Kiefer Sutherland

Graeme Virtue

IN A screen career spanning more than three decades, Kiefer Sutherland has played a lot of different characters. On stage at the ABC, he seems to be relishing his latest role: a grizzled, grinning 50-year-old country singer touring the UK in support of a pretty good debut album.

The former Young Gun and CTU troubleshooter certainly looks the part in worn jeans, neck rag and white gaucho hat. Crucially, Sutherland sounds convincing too. His vocal delivery – a variant of Jack Bauer’s urgent, commanding rasp familiar from dozens of hectic interrogations on 24 – is a pleasing fit for the hardscrabble songs of heartbreak and hard liquor that feature on his Down In A Hole record.

During the mid-1990s, Sutherland worked the rodeo circuit, so his bronco-busting posturing doesn’t feel too much like an affectation. Similarly, his well-documented hell-raising adds some heft to the sozzled waltz of Not Enough Whiskey and the road house boogie of Ways to be Wicked.

A rowdy, raucous four-piece backing band allows Sutherland to focus on being a frontman, geeing up the sold-out crowd with welltimed air punches during songs and wrangling them with off-colour anecdotes in between. His songs are immediate enough to grab even those who may have only come to gawk at a Hollywood star off the reservation, and are interwoven with some well-chosen Merle Haggard, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan covers.

Midway through the first of two encores, the audience burst into a five-minute long ovation and if Sutherland’s moist-eyed reaction to the hollering is an act, it’s a good one. MARTIN Provost’s drama is a double hander featuring two of France’s finest leading women, Catherine Deneuve and Catherine Frot. Which Catherine is the greater?

It’s a close run thing as Provost tells his tale of a Parisian midwife (Frot) whose fraught relationship with her father’s lover is unexpectedly renewed after decades of estrangement. Deneuve, playing the mistress, breezes into the film on a cloud of Chanel and scarves, charming everyone she meets, save for the one woman she truly wants to impress.

Only French cinema knows how to mine the best from its older actresses, and the two Catherines, given the chance to shine, grab it.