Stage review: Peter And Alice, Noel Coward Theatre

STAGE
Peter And Alice
Noel Coward Theatre
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw illuminate a mournful encounter between the real-life Alice In Wonderland and Peter Pan.

REVIEW
When Christopher Oram's dusty bookshop backdrop rises to reveal a world of childhood imagery - Cheshire cats, pirate ships, Red Queens, moonscapes - then the magic behind the book covers is undammed and floods the stage.

If an encounter between the (real-life) Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan never happened, it would be invented for a conceit such as this.

That their paths did cross - in 1932 when she was 80 and he 35 - gives an added thrill to a theatrical prospect that only marginally overshadows the anticipation of on-stage encounter between the irredeemably majestic Judi Dench and charmingly gauche Ben Whishaw.

The two twirl around their childhoods like strands of DNA, linked by their early fate and fame. The sinuous, poetic prose from John Logan only enhances their flights of inquiry.

Peter is the more stubbornly forensic of the two, and the most damaged, but the haughty Alice seems to fall further. Their interplay, inevitably, is mesmeric.

But this is a melancholy, self-involved piece without much light to illuminate the shadows. The lurch from the joys and whimsies of childhood to the brutal, bill-paying function of adulthood would be a yowling rip in the best of circumstances.

But neither Alice Liddell Hargreaves and Peter Llewellyn Davies saw the best of circumstances.

Their lives were scythed by the first world war, which took family members and, in Peter's case, his sanity.

And beyond that horror, there were everyday disappointments. Their attempts to retrieve their golden summers and weigh their fame-in-amber childhoods against those of their siblings is a lesson in self-flagellation. Why go there when the answers, or the lack of them, will amount to the same each time?

But playwright John Logan and director Michael Grandage prod and push them there time and again, torturing his protagonists as they dissect the foibles and ambitions of their patrons - the stuttering Charles Dodgson (Nicholas Farrell) and the needy JM Barrie (Derek Riddell).

In this overwritten merry-go-round of remembrances, there is some relief. Peter Pan (Olly Alexander) bounces like a puppy and Alice (Ruby Bentall) is bold and fresh. Both find the adults' nostalgic indulgence boring and long for sword fights and romance, a sentiment shared by the audience whose patience is tested even in this 90 minute work.

Although lyrical and moving - and acted with delicacy and grace - there is a sense that a blast of fresh air through the bookshop would heal old wounds with much less pain than the tortuously slow pulling of the plaster.

Until June 1. Go to delfontmackintosh.co.uk

Spiral Notebook: 32 signs of a lifestyle gone wrong

32 tell-tale signals that your lifestyle may not be all that you imagined for yourself.

■ When you stand up, bits of dry breakfast cereal avalanche from the creases in your sweat top.

■ Your attempts at the Downward Facing Dog are followed by letters of complaint from the RSPCA.

■ You're not immediately repulsed by the thought of reclaiming that chest of drawers by the roadside.

■ You avoid visiting a dentist, Gap or doctor's surgery because there's not enough money in the world sufficient to compensate someone for studying you.

■ Floor food feels more nutritious.

■ Your pension plan has five numbers and a bonus ball.

■ Your belly button is a better source of surprises than iPod Shuffle.

■ You add a week on to Best Before dates for meat and dairy and add a year for Super Noodles.

■ The TV Times is a better guide to your week ahead than iCal.

■ You spend longer looking for new slippers than brogues.

■ You stop getting pizza delivered because you can't remember which parts of your hallway should be a cause of embarrassment.

■ Free stuff is unfailingly brilliant.

■ Water tastes funny and wrong.

■ Your computer mouse has evolved to incorporate the gunge in its tracking.

■ You watch University Challenge solely to cultivate people to hate.

■ Every day is a bad hair day because it's started collecting in balls under your bed.

■ Food tastes funny and wrong. Best add more curry powder.

■ You use the defence "you see monkeys doing it" much too often.

■ You've changed the setting on your weighing scales from stones to kilos because you the figures are meaningless and, at a pinch, 120kg could be good.

■ The dust on the window sill has begun to lithify.

■ Fresh air feels like a bath.

■ Five a day might be possible, if you could just get more time to yourself.

■ Your handkerchiefs are in 3D.

■ Global warming, poverty, religious division, conflict - let both sides come to a consensus, then you'll get on board.

