Review: Oh What a Lovely War
Musically directed by Ellie Verkerk the six-strong cast play instruments throughout. They’re a phenomenal team, singing beautifully a capella or in solo. With six young actors mostly fresh out of drama school absolutely at the top of their first game, we’re treated to acting both hungry to prove and yet touched by the world they’ve entered. This is an outstanding production.
Review: Mates in Chelsea
Mates in Chelsea is definitely worth seeing, and apart from adaptations surely the best thing this writer’s produced in a decade. Royal Court Theatre
Review: Dead Dad Dog
McKay is even-handed, and very funny. And don’t you just love a ghost in 1985 who’s never heard of Margaret Thatcher?
Review: Accidental Death of an Anarchist
The adage that farce is tragedy speeded up met its greatest progenitor in Dario Fo. In a ferocious new version by Tom Basden of Franca Rame’s and Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist, directed by Daniel Raggett in a stunning production now at the Haymarket, the target here is squarely the London Met. And if you slowed down Basden’s brilliant, no-holds-unbludgeoned telling, details prove tragic enough.
Review: Purgatorio
Groundhog Day - Saying goodbye to old memories, whilst finding new ones. A beautiful physical representation on our ability to accept who we truly are! Get down to Club Purgatorio!
Review: AFTER ALL
Weinachter is an interchangeable chameleon: not just a dancer, but a rare performer who can do it all! Her style and execution of ideas paints a beautiful memory of her idiosyncratic talents in exploring the beginning and end of life. Stunningly poignant.
Review: The Ruffian on the Stair and Funeral Games
Joe Orton’s The Ruffian on the Stair and Funeral Games come to the Lantern Theatre for four performances. This in-house double bill of one-acters is directed by Daniel Finlay and Mark Burgess respectively. A fitting end to the Lantern’s extraordinary week
Review: FOOD
Geoff Sobelle’s performance is outstanding, absurd, magical and mysterious visual physical storytelling.
Review: Double Bill: Paul Robeson, Suzi of the Dress
No doubting of the power of this double-bill from Kansas. The Paul Robeson is solid gold, the Suzi of the Dress, quicksilver.
Review: Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!
A cost-of-living revolution in St James Street? You’d better believe it as Triada Theatre kick off the weekend with Dario Fo’s 1974 Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! at the Lantern Theatre. Superb, energised theatre, rough occasionally, but mostly very-well performed, imaginatively staged, rapturously received. Now get out on the streets.
Review: Cheesy Cheesy Catchy Mousey
There’s surprises here you’ll discover. A superb landmark in Mark Daniels’ gifted exploration of Absurdism’s relevance. This isn’t deadly theatre, it’s quietly lethal to deathly assumptions everywhere. See it.
Review: all of it
Still the most sheerly thrilling yet intimate piece MacDowall has written, though all three pieces amplify that. A miniature classic of snatched meaning its staging too flashes by with shocking brevity. In all it lasts just 90 minutes. Catch it.
Review: A Caravan Named Desire
Anything by Alexander and Helen Millington is worth coming for. A Caravan Named Desire isn’t yet at the level of I Love Michael Ball but by the time you see it, it almost certainly will be. This is a team to watch and queue for.
Review: Beneath
A highly interesting absurdist environmental performance with an intense message given air from under the ocean
Review: Candide
"Brimming with ideas, full-blooded and full throated performance, Candide is presented successfully in a way only Babolin theatre can achieve."
Review: Cocky and the Tardigrades
Bonkers brilliance. Cocky couldn’t have been premiered with two more stunning actors, and the author’s flawless stepping-in remains remarkable.
Review: The Play That Goes Wrong
A play about amateurs no amateur company should even dare contemplate. There’s genius in the timing of all this. Outstanding.
Review: Language Games
A quirky and delightful play of language and ideas in a short film depicting 4 characters in philosophical conversation (overseen by a giant, verbal rabbit).
Review: The Marching SKAletons and Dead Beat Poets
An 8-piece day of the dead inspired parade band plus the Dead Beat Poets
Review: Two Horsemen
The glaring energy of this piece can’t disguise how it strikes profundity in its funny-bone.
Review: Living Newspaper #6
Like all the Royal Court’s Living Newspaper series, we need this. Watch what this does with the future
Review: We, The Lost Company, An Adaptation.
A delightful musing on water and the seaside that was engaging and intriguing.
Review: Until the Ad Break
An absurdist comedy that tries very hard to find the humour in an apocalypse.
Review: A Separate Peace
Stoppard looks at society’s phantom limb ethic. Even when it’s gone it aches, and it aches to have someone opting out.
Review: Far Away
Our greatest playwright since Beckett and Pinter. An outstanding revival. Hesitating?
