Keira knightley

Claire Foy and the future of celebrity activism

When the actress Claire Foy – still best known for her deservedly award-winning performance in The Crown – was interviewed recently by Harper’s Bazaar to promote her new film H is for Hawk, an adaptation of the Helen MacDonald memoir, she must have expected an easy ride. Estimable title though Harper’s Bazaar undoubtedly is, few would confuse it with a hard-hitting investigative magazine. Yet Foy made some remarks that have blown open the whole vexed question of what the point is of actors getting involved in public discourse, and whether they should, instead, stick to reading other people’s lines. Foy said, when asked about her public opinions, that it was not her place to sound off on social or wider issues.

claire foy

A tastefully muted mishmash of interior design, Nazi fetishism and war guilt

Lewis loves Rachael. Rachael loves Lewis, but she’s not sure if he still loves her. Stephen the handsome widower loves Rachael on sight. Stephen and Rachael have an affair. What happens when Lewis finds out? This plot will be familiar to all practitioners of suburban adultery. It will also be familiar to those students who, rather than taking their pleasure quickly on the kitchen table like Stephen and Rachael, have read Anna Karenina. It is also the plot of The Aftermath, a tastefully muted mishmash of interior design, Nazi fetishism and war guilt, enlivened by that unacknowledged innovation of the World War Two era, the key party. It’s the winter of 1945. The victorious Allies have divided Germany into zones of occupation: American British, French, Russian, erogenous.

aftermath keira knightley