Anthony Hopkins: Life Is a Dream album review – easy on the ear melodies written from the heart

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh This fantastic comic play from the Radio 4 trio unleashes a torrent of great gags and illusions Horror pastiche has a proud lineage at this festival – for example Garth Marenghi, and Andrew Doherty’s hit Gay Witch Sex Cult two summers ago. In that company, Crybabies’ The Scaring can stand as tall as the demon Haeldrrun towering over its finale: it’s another fantastic comic play from the Radio 4 trio of Michael Clarke, James Gault and Ed Jones with chills as well as laughs, and production values rarely seen on the fringe. A tale of demonic possession and a disillusioned priest, set in a guesthouse that makes the Overlook in The Shining seem five-star by comparison, it’s as tightly packed with smart gags as a hotelier’s cellar with the corpses of slaughtered guests. The plotting, too, is twistier than Regan’s neck in The Exorcist, a moment referenced in one creepy/comical scene here featuring a haunted dolly. It begins with two priests exorcising a beast from another dimension. But the beast wins, leaving our hero Father Arthur bereft of his partner, and his calling. And so (cue non sequitur second scene) he must take up work in the immersive stag-do industry – at least until summoned to the Lyle Away hotel, where a reckoning with his traumatic past awaits …...

A teasing tale of the friendship between a writer and an actor explores the fallout from fame, and the blurring between pretence and reality M is a celebrated film actor. A star since childhood, now the face of a major fashion brand, she has been famous all her life. That her career closely resembles Natalie Portman’s has been gleefully seized upon by the press, something Rachel Cusk must surely have anticipated: in the novel, M’s first film has its sex scenes cut at her mother’s insistence, as happened with Portman’s 1994 debut Leon, while her ballerina movie is recognisably Black Swan. M is also, in the words of the nameless and genderless narrator of Life of M, “a good sport”. When the narrator suggests writing M’s autobiography, M likes the idea. “Would you just make it up?” she asks. A celebrity autobiography is seldom the work of the celebrity herself. And yet any suggestion that the narrator will serve as a kind of ghostwriter to M is dispensed with in a few pages. The pair meet for coffee at a luxury hotel and, after the narrator’s partner falls suddenly and seriously ill, for lunch in a restaurant. The lunch is unsatisfactory, an attempt at intimacy that the narrator acknowledges afterwards to have been a mistake. Though M is determined to live as normal a life as possible (“her personal task is to become real, or rather to acquire some reality”), the narrator is uncomfortably aware of their own falseness with M: “It was as if I was acting, while M came across as authentic and real. It was as if she was the only one good enough at acting to attain reality.” After that the two of them do not see one another again “for a long time”...

Despite stars Leslie Mann, Anna Faris and Isla Fisher and the writers behind The Hangover, this tale of friends at a luxury hotel is a dud Jon Lucas and Scott Moore are the screenwriters who struck gold nearly 20 years ago with The Hangover, a brilliant stag-weekend nightmare comedy about what happens in Vegas, which sadly spawned a terrible (though lucrative) franchise. Now, as writers and directors, they have tried turning it around and making a movie about how middle-aged women behave on a longed-for spa weekend at a luxury-porn hotel. The result is a comedy without gags, a comedy which, for all the strenuous high-jinks, is afraid to be flippant or mean or, indeed, funny in any way. Leslie Mann plays a hotshot lawyer called Jane who can’t make room in her life for romance; Anna Faris is goofy Sophie, PA to a rich asshole; Michelle Buteau is outspoken badass Coco, angry at her ex-husband dating again; and Isla Fisher is landed with the stridently unfunny role of Mel, a wild child who makes the other three nervous, but whose life-affirming no-filter honesty is going to break everyone’s emotional logjam and sort out their lives. As for Jane, it looks as if the hotel’s super-hot super-sensitive yoga teacher, Kai (Adam Demos), is going to hook up with her...