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After a stunted night out, five teenagers wait indefinitely for a train. With nothing to do but sit on the platform, they exchange memories – but the reminiscence is just badly disguised ridicule. Everyone is forced to partake, lest the mockery should fall onto you, and so they scramble and tear into one another, into […]
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Splendour is a play which delights in being enigmatic. Written by Abi Morgan, screenwriter of Suffragette and The Iron Lady, this claustrophobic character study manages to be disorientating, roundabout, and yet urgently compelling. Kathryn (Natalie Woodward), a photojournalist, is sent to the lavish house of a dictator and his wife, Micheline (Rosie Richards), in “a […]
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One might well say it’s an exciting and empowering time for the role of trans issues in the arts. Notably, the story of the painter Lili Elbe achieved international recognition in ‘The Danish Girl’ and, closer to home, both slots at the Burton Taylor Studio this week have been devoted to pieces of new writing […]
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Since last week’s show at the Burton Taylor Studio, a relatively small change had been made to the arrangement of the audience seating, but it was the first thing that interested me about ‘Noose’. Whether or not it was intentional, the result was to allow the acting space, connected to the thin gap through the audience that constituted the actors’ only entrance […]
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✮✮✮✮✮ There’s a moment in Berkoff’s Dahling You Were Marvellous when a group of thesps vent about a particularly nasty specimen of theatre critic: “He said my acting could cure insomnia – imagine reading that the next morning over your muesli.” The cast can be pretty confident they won’t provoke any such response themselves. […]
Continue Reading✮✮ Role Call, written by Christopher Evans and directed by Madeleine Perham, comes from the team that worked on the phenomenal Blue Stockings. It tells the story of a teacher, Mr. Kendall, who sleeps with his student, Hazel, and is consumed with guilt about crossing the line and failing to be the inspirational mentor that […]
Continue Reading✮✮✮✮ We were promised sex, and sex we were given. But as we watch a mother hysterically laughing in an attempt to cover the sound of creaking bed springs from her 15-year-old daughter’s room, it is clear that this is not the youthful romp we may have expected, but an excruciating and close-to-the-bone comedy […]
Continue Reading✮✮1/2 “Why people have to complicate a thing so simple I can’t make out,” remarked Beckett on the multitude of different interpretations which sprang from his play. Perhaps so, but as this two-and-a-half hour whale swims interminably along, it’s difficult not to find its religious and sociological overtones a little tiresome. The fine cast […]
Continue ReadingKafka. The name alone is usually enough to send shivers through you. Personally, the addition of a creepy groom, a raped girl and a dying boy seemed completely unnecessary, if it was a scare you were after. You could just as well have stood in the middle of the stage with no lights or props, […]
Continue ReadingImmortality. It’s a subject that has taken up a lot of time in books, on stage and the screen, although usually it seems to be the fanatical desire of a super-villain (like that bloke in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade who tried to find immortality in the Holy Grail) or something that afflicts a […]
Continue ReadingLess than ten minutes into Stood Up In Oxford and my cover had been blown. Reviewers can’t help but stick out in stand-up audiences, their pads and pencils replacing the pints clutched by the other audience members, and a tentative snicker replacing the easy guffaw. I could, to the trained eye, have been rumbled long […]
Continue ReadingRosalind Stone previews Caligula, showing in the BT in 7th week.
Continue ReadingZoe Apostolides previews Mammals, to be showing in the BT Tuesday 1st – Saturday 5th November.
Continue ReadingRosalind Stone previews The Dummy Tree, showing Thursday 27th – Saturday 29th October at the BT.
Continue ReadingFrankie Goodway previews 4.48 Psychosis
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