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The top honorees at the 2023 Laurence Olivier Awards were plays that focused on cultures outside of London. “My Neighbour Totoro,” which is based on the beloved Japanese film of the same name from Studio Ghibli, won six trophies, the most of the night, including Best New Comedy, Director, and four craft categories. A revival of the American classic “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams claimed three: Best Play Revival and for lead Paul Mescal and featured player Anjana Vasan. Meanwhile, the British-based “Prima Facie,” which is set to bow on Broadway this month and will thus compete at the Tony Awards, took home two prizes for Best Play and for star Jodie Comer.

The only other productions to win more than one trophy were all musicals. “Standing at the Sky’s Edge” won two of the top prizes: Best Musical and Best Original Score or New Orchestrations. “Tammy Faye,...

Two new works based on existing material dominated the nominations for the 2023 Olivier Awards, the top theatre honor in Britain. “My Neighbour Totoro” and “Standing at the Sky’s Edge” lead the play and musical fields with nine and eight bids apiece. The former is a stage adaptation of the Studio Ghibli film of the same name, brought to life in a visually stunning production featuring impressive puppetry by Basil Twist. “Standing at the Sky’s Edge” uses songs from the Richard Hawley album and new material to tell the story of three families in a Sheffield housing complex.

Revivals had strong showings, too. Director Daniel Fish’s remounting of “Rodger & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!” and the Paul Mescal-led “A Streetcar Named Desire” netted seven and six nominations, respectively. This production of “Oklahoma!” previously played Broadway and received eight Tony Award nominations, including wins for Best Revival and Featured Actress...

Documentary

Channel 4-backed U.K. independent content production company Spirit Studios has teamed with James Watt, co-founder of multinational brewery BrewDog, to produce “Mission Finpossible,” a drama documentary aiming to to highlight the issues facing the world’s shark species. Humans kill over 120 million sharks a year, mainly for their fins for soup and many shark species are now under considerable risk of unrecoverable decline with some species having declined to near extinction in recent years. The shark is an apex predator and crucial to maintaining healthy ocean ecosystems.

Spirit Studios, whose previous content activism campaigns include global mental health movement #Iamwhole, will produce the documentary that will feature an original scripted element together with input from the world’s leading shark experts and archive footage. BrewDog is funding the project and will also produce an exclusive beer to raise funds for shark support groups around the world. The...

Stars: Rory Kinnear, Maxine Peake, Neil Bell, Pearce Quigley, David Moorst, Rachel Finnegan, Tom Meredith, Simona Bitmate, Robert Wilfort, Karl Johnson, Sam Troughton, Roger Sloman, Kenneth Hadley, Tom Edward-Kane | Written and Directed by Mike Leigh

Peterloo is the latest film directed by British auteur Mike Leigh and is his second-period piece in the last five years, after his critically acclaimed epic Mr Turner, released in 2014. Premiering on what will be the 200th anniversary of the relatively unknown British tragedy of the same name, occurring in the year of 1819 in Manchester. It is a rather timely release considering only 200 years later the British people are once again in a traumatising political disposition considering the deliberating reasoning of Brexit, although I’m sure this is no coincidence on Leigh’s part. Peterloo covers the days and ultimately the harrowing event itself with a massive British ensemble with pretty much every single UK...

Mike Leigh spent much of his time since the release of Mr. Turner in 2014 discussing, researching, and filming the nature of political protest via the story of Peterloo. Political unrest is nothing new and the powerful have amazing resilience, as shown by the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry’s ability to slaughter 15 people and injure hundreds more at Peterloo, and in the process quell the chance at English revolution.

Why the United Kingdom didn’t have a revolution comparable to France, Italy or the United States was up for discussion when I recently sat down with Mike Leigh. In Peterloo, his career-long interest in class division meets the usually dry discussion of taxation. Leigh dedicates one scene to the Corn Laws, which lit the fire of revolution, and spends the rest of the film following the working-class political convergence that lead to the rally at St. Peter’s Field and the...

For much of its two-and-a-half-hour running time, Mike Leigh’s period epic “Peterloo” consists mostly of people talking — about what they need in order to be seen, to be heard, and frankly just to live. The last half hour depicts what happens when that kind of speech is cut off by the most disturbingly effective countermeasure: physical violence.

In 1819, a peaceful pro-democracy rally at St. Peter’s Field in poverty-stricken Manchester, England, became a massacre when charging infantrymen attacked the crowd with their swords. Whether you walk away from Leigh’s sacredly handled, no-nonsense slice of this history remembering the impassioned oratory of angry citizens or their murderous treatment by a cruel government is, on some level, Leigh’s own cinematic referendum on what we want from movies. Life as spoken up for, as passionately reasoned, or its opposite: death as grim spectacle?

Leigh makes talky films, after all, not action pictures.

What possessed the British Tory government to order a military charge on horseback into a crowd of over 100,000 unarmed, working-class protesters? The place is St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, England, and the slaughter ended with 18 dead and hundreds injured as the cavalry — swords drawn — slashed through a gathering of dissenters in an enclosed space that made them ducks in a barrel. The time is August, 16, 1819, though Mike Leigh’s painstaking re-creation of the Peterloo massacre might as well be happening right now outside your window. Rest assured, there was...

An odd irony drives “Peterloo” forward. Mike Leigh’s expansive, exhaustive, and extraordinarily thorough portrait of early 19th-century political activism is, to put it one way, deliberate in pace and tone. To put it bluntly — and in an argot more readily familiar to its cast of working-class characters — the film is bloody well dull.

But to the film’s measured credit, it somehow manages to use that very dullness in its favor, almost turning it as an advantage. Think of “Peterloo,” with its sprawling cast and volumes of political oratory, as the prestige-pic equivalent of a public library: It leaves plenty of ideas out on display, and offers ample quiet spots in which to think about them.

The film starts — and ends — with a bang. It’s 1815 and the Battle of Waterloo has just come to a close, leaving England victorious in their nearly two-decades-long war with France. Leigh picks...

For two filmmakers who have, for much of their careers, been bracketed as twin bastions of British social realism, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach have never had much in common. Where Loach has long worn his liberal activist’s heart on his sleeve, Leigh tends to tuck his politics into the folds of his movies, national crises of class tension and inequality needling through intimate domestic scenarios. So it’s chief among several surprises in “Peterloo,” Leigh’s vast, many-headed, boomingly angry historical epic, that it plays almost as his version of a Loach film. Strenuously detailing the many small orders of business that led to Manchester’s devastating 1819 Peterloo Massacre, which saw the British Tory government ordering a brutal military charge into a working-class crowd of peaceful pro-democracy protesters, it’s a stately, explicitly rhetorical paean to the people — setting the past in stone while also lashing out at a present-day political order.

This week Toronto and Venice will announce at least the first part of their line-ups and one title sure to land amongst the slate is the latest film by Mike Leigh. Following Mr. Turner, his new drama Peterloo follows the British government facing off against 60,000 during a protest in which 15 died with more having numerous injuries.

Ahead of a November release, the first trailer has now arrived, which sets the stage for the massacre. “There has never been a feature film about the Peterloo Massacre,” Leigh said. “Apart from the universal political significance of this historic event, the story has a particular personal resonance for me, as a native of Manchester and Salford.”

See the trailer below, courtesy of Amazon Studios, for the film starring Rory Kinnear, Maxine Peake, Pearce Quigley, Philip Jackson, Karl Johnson, Tim McInnerny, and David Moorst.

Internationally acclaimed and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mike Leigh portrays one of...