Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: Why The White Lotus is murderously good

Amid the banyan trees and under the disapproving gaze of monkeys, we meet the Ratliff family from North Carolina: businessman Timothy (Jason Isaacs) and his lorazepam-addled wife Victoria (Parker Posey), and their three children. Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger, with a grin uncannily like his superstar father’s) is a remorseless alpha male, living on Adderall and protein shakes, while insisting to his gentler brother Lochlan (Sam Nivola) that it’s time to step up, bulk up and be a man: “Getting what you want in life – that’s happiness, bro”. 

Meanwhile, their sister Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) is studying Buddhism and seeks to make contact with a famous monk at a nearby retreat (the notional reason for her parents’ choice of holiday destination). “We’re a normal family, you’ll see,” claims the sedated Victoria. 

Well, that’s obviously nonsense. Why, for a start, is Timothy refusing to abide by the resort’s “digital detox” rule and nervously taking so many calls from the Wall Street Journal?

Walton Goggins is terrific as Rick, a shell of a man in a Bermuda shirt, whose permanent state of indignation clearly reflects dark secrets. Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), his younger Mancunian girlfriend is smarter than he recognises. “This is so on-brand for you,” she tells Rick. “To be a victim of your own decisions”. 

The resort offers any number of spa treatments and New Age remedies, but he sees himself as irredeemable: “I don’t need to detach. I’m nothing”. Chelsea presses him to participate: “It’s good to talk about things with a wise Indian”.

One of the great pleasures of The White Lotus has always been White’s microscopic attention to the dynamics of dialogue and the barbs that are smuggled into the apparent banalities of vacation-speak.

Best of all in this respect are the three lifelong friends who have decided to spend quality time together in a dream location: Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), a successful actor; Kate (Leslie Bibb) a stay-at-home mother and suspected Trump voter from Texas; and Laurie (Carrie Coon, always great) a workaholic lawyer trying to get over a divorce. Whenever two of the three are alone, they are reliably spiteful about the third. Their otherwise hyperbolic praise for one another is rendered meaningless by these funny (and bleak) scenes of character assassination.

As always, the show contrasts the guests’ gluttonous commodification of local culture – in this case, off-the-shelf Eastern mysticism and pseudo-spiritual therapies – with the authentic day-to-day lives of those who work at the resort: principally, the decorous courtship between hotel security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) and “health guru” Mook (Lalisa Manoban, AKA Lisa of K-pop’s BLACKPINK).

Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge), so memorable in the first two seasons, does not return, but there are some intriguing continuities of personnel which I shall not spoil. More importantly, perhaps, the show’s DNA – White’s love of murder mystery, lurking lust and dark humour – is alive and kicking. A fourth season is already confirmed.

Unicorn (Garrick Theatre, London, booking until April 26)

You cannot really go wrong when Mike Bartlett is the writer: his 2010 play Earthquakes in London remains the most memorable artistic exploration of climate change and its consequences that I have seen, and his BBC drama Doctor Foster was, with good reason, a big hit. 

Addressed ineptly, the subject of “throuple-dom” – can three people really co-exist in a stable relationship? – could seem merely salacious or, at the other extreme, tediously prim. But James Macdonald’s fine production avoids both pitfalls: Bartlett’s deft use of language captures the deep humour of the situation, and the very English repressions, taboos and awkwardness that it involves.

It helps, too, that the performers are all from the acting premier league. Nicola Walker as Polly, a poet and teacher, initiates the adventure with the younger Kate (Erin Doherty, Princess Anne in the third and fourth seasons of The Crown) and strikes precisely the right balance between desire and reserve. Her husband Nick, a doctor, is played by Stephen Mangan, who can make an entire audience laugh with the slight shift of an eyebrow, and lurches in mid-sentence from attempted displays of virility to quiet desperation.

Though it makes many serious points about modernity, loneliness and relationships, Unicorn does not take itself too seriously, and is consequently a tremendous theatrical achievement.

Virdee (BBC One; iPlayer)

From the first, disorienting sequence of a police officer chasing a villain on-foot – its aesthetic punch worthy of a high-octane video game – Virdee announces itself as much more than a standard police procedural.