■ Getting your hair cut is the closest thing you get to meaningful health care.

■ It takes a week for your sink to drain.

■ Shame replaces magnolia as your go-to hue.

■ You keep paying missold Payment Protection Insurance because you can't be bothered to stop the direct debit.

■ If it doesn't come away with a squirt of bleach, it must have been part of the pattern.

■ Weirdly, there's a lot of blue cheese in your diet, even though you've never bought any.

■ You find the crying child somehow cathartic because life is tough, everything is miserable and they might as well get used to disappointment and pain.

■ Modern life is funny and wrong. Best add alcohol.

Exhibition: Alien Revolution, Greenwich

"No-one would have believed," writes HG Wells in his famous opening for The War Of The Worlds, "in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's."

No-one would have believed! Wells clearly wasn't browsing the internet.

Someone somewhere is believing most things and the existence of life beyond our planet appears to be the receptacle of choice in which to decant the latest extreme thinking, providing a warm embrace for a spectrum of theories from the sinister to the scientific.

This new exhibition - with accompanying planetarium shows and talks - explores the history of ideas surrounding our search for extra-terrestrials.

What becomes apparent is that imposed upon ET are the beliefs, fears and hopes of the time he is sought, from the fantastical realms of life before the enlightenment, through the wrestling and wrangling with the anthropic principle on to the paranoia of the Cold War.

Although we are taking the whole business more seriously these days, the fact we are in thrall to Mars Curiosity's distant digging shows that romanticism is still rampant.

Carl Sagan said: "I am often asked, 'Do you believe in UFOs?' I'm always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not evidence. I'm almost never asked, 'How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?'"

Although right about extra-terrestrials, Sagan misses the point about the humans posing the question.
In response to the Big Question about whether there is or isn't either answer is so mind-blowing that religiosity has the best vocabulary.

Until Sept 8, go to rmg.co.uk.

Image: Lunar Life by Leopoldo Galluzo, 1836 © Smithsonian

Spiral Notebook: Welcome To The Paunch

Eran Creevy is not the only director who can pitch a Canary Wharf set thriller:

Fade in: We're with Roger Fairbrother, mid-50s, fat. He marches down a corridor, beads of sweat on his face. He carries a box, a man on a mission.

Through corridor windows, we see autumn leaves gather in mulchy pools. Smokers huddle in the Allotted Smoking Area. "Roger!"

The camera rises to capture Barry Wheedle, same age but leaner. Frantic. He follows, waving papers.

Roger stops. He doesn't turn. When Barry speaks he is talking to Roger's back.

"You forgot to fill in Requisition Schedule 43 (a) and (b) and to sign here, here..." He gulps. "...and here."

Roger turns slowly. Like a battleship. Menacing. Growling.

"I'm a busy man Barry."

"You've gotta sign. You know what happened last time."

Roger snaps.

"I know what happened last time!"

"The disciplinary board."

"Damn the board, Barry. And damn you. I gotta get these toner cartridges to accounts otherwise Barbara goes into the sales meeting without her forecasts. She goes in there naked, for Christ's sake."

Flashback 18 years. Cut to: An office. The Sales Manager is berating Barbara. Barbara, 30s, weeps. She runs out the office, crashing into Roger. Betrayal blazes in her eyes.

Cut to present: The corridor. Roger is lost in the memory, guilt captured in a sheen of sweat. "I can't let that happen again. Not on my watch." Calmer now. "I gotta go Barry."

Roger turns. Barry reaches out touches Roger on the shoulder. The touch is like electricity, like the remembrance of lost friendship.

"What happened to you Roger? You've changed."

"Everybody changes, Barry. It's called life and she's a bitch."

Barry laughs.

"Remember the days when we just used to enjoy this stupid, pointless merry-go-round and damn the consequences."

Flashback 35 years. Cut to: Two men, Young Barry and Young Roger party in the Supplies Office. Mess. Everything is covered in Post-It notes including... Young Barbara, happy, laughing. In love.

Smash cut to present: "I gotta write you up," says Barry. Failure to sign a requisition schedule is a reprimand. Mandatory."

"You do what you gotta do."

Roger faces the exit, ready to push through to an unknown fate.

He stops short of the door. Lost. Broken. With a passion that he once used to invest in stationery supplies, Roger suddenly throws the box through the corridor window.

"Roger? What the hell?"

