FringeReview UK
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FringeReview UK 2021
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Even more than 2019, a carnival riot of joy – with enough misdirection to evoke moonshine
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Absorbing. With such an acting masterclass the play’s a bewitchingly-voiced fugue on the limits of belief and betrayal.
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An Evening With Flanders and Swann
A sovereign tribute. If you know Flanders and Swann, you’ll know Bednarczyk.
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Yomi Sode’s hybrid theatre is a compelling immersion of witness and poetry: we need more of it.
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A pristine, heartwarming Valentine of a musical, starring a pair of real-life lovers, it deserves a real-life run
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Three very fine and one outstanding work, Scratches – the best kind of play on depression, self-harm, black holes. Because it’s screamingly funny and deeply connected to why we do theatre.
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Evening Conversations/Life Laundry
Engrossing, it should provoke. Sudha Bhuchar absolves us by being bloody funny.
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Charlotte Emmerson and Sian Phillips make their parts indelible, and add to Beckett’s stock of pity, stoicism and a window on death. Outstanding.
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Hamilton and Me: An Actor’s Journal
In rapid, elegant, idiomatically kerned language, Giles Terera proves himself a superb expositor of where it happens.
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Jumbo’s Hamlet strips out accretions and ghosts you into asking who or what Hamlet is. See it if you possibly can.
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Don’t miss the chance to see this transcendent actor prove she possesses another dimension altogether.
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Its potency lies in a fine peeling apart by Adrian Lester and Danny Sapini, and the language that bridges it.
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After all the gods and their lack of choice, we come to the final instalment, the human dimension. Where we have one. A heartfelt, satisfying finish.
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A finely-calibrated solo play of what it’s like to enter that tunnel of near-undiagnosable but very real illness. Corinne Walker’s both authoritative and quicksilver. Do catch it.
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One of the wittiest but also truthful comedies about love, identity, sexual politics and gefilte fish I’ve seen
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An adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel Little Women by all-female performance art collective Figs in Wigs
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Living Newspaper #3 Royal Court Theatre
Hot off Sloane Square a team of writers, actors and creatives twist the news to truth
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Like all the Royal Court’s Living Newspaper series, we need this. Watch what this does with the future
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Like all the Royal Court’s Living Newspaper series, we need this. Watch a group of young dramatists take on the future
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Building out of Macbeth a recurring epic of structural violence not ended with one overthrow, sets the seal on this outstanding production.
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Immerse yourself in Blanche McIntyre’s quizzical production. You’ll come nearer to this play.
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As we saw in March, don’t be lulled by friendly colours and fluffy fonts. Queens of Cups again proves they’re a company to revel with and wait for heart-stopping reveals
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Don’t be lulled by the friendly colours and fluffy fonts. Queen of Cups is absolutely a company to watch, and its showcase productions are literally unmissable
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On Arriving takes sixty minutes it seems we’ve been immersed in a Greek Tragedy of ninety. See it.
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Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied Tunisia
A profound parable for co-existence and its sometime impossibility, perpetually skewed by others’ disruptions.
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A terrific reinvention, bringing gods and heroines up from the death of myth to an altered world.
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As with Inside, Outside not only fits us, they help us to move on, and become in their modest, unassuming and utterly transcendent way, part of how we learn to.
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Pandora’s Jar/Honour Among Thebes
The most educative stand-up and a thrilling presentation. Oh and bloody funny on the tragedies.
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With his new production director Robin Herford, most associated with this play, brings pace, panache, and more than a dose of Ayckbourn’s generosity of spirit
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Do see this work of understated virtuosity, rich in character, substance, a shape-shifting singularity.
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A fleet, brilliantly upending, wholly relevant take on the Verona-ready toxicity feeding male violence and young depression
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A revelation, superbly written and acted. Comparisons have been made with A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing. I can think of no higher praise either. You must see this.
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A joyous, heady and oh-so-welcome return to this intimate yet high-kicking theatre. An absolute must-see.
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A first-rate revival of a play that with its ostensible shock-value in aspic, reveals subversions and a clever structure so unsettling we should all look in the mirror and wince.
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Statements After an Arrest under the Immortality Act
An important, scorching revival, Statements explores the limits of love in a forcing-house of oppression and racism.
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Naturally enriched by living with Shakespeare Michael Pennington unearths local habitations and names for him.
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The Girl Who Was Very Good at Lying
Andrews vividly conveys what it is to be an undone thing, someone unravelling tales to live.
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A dramatic sense of arrival the way the Odyssey here ended: a clash of even vaster ferocity, keening, treachery, humour, mischievousness, sacrifice and grief, joy and the agency of women.
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The definitive way to experience this troublingly great, disturbingly unresolved poem
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Do see this Tempest, not only subtly outstanding, but pulsing with human connectivity and warmth.
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Heartstopping. There’s an absoluteness here we need. We must prove desperate for it or die ourselves.
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Another sovereign tribute. Stefan Bednarczyk brings Tom Lehrer swaggering out of retirement.
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Again the most educative stand-up and a thrilling presentation. Oh and bloody funny on war, male sexuality and the Bechdel Test.
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With Michelle Terry as Viola, one of the most touching and truthful Twelfth Nights I’ve seen.
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The glaring energy of this piece can’t disguise how it strikes profundity in its funny-bone.
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Vagabonds My Phil Lynott Odyssey
An original off-kilter approach to elegy, tribute and becoming yourself.
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Vespertilio marks Barry McStay’s emergence as a writer of distinction. Anything he writes now should be looked out for.
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Amy Berryman’s Walden is a remarkable play where the earth itself’s at the cross-planet, and travellers in space have inner and outer choices.
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Churchill’s anatomy of grief is what abides. Its emotional plangency and pulling the future open is unique.