11/01/13….Shadow Dancer – Showing tonight!

SHOWING at Thame Cinema 4 All, Thame Players Theatre, Nelson Street, Thame – Shadow Dancer – 2012, 101 minutes, 15 certificate, Directed by James Marsh, Starring Andrea Risborough, Brid Brennan, Clive Owen, Aiden Gillen, Domhnall Gleeson

James Marsh is best known for documentary film making ? notably 2010?s Project Nim and 2009?s thrilling Man on Wire. Screenwriter Tom Bradby, who has adapted this from his own novel, was once an ITN journalist reporting from 1990?s Northern Ireland. The combination of real life politics, edgy fiction, and cinematic realism is ideal for this gripping Troubles-set thriller about the murky paranoia of the 1990?s IRA.

Andrea Risborough has already demonstrated her place as one of the most talented chameleon-esque actors of her generation. She can convince as pretty much anything: from ditzy Essex flirt (Made in Dagenham), or painfully vulnerable victim (Brighton Rock) to a ruthlessly ambitious Margaret Thatcher (The Long Walk to Finchley) or an imperiously glamorous Wallis Simpson (W.E). Here she is superb as Colette McVeigh, a single mother from a well known republican family in West Belfast, with two brothers who are active in the IRA, a woman consumed by self-loathing and moral compromise, tainted by the political culture of her upbringing.

Set against the backdrop of the Good Friday agreement, with its connotations of secret deal-making between sworn enemies, Colette is caught between high politics and gritty familial loyalties: she must negotiate her desire to protect a young son, the pressure from menacing republican activism at home and the demands of an ?agreement? with Clive Owen?s Mac, a British Intelligence Officer. The whole is enigmatic, understated, compelling.

Doors open 7.30pm – film 8pm – Licensed bar