With every last ounce of energy in his corpulent body, Roger lifts himself through the frame and out.

He runs like he used to in the old days. Carefree. He breathes the clean fresh air. He kicks up the leaves. Like he used to with Barbara.

He seizes his chest. Pain erupts. He falls to his knees. Then topples forward into the puddles.

Close up on his mouth.

"Post-Its," he whispers with his last breath. "Post-Its."

Fade out

Welcome To The Punch: Shooting in Canary Wharf

The dead of night in east London. The streets are deserted, the cloistered colonnades of Canary Wharf, quiet. It's dark, of course, but the neon sheen of the tall towers provide a geometric, shimmering glow.

Into this frame of chrome and steel, enters an armed gang. Identical in appearance, otherworldly in their gas masks and seeing the Wharf circuits as a loop to slingshot them, and their ill-gotten gains, to freedom and riches.

In their wake, a driven cop, Max Lewinsky, willing to break the rules to bring down criminal mastermind Jacob Sternwood (Mark Strong).

Smoking cartridges ejected from chambers bounce on the pavement, their deadly cargo thudding into walls and flesh.

"Pe-ow," the actors shout like nine-year-old cowboys. "Peow, peow." (Or an onomatopoeia of their choice).

The director has to remind them, again, not to make the noises. That'll be done in post-production.

In the meantime, the camera is recording their mouths acting as muzzles and it's distracting from the high-sheen action.

"You can't fire guns in and around Canary Wharf," actor Mark Strong tells The Wharf as we sit in a Soho hotel a week before the release of Welcome To The Punch, which sees much of its action take place in familiar locales.

"We had these specially made automatic weapons and the cartridges would come out but they would make no noise and there was no muzzle flare, that was put on later.

"That meant we kept running around going..." [he makes a "phut-phut" sound] "... and we kept on having to be told not to make the noise. If you're filming at night around that area it has to be very quiet."

And "filming at night around that area" was very much in the mind of Isle of Dogs director Eran Creevy as he began envisioning a palette for his slick cops and robbers thriller, a follow-up to his 2008 debut, the more realistic, down and dirty Shifty.

No London buses, red telephone boxes or bobbies' helmets adorn the film which aspires to emulate the Hong Kong shoot-out actioners or the simmering take-downs of Michael Mann.

Eran is open about his influences and inspirations.

"I wanted to make something from a film buff's point of view, a genre-geek, who grew up loving films like Bullit and conspiracy movies like Three Days of the Condor, The French Connection, Heat and Infernal Affairs; I have a massive love for Michael Mann, the Scott brothers and also Hong Kong cinema, especially the films of John Woo," said the ebullient director. (James McAvoy likens him to Danny Boyle in his infectious enthusiasm.)

"I live in east London and I was jogging around the island and through the city and I'd see these angles and shots and wondered 'why doesn't anyone shoot around here?' There is a futuristic Tokyo style weird clean streets with no litter.

"You can't enter Canary Wharf without being tested for gunpowder on your steering wheel. It's a crazy place and just the most beautiful metropolis."

Think east London and criminals and you're in the territory of Jack the Ripper or Guy Ritchie's lovable cockney canon and its imitators.

"This seemed very determined not to be your usual geezer, gangster, apples and pears crime film," McAvoy told The Wharf.

"I've seen a lot of those being really great as well but it's willingness not to rely on gritty British realism seemed refreshing.

"It felt quite fresh in terms of what Britain produces. It wasn't about the street, it's what's happening in the financial world and the political world that's what fuels the action, a high political conspiracy."

Strong said: "When we make films about London they tend to be caper comedies. It's fascinating that Eran's chosen to shoot at Canary Wharf, the palette of chrome and steel and give it a look which is more like a Heat or Casino, than what we're used to. "

"We don't make many action movies in this country is the simple reason is economics. Once you've made one in London you can't sell it in Europe or America because they're not interested."

The result is a story about two men - both damaged yet both noble - who face each other from different sides of the law and find a weird bond when they are threatened by forces bigger than both of them.

It is a story that initially was filled with arthouse moments, with complex personal histories, all shot and in the can when the director had a sudden change of heart.

Sometimes you have to be ruthless to make a film that moves with a bit of pace and I saw this movies as something that lives in the immediate, with these two men steam training towards one another.