Adapted by AA Dhand from his popular series of thrillers (the next, The Chemist, is out in May), this six-part crime drama is a neo-noir gem that keeps you gripped from start to finish. Detective Harry Virdee (Staz Nair) is tasked by his boss DS Clare Conway (Elizabeth Berrington) with finding a missing teenager, Ateeq Farooqi (Yousef Naseer). But the case quickly metastasises into something much uglier.

Are Harry and his partner DS Amin (Danyal Ismail) investigating a war between Bradford’s drug gangs, or the horrific work of a serial killer – or both? There are nods to The Wire (2002-08) but also to The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Se7en (1995).

At home, Harry is blissfully married to Saima (Aysha Kala) and a devoted father to their young son Aaron (Wissam Naseer). But his inflexible father Ranjit (Kulvinder Ghir) has cut him off because their family is Sikh and Saima is Muslim. Amid all the action – and, be warned, sometimes gruesome violence – this emotional tension is deftly portrayed.

To complicate matters further, Saima’s brother Riaz (Vikash Bhai) is one of Bradford’s most powerful drug lords and bonded to Harry for reasons that are deep-rooted and full of ambiguity. Bhai is impressively persuasive as the gang boss trying to convince his brother-in-law (and himself) that he brings order to his illegal trade and provides his community with work into the bargain. “This city’s got rules of its own,” he says. But who gets to enforce those rules?

Still only 33, Nair is a revelation in the lead role, and – not for nothing – should certainly be on Barbara Broccoli’s shortlist of candidates to succeed Daniel Craig as James Bond.

The Extinction of Experience: Reclaiming our Humanity in a Digital World, by Christine Rosen (The Bodley Head)

Socrates was famously hostile to writing on the grounds that it undermined memory and true understanding. It is a cliché that all significant technological innovations are initially opposed as a threat to what makes us human and often trigger moral panic. 

But Christine Rosen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is not a Luddite: she readily acknowledges that the benefits of the digital revolution – comfort, convenience, accessibility, speed – “are compelling”. 

Instead, she urges us to consider seriously what this social and behavioural upheaval may also be costing us. “More and more,” she writes, “we relate to our world through information about it rather than direct experience with it”. 

We chase status, optimisation and constant distraction through the screens of our devices; in the process, we are surrendering spontaneity, face-to-face contact, and other “ways of thinking, knowing, and being in the world”. The overmighty algorithm is billed as a futuristic force; but, in practice, traps us in the past, giving us more of what we like already.

Though the pandemic and lockdown certainly turbocharged the process, Rosen suggests that this was simply “an acceleration of a growing trend”. Like Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget (2010) and William Gibson in his prophetic science fiction, she calls for deep reflection upon “what we are losing, as well as gaining, when we allow new technologies into our lives”.

This means remembering human agency in the midst of the technological tsunami. “Extinction [of experience] is not inevitable” she writes. “It is a choice.” Exactly so.

Captain America: Brave New World (general release)

Look, it was either this or Bridget Jones and the Temple of Doom. And – though by no means the best of the 35 Marvel Cinematic Universe movies that have appeared since 2008 – Anthony Mackie’s first big-screen outing as Sam Wilson, inheritor of the star-spangled shield from Steve Rogers, is entertaining popcorn fare.

Harrison Ford plays the recently elected President Thaddeus ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross, pleasingly grouchy but keen to seal an international deal on access to Celestial Island in the Indian Ocean and its precious extra-terrestrial mineral resources – and thus prove to his estranged daughter that he has turned over a new leaf as a peacemaker. Naturally, all of this is imperilled by his (heavily trailed) transformation in the White House rose garden into the Red Hulk.

In pursuit of villains using Manchurian Candidate-style mind control, the captain is aided by his trainee Falcon, Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) and Ross’s security adviser, Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas) – who is also, helpfully, a graduate of the Russian ‘Red Room’ school of Black Widow secret agents. As always, Giancarlo Esposito adds class to proceedings, in this case as bad guy Seth Voelker, aka Sidewinder.

It’s all enjoyable hokum, setting the scene for a new line-up of the Avengers, and the MCU’s next tentpole releases, Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, expected in May and July respectively.Personally, I would love to see Marvel embrace once more the mean-streets grittiness of its Netflix era (2015-19) and memorable shows like Luke Cage, Jessica Jones and The Punisher. But I am not holding my breath.