Review: The Affair
A lovelorn lothario with ants in his pants meets his match in a knockabout clown play
Review: There She Is
A treat of an absurdist “tale” that brings the confusion of life into the centre of our universe
Review: Headhog
An absurdist comedy that suggests what is in your head may not be as simple as you think
Review: The Play That Goes Wrong
A play about amateurs no amateur company should even dare contemplate. There’s genius in the timing of all this. Outstanding.
Review: There She Is
An absurd tale of dance and conversations combined into a performance that settles into a treatise on barriers and perceptions.
Review: Another One
An impressive physical theatre piece that does seem to meander round a lack of connection.
Review: Monsieur Somebody
Excellent acting, intriguing new absurdist play by Seamus Collins is provocative and entertaining!
Review: Pity
Those receptive to those energies unleashed in the Ionesco, or more fitfully in Saint George and the Dragon will readily see Mullarkey’s almost unique position. What he writes next might define him.
Review: Exit the King
We need such risk-taking theatre back. This outstanding production of Exit the King might just remind us how to get it.
Review: The Fabulous Bäckström Brothers
An operatic clown show, first performed in Helsinki in September 2014.
Review: Pigspurt’s Daughter
Guardian obituary, 2008. ‘Ken Campbell was one of the most original and unclassifiable talents in British theatre of the past half-century.’ It just happens that his daughter Daisy is both that and far more. She’s one of the most cunning crafters of comedy and storytelling in the anti-business
Review: Ken
Terry Johnson’s two-hander might seem a low-key hommage but his script’s brilliant. It’s a re-affirmation of Campbell’s comic epic theatre, and inspires you to look out for what his daughter Daisy might be bringing to us at the Brighton Festival.
Review: Die Die Die Old People Die
A stunning new work from Ridiculusmus, the multi-award winning theatre company who specialise in transforming complex mental health issues into warm, witty and accessible performance.
Review: Great Train Robbery
Through an ingenious mix of clowning, physical theatre and wonderful singing, this comic four shed new light on ‘what really happened’ and ‘how they participated.’
Review: Blindfold: The Night of the Hunt
Four actors led by writer/director Sofia Stavrakaki enact what’s clearly a prison of a circus, people forced to perform a ritual of trouping for the delectation of a whip-cracking elite. A summary hardly does justice to the atmosphere this production evokes or the meta-language burning through the glares of hallucinated prey. You’ll know whether it’s for you if you like Beckett or European theatre
Review: Good People, Bad Day
I loved this piece and so, I think, did the audience on the first night. The cast’s comic timing is second to none. Go see it and be confounded by this fine troupe who deserved all the applause they received on the first night.
Review: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Daniel Radcliffe’s Rosencrantz is the box-office draw, all bemusement, beautifully drawn out in a hollow-cheeked slow horror of his lot. But it’s as Guildenstern that Joshua McGuire’s sashay from affront to despair through bemusement encompasses the open-mouth ‘lads’ Hamlet greets both with. And David Haig’s Player knowing he’s the opposite of a person insulates his reflective volatility from extinction. On the fiftieth anniversary of its Old Vic debut, Stoppard’s early masterpiece still startles in such a first-rate revival, protesting life to the black-out.
Review: The Comedy About a Bank Robbery
The Comedy About a Bank Robbery redefines the category, by edging beyond even recent work and revealing a classic structure entering a hall of mirrors and going mad. The musical as well as general ensemble is the most remarkably timed I’ve ever seen in a theatre, and the set designs and shifts the most frantically split into milliseconds. This is an outstanding and redefining farce in every way.
Review: Blue Heart
A major Churchill season is long overdue, and her eightieth in 2018 shouldn’t be the only occasion of it. Orange Tree’s production is as good as it gets in Blue Heart.
Review: The Rise and Inevitable Fall of Lucas Petit
An off beat look at life that highlights rather than sparkles but raises a smile nonetheless
Review: Twonkey’s Drive In: Jennifer’s Robot Arm
Paul Vickers' first musical is unsettling, shambolic and very, very silly.
Review: Cosmic Fear or the Day Brad Pitt Got Paranoia
An uncomfortable time examining the environmental disaster ready to unfold
Review: Stunning The Punters
Arguably, no single person in English theatre has a better understanding and presents a fuller expression of physical theatre than George Dillon. His vocal range is phenomenal whilst his physical presence is captivating. Superlatives become redundant.
Review: Wolf Meat
Profoundly silly and farcically serious show with just the kind of anarchy that offers coke to audience members. Contains brief and ghastly nudity.
Review: The Big Stiffy
Absurd and off-the-wall, this surreal funeral party is a bizarre experiment that really does pay off
Review: The Bald Prima Donna
Spirited pacey revival of Ionesco’s first play, with one stand-out performance and superbly idiomatic one. A perfect introduction to the playwright.
Review: A Dirty Get-Away!
Brilliantly silly and profound meditation on the nature of memory loss as innocence
© 2018 Fringe Review
All Rights reserved
Links
Help us to keep FringeReview free.
Make a donation to show you value what we do.