So I cut a lot of the flashbacks and made them live in the present. I love that minimal style of film-making in the 70s where you don't feel you have to shoehorn in all this backstory about the characters.

The result is bullet fast and true.

Strong says: "The introduction of the script describes that [slickness] and when I met Eran he was unequivocal that's what he wanted to do, he wanted to make an aspirational movie.

I remember reading the script and wanting to find out what happened at the end and I thought what was very interesting that, under the guise of an action movie, there is also this story about guns themselves, about arming the police and the idea that the politicians might be using the issue of gun crime to get votes.

"There's a real possibility that it might cross borders that people see it as an international movie set in London rather than a London movie."

And it might not be the last time, Eran comes knocking on the doors of Canary Wharf Group. He said: "Once we'd production designed the movies so there were no red buses no red telephone boxes or parochial police cars or uniforms we'd created a parallel universe to London, almost a separate London. It borders on being a sci-fi movie.

Ridley Scott has never made a big movie in London and I wondered why that was. And I think we're a new generation of film maker that has grown up around a new London. You think of the London, Ridley would have known - grey and rainy with power cuts and the rubbish on the street - but the new metropolis has sprouted up into the air.

"There's going to be a new generation of film makers that set more films here. We have visual canvas to tell more aspirational, glossy style thrillers that wasn't there before."

I want to make a few more in that universe neon noir London and I won't try to justify it next time because I think the audience will just buy it."



GETTING STARTED

Director Eran Creevy is a bundle of nervous energy. Hard to imagine that this man who spills out words so fast and with such glee could be the focussed director described by his star James McAvoy.

McAvoy said: "The energy flies off him but he is so in possession of his craft.

"His skillset is fantastic, his understanding of the film business is full. That's why he managed to make a movie that looks like $20-$30million dollar movie for peanuts."

Ask how the film came about and the Isle of Dogs film-maker is off and running.

"After making Shifty, which was a more verite style of film, I wanted to make something that harks back to the archetypes of the grizzled cop, the mastermind super criminal but set it in a beautiful, modern London.

"I gave my first 180 page draft to my producers. They were expecting a kitchen sink drama and they were like, 'alright we see what you're trying to do'. We sat around for the next few years, crafting the screenplay and trying to make it work.

"We got the financing but James was off doing X-Men First Class and Mark was doing Green Lantern and John Carter.

"We needed an executive producer to give the film traction. We sent the screenplay to Ridley Scott (inset) and asked if he would help the film move forward.

"He loved Shifty and responded to this script. I flew out to LA to meet him and then he came on board and started making phone calls immediately.

"When someone like Ridley Scott comes on board it gives a certain cachet to the project so things started happening. What Ridley says goes.

"Ridley was making Prometheus at the time and his mind was there but he still found the time to watch the rushes every night.

"He left us to it but he became very involved in the edit, giving me the benefit of his advice."

Film review: Welcome To The Punch (15)

FILM
Welcome To The Punch
(15) 99mins
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Director Eran Creevy's grasp exceeds his reach in this Wharf-set thriller but there are still moments of scintillating brilliance.

REVIEW
Straight into the action, as the director decrees. The throbbing soundtrack, the neon wash, the chrome taking what little light there is and creating a shimmering space ship vibe.

Slick biker thieves engineer their escape with the loot with only a lone cop, breaking rules, to pursue them.
But he is left with a bullet in his leg and a nemesis that becomes an obsession.

Fast forward - everything's fast - and Max (James McAvoy) is burnt-out and beleaguered and noble but broken gunman Jacob (Mark Strong) has found peace of sorts in Iceland. But when Jacob's son is caught up in trouble he must return, setting the two back on a collision course.

Meanwhile, rumbling in the background, pulling invisible strings and leaving our protagonists dangling, is a meta-plot of corrupt police, cynical politicians and a quest for votes that puts guns on the streets.

Eventually, the two become unlikely and uneasy allies in a grander power struggle that culminates in a devastating shoot-out somewhere we know to be Wood Wharf.

Ambitious stuff. And a tall order. Especially as the director has given himself a self-denying ordnance - he has dumped flashbacks (except the prologue) and back story in favour of momentum.

This means that the film speeds through with enviable pace and the tension is ratcheted remorselessly.

This also means much explanation is left on the cutting room floor, with Jacob and Max never fully fleshed-out to the satisfaction that the twisting plot demands.

