967 in rural Bangladesh, her survival is left to fate...

@giuliettaluce

Anneika Rose as Juliet and David Dawson as Romeo in Neil Barlett's 2008 production of Romeo and Juliet for the Royal Shakespeare Company

Anneika Rose as Mary in THE HOOD MAKER on the TV series ELECTRIC DREAMS – 2018

Don’t patronise me. You think you’re so fantastic, you think you’re so powerful. 

Now I see why you never made Detective.

BEHIND THE SCENES: Vicky McClure, Kelly MacDonald, Perry Fitzpatrick, and Anneika Rose on the set of Line of Duty (S6)

"Must we be divided? must we part?" "Ay, hand from hand, my love, and heart from heart."

Richard and his queen - Richard II (2015)

Anneika Rose as Farida in ‘Line of Duty’ S4

Sceencaps || Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams - Season 1 + Opening Credits GALLERY LINK : [x] Quality : HD Screencaptures Amount : 10441 fles  Resolution : 1280x720px

-Please like/reblog if taking! -Please credit grande_caps/kissthemgoodbye!

John

17 February 2018, Dorfman

Before this production I hadn’t seen any of Annie Baker’s work staged, but I would count her as one of my favourite playwrights - and certainly one of the most interesting working right now. Strangely, then, I went into John without having read the play, and having been told that it was maybe a little different from her previous pieces. As with most of her other plays, it features a cast of characters with quite major age gaps, which I’d always found interesting in terms of the dynamics of the relationships that are portrayed, but in John there’s a definite sense of the central couple being intruders in a space that is detailed and disquieting. Other writing about the play has talked about a certain sense of spookiness, maybe leaning in a magical realist direction, which gives it a slightly more actively theatrical bent. In fact, each act is prefaced by the owner of the Gettysburg B and B, Mertis, drawing and closing a huge red curtain like you’d find in an old-fashioned proscenium arch theatre.

So John is about a couple in their late twenties, Jenny and Elias, on their way home from Thanksgiving who are stopping for a couple of nights at this eccentric B and B in Gettysburg. Elias is a civil war buff and wants to do some local sightseeing during their stay, but Jenny gets really bad cramps and so stays inside, chatting with Mertis and her intriguing friend Genevieve. That’s the plot in a couple of sentences, because Annie Baker as a rule doesn’t do plot - or certainly not big action-y plots - there’s a lot that goes on in John, but it’s what I guess you’d call emotional plotting. Jenny and Elias’ relationship is not in a good place, so we spend time watching them bicker, seemingly salvage things a bit, then fall back into horrible patterns. I’m going to get a little spoiler-y for a second, just to say that I am a huge fan of the women in Annie Baker’s plays who get to be bitches, without having to owe anyone anything. From my read on the play, Elias is the real problem in the relationship, but it’s Jenny that has cheated on him. And in The Flick, Rose is not very nice to either of the guys, just as in Circle Mirror Transformation Teresa strings Schultz along. These women aren’t stereotypically messy, like the “messy” female protagonists you get in rom coms (where messy means, oh my god, they eat all the time but still seem to be tiny? I digress.), they just make poor or hurtful or selfish decisions and, refreshingly, they don’t really get punished for it.

And so we watch Jenny and Elias arguing (including upstairs, out of sight and quite muffled at one point, which is a bit different), watch them both interact with the older women, and we do get some way towards finding out who John is. John the play is long, with the famous Annie Baker pauses, but it’s nice to sit and watch these characters live in front of you. They’re so well written, and well performed by a 3/4 British cast (Marylouise Burke having come over from the US, apparently with considerable Equity negotiations), that I could have done another three hours easily. The forays into less realist moments are really quite wonderful too - particular highlights for me were Genevieve’s second (I think) interval speech, and a lot of the third act, where the lights go down slowly and you feel like you’re entering into something entirely more strange and otherworldly. 

It feels very odd to have got this far and not talked about the set at all - in some ways I wish I hadn’t looked at any production photos before I went, because the first reveal of the B and B, with Mertis drawing back the red curtain, must have been quite something for people in the audience who didn’t know how Chloe Lamford had run riot with the kitsch decor, including of course Samantha, the American Girl doll. Jenny and Elias’ reactions to arriving in their ‘home away from home’, as Mertis rather terrifyingly calls it, are pretty great. I found, though, that after a while I got sort of used to the madness of the ornaments and the dolls and the classical jukebox - I was so focused on the characters and the nuances of the dialogue and the acres of subtext under every interaction.

Having missed The Flick a couple of years ago, I was so pleased to be able to see this. I can’t quite tell how I feel about Annie Baker in performance as opposed to on the page - I bought the John playtext this weekend, but haven’t read it yet, I suppose to make sure that my memory of seeing it live wasn’t tainted by my experience of it read. I’m really hoping I get to see any of her other plays, or a new one very soon. I love her work and am very happy to start my live collection off with John, and to have it expand my printed collection.

Side note: she dedicates the final page of the play to her husband (I think) Nico Baumbach, which is Mertis’ incredibly understated but also sort of aggressively beautiful speech about meeting her husband in person for the first time. You hopeless romantic, Annie!

Anneika Rose as Mary in THE HOOD MAKER on the TV series ELECTRIC DREAMS – 2018

Line of Duty | 6x01

bonus:

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams 101 The Hood Maker