Creevy's multi-layered plot has various levels of success too, with the cops and robbers a meaty triumph but the politics a limp, camp follower, meaning the climax is uneven.

Winning the acting honours in this very masculine film is Andrea Riseborough, whose cop mixes it up with little concession to her gender.

She finds herself lifted by a tide of neat cameos from a cast that has big names from Creevy's busy contacts book.
Among them Peter Mullen, David Morrissey, Daniel Mays and, in another eye-catching display of louche menace, Johnny Harris.

Mark Strong is, as ever, impeccable, conveying Jacob's fractured steel. Willowy McAvoy occasionally feels adrift in underpowered Lewinksy and, overall, if the viewer feels short-changed then it is in the editing suite that the crime occurred.

Memorably though Eran Creevy succeeds in his self-stated mission to give London a sheen of gloss and, in doing so, has cracked opened the door for more shiny London thrillers (many hopefully made by him) and for that there should be gratitude.

Book review: The Universe Within, by Neil Shubin

BOOK
The Universe Within
Neil Shubin (Allen Lane)
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Shubin tries to make sense of the universe using the human body and behaviour as the keyhole to peep through.

REVIEW
The universe, as lesser scientists than Neil Shubin have pointed out, is a vast place.

It contains wonders that defy credulity all presented in magnitudes that stretch the meagre capacities of our imagination.

Tall order then for an author to capture its marvels in print, especially in such a compact length - other authors please take note.

Distinguished scientist Shubin has opted to take the tricks of his first love - paleontology - to give this book a spine. Fossils are glimpses and clues to the real beast. In the same way, the human body is a synedoche for just about everything there ever was.

From DNA, to time-telling, from the products of the Big Bang, to celestial imbalances that produce Ice Ages, Shubin sets out to show that a residue of all existence is contained in our own bodies. Neat idea, neat book.

DVD Review: The Amazing Mr Blunden (U)

DVD REVIEW
The Amazing Mr Blunden
(U) 99mins
★★★★★

IN A NUTSHELL
At last - as Mr Blunden memorably whispers. At last. The DVD of one of the greatest family movies ever is released 40 years after it cast its enchanting spell.

REVIEW
Two figures emerge on the lawns of Langley Park. For a moment, young Lucy (Lynne Frederick) believes it is the swirling mist that makes them appear insubstantial. She is already spooked - the whispering voices in the burnt-out shell of a mansion have put her on edge.

"Sara! Sara! Don't leave me," says an echo, disturbing the pigeons.

Back on the lawn, she calls for brother Jamie (Garry Miller) and a truth becomes as real as the hands of the young visitors they clasp for assurance, a truth suggested by the enigmatic Mr Blunden who brought the fatherless Allen family to tend this far-away wreck of a mansion.

And there we are, in the thick of the story in one of the most magical family films ever, at last released on DVD on Monday by Second Sight Films, 40 years after its release.

In 1818, almost 100 years to the day before their encounter in the garden, Sara (Rossalyn Landor) and Georgie (Marc Granger) are in mortal peril. Their story is made clear in the churchyard where the date of their deaths is carved on their headstones.

But Sara and Jamie have a chance to travel back in time, rescue the children and rewrite their fateful history.

Images are rich and rife through this lovely film and its characters survive the travails of time too.

Of David Lodge, the punch-drunk husband who fights shadows at the clap of a bell; of the red-nosed and rotund Diana Dors, as Mrs Wickens, plotting to get her hands on the moulah; of Bella confused by apparitions no-one else can see.

This is a companion piece to Lionel Jeffries' The Railway Children but has an added edge and verve, touching on themes such as guilt and redemption.

Mr Blunden (Laurence Naismith in his last film) explaining why the grown-ups cannot see the young time travellers tells Lucy and Jamie: "As they grow older they lose their power to believe in the unlikely."

Thanks to you, Mr Blunden, not me. Never me.

Spiral Notebook: The Meaning Of (East London) Liff

It is the 30th anniversary of Douglas Adams' and John Lloyd's The Meaning Of Liff, the much-loved dictionary which uses place names for words that should exist but don't.

As a tribute to the work of genius, an east London homage:

Aldgate (n.) Unit of distance between you and the person behind which marks whether or not you should hold open the door for them.

Bermondsey (n.) The sudden and infectious smile of a lost-in-thought train passenger when they remember something funny.

Blackwall (n.) The precipitous loss of appetite that follows the discovery of a strange tube in a piece of steak.

Dagenham (v.) To drum on the steering wheel to an '80s rock classic.
 
Gallions Reach (n.) The hopeful but pointless lunge towards Tube doors that stay open as a tempter but then close in your face.

Greenwich (v.) To pull in your elbows from the armrests when the neighbouring Tube seats are taken.

Leamouth (n.) Moment of sublime synchronicity when the lyrics of the song on your MP3 player perfectly match what you're seeing or experiencing.

Limehouse (v.) To shuffle uncomfortably around in a lift to accommodate new passengers.

Newham (n.) Unit of measurement that accords to the light pressure placed on a toilet door to check if it is actually engaged.

Plaistow (n.) The spare button sewn into the hem of a shirt.

Plumstead (v.) To settle on the sofa after having cleared the ironing basket.

Rotherhithe (v.) To mumble your choice from a foreign language menu on a first date.

Shoreditch (n.) The person you least wanted to come to a party but you're most likely to end up with.

Southwark (v.) To repeat a piece of gossip to the person who told you in the first place.

Spitalfields (n.) The improvised network of fabrication required to make the original lie viable.

Stepney (v.) To adjust your posture slightly to avoid an energetic child who is likely to punch you in the crotch.
 
Stratford (n.) The thin layer of dust on everything that is so uniform it appears dull rather than unclean.

Surrey Quays (n.) The polite smiles you receive from strangers that you immediately assume will lead to marriage.

Tower Hamlets (n.) The moment of serenity that overcomes someone contemplating throwing themselves out the office window.

Walthamstow (v.) To crumple up a very expensive bag in order to get it in an overhead locker.

Wapping (v.) Of an iPhone. The obsessive updating of apps to clear all the numbered red discs.

Victoria Dock (n.) Sly glance downwards a woman makes to check her cleavage.

Woolwich (n.) The annoying span of time between waking and the alarm.

Westferry (v.) To travel on the front seat of the DLR pretending to be the driver.

Film review: Broken (15)

FILM

Broken
(15) 99mins
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Newcomer Eloise Laurence gives a sunny, stunning performance in Rufus Norris's overcrowded story of suburban strife.

REVIEW
The adolescent world of tomboy Skunk is beautifully realised in Rufus Norris's otherwise wearying merry-go-round of suburban strife.

The feuds, the fears, the fumblings and the giggles come brilliantly alive amid sun-silvered grass and honeyed nostalgia. Although contemporary, it feels like the summer of 1976 thanks to Rob Hardy's glowing cinematography.

Skunk is captured with winning zest by a newcomer Eloise Laurence, a performance made all the more extraordinary when set against the cast she overshadows - Tim Roth as her gentle father Archie, Cillian Murphy as teacher Mike, Rory Kinnear as her violent neighbour Mr Oswald, played in jittery Yosser Hughes mould.

When diabetic Skunk gains a friend Jed, in the diffident sphere of after-school flirtation, the film feels at home. In contrast, the cycle of destruction that intrudes upon her world, and the film, is so contrived and inauthentic that her seething cul-de-sac would pass comfortably for Brookside Close.

The three houses host their own nightmares - the son who retreats to violent paranoia when he is falsely accused of rape. Oswald's own bloody brutality visited back upon him. Archie's relationship woes.

That would be sufficient, thank you. But the film concerns itself with the intersections, the moments when their Venn diagrams of disaster overlap, ramping up drama beyond tenability.

So by the time Skunk's own life is imperilled, and Norris's creeping air of doom finds its destination, exhaustion, not sympathy, is the only fitting response. Safer to retreat to numbness than invest in yet another calamitous, implausible trauma that could go either way.

There is much to admire in this small, overcrowded film but it is better to admire it from afar.

Spiral Notebook: To whom it may concern

It is with honour and a degree of bafflement that I have accepted the invitation to shape a possible future - although, clearly, not ours.

A new take on the theory of vacuum instability suggests another universe could bubble up, erase us and take our place.

My role is to write a handover note for the new tenants with the accumulated wisdom of our 13billion years.

My rough draft is as follows:

■ If possible, evolve branches for arms. This would allow for photosynthesis, ensuring a personal oxygen supply, and might attract parrots which are a great party ice breaker.

■ You have to flush the toilet to get the hot water to work. I know!

■ Label all dead things from the outset. This will eliminate a lot of unpleasantness in the fields of paleontology, geology and religion.

■ Don't steal my pen.

■ 20 down in The Times crossword is Ephemeral. I repeat, ephemeral.

■ Giraffes. No, they're meant to look like that. We thought so too but we checked the instructions. Twice.

■ If you get a chance, try to import some men from Mars and some women for Venus. Not a biological imperative but I have this cracking idea for a book.

■ Oranges are not the only fruit.

■ Don't shirk on J-cloths, toilet rolls and teaspoons. You can never have too many.

■ If God gives you lemons, make Campari and soda.

■ Stick with steam. Oil is messy and will lead to cataclysmic bother. Same is true of the Dulux Once range.

■ Put it all on Stanley's Roustabout in the 2.30 at Wincanton.

■ Listen to the termites. They have the whole society thing down.

■ Feed children peanuts from an early age. If you don't, suddenly you can't eat dried roasted in economy class for "the welfare of other passengers".

■ Never go economy class.

■ Answers to the big questions: Double helix, no, yes, Darth Vader, "not to be", flux capacitor, 1966, parmesan and Bohemian Rhapsody.

■ Turn that frown upside down.

■ I said don't steal my pen.

■ Time is relative but come to a consensus quickly because, trust me, you don't want a steward's inquiry into the 2.30 at Wincanton.

■ No three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than two. I'll explain later.

■ The following things are more trouble than they're worth: Jim'll Fix It, lip balm, 3G, masculine and feminine forms, democracy, two for £10 meals at Marks and Spencer, hotmail, Dyson, ITV3+1, Stockholm Syndrome, pomegranates, DIY, Beagle 2, candy floss, Semtex, chemistry, love and pandas.

■ I've left bleach in the cupboard and the details of a pizza place that delivers in the kitchen drawer.

Good luck!

Film review: Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (15)

SCREEN
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters
(15) 98mins
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
No messing, but plenty of mess, as the rebooted Grimm siblings get busy with the witch-slapping.

REVIEW
Deep down, somewhere primal and icky, fairy tales have a potency beyond reason.

But Norwegian writer-director Tommy Wirkola doesn't do deep down. Instead, he puts Hansel and Gretel in the title for the sake of clarity and gets on with the business of splatting so much gore on the floor that it fills the tread of his reboot.

Offal you might say. But this is what you wanted, right?

With the pre-title sequence (which is an animated highlight) he gets done with the Grimm fairytale of the brother and sister lured to a witch's candy house but who escape before their tormentor turns them into an incestuous risotto.

Now it's 15 years later and Grimm becomes gruesome as the two bounty hunters with a nifty arsenal of steampunk weaponry and a visceral hatred are busy gaining coinage and notoriety by dispatching a forestful of Olay-deprived child-snatchers.

The witches are heartless, lupine, fast and not afraid to hoik a spade in the mush of a foe.

They are also grotesque - except Famke Janssen's top trump meanie Muriel who needs the upcoming blood moon, a stone circle and a coven of gnarly crones to nail immortality.

Final ingredient in her brew is Gretel herself for a reason that has our leather-clad siblings pondering their past. They want to understand why they were abandoned in the forest by their parents in the first place.

Like a broom-born witch tethered to a tree, this goes round and round. There isn't much of a story and the character development is minimal but you don't give Jeremy Renner a bottle blonde white witch skinny dipping in a healing pool and expect a brooding soliloquy on the unfathomable inequities of the human condition.

Together with a delicious Gemma Arterton, who is feline in action and minxy in outlook, the pair (who have a sparky chemistry) do what they do best - witch-slapping.

Director Wirkola says: "I wanted the vibe of the original fairy tale but I also wanted to spice it with the things I love most in movies - comedy, horror and graphic action."

So witches get dispatched in the foulest of ways with the wickedest of weapons and the greatest of delight. Against a baroque setting of higgledy-piggledy houses and ancient forests, the pair grapple with the sisterhood and the riddle of their DNA.

Dialogue is clunky, a headbutt passes for a riposte and the undertone of misogyny is kicked in the crotch.

A director with a mischievous eye would have mercilessly mashed up the fairytale subculture, Shrek style, but, apart from some porridge, not too hot or not too cold, Wirkola eschews playfulness in favour of a 12-bore to the face wart.