Review: Agleyum Cliyopatrayum
An original blend of physical theatre and Indian ritualistic elements conveys the unconscious emotional worlds of two archetypal female characters.
Genre: Experimental
Review: Cutting the Tightrope: The Divorce of Politics from Art
An essential, raging and ranging collection of works flashing with humour and teeth, flecked with harrowing stories and above all love for a humanity the establishment wishes us to other and consign to tragedy. A must-see.
Review: Fille De Mon Coeur
An investigation into the relationship between Antonin Artaud and Colette Thomas.
Review: Nobody Meets Nobody
A relationship like no other - an experiment of the best kind. Emotive. Powerful. Relatable.
Review: The Years
This production reminds us it’s often the least theatrical, least tractable works that break boundaries, glow with an authority that changes the order of things.
Review: Geneva Convention
As this gets quieter, it shouts more loudly. Exciting as this is, it will devastate when it finds its arc. This might ascend into something crucial.
Review: Women’s Writes
We’ve been lucky to sit in on the first stage of a very promising conversation collaboration, and theatre piece.
Review: Materia
A strangely compelling oddity that plays with the possibilities of form to illuminating effect
Review: Company RAus’s Dido
A multimedia portrayal of Dido's love and loss, in sound, light and solo dance
Review: Twisted Tales
One mat, six players and bundles of talent in this dynamic ensemble. Bringing Total Theatre back!
Review: Good-Bye
Wholly absorbing, wholly other, it’s a gem of the Coronet’s dedication to world theatre.
Review: The Beautiful Future is Coming
Beautiful Future engages throughout though the near future is where it beats quickest. Flora Wilson Brown’s play makes you wonder what life, not just the playwright, might do with her characters. Urgently recommended.
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: Lovefool
Though it might be red-topped as a Fleabag for the abused, it’s so much more excoriating. It’s also a work profoundly moving, necessary and – particularly for Gintare Parulyte - an act of courage. Lovefool’s on till May 26th; do rush to this 55-minute must-see.
Review: Manic
A new solo show that combines puppetry, spoken word and theatre to bring an honest look at sex and trauma to Brighton Fringe 2023
Review: BANSHEE/ WITH ECHOES FILLING UP THE ORBIT, BUT DAMAGED (EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING)
An eclectic mix of challenge and theatre
Review: Sound of the Underground
It’ll remain one of the break-out, breakthrough, certainly ground-breaking shows this year.
Review: Not One of These People
Worth 95 minutes of anyone’s time, you come out heavier with the weight of where you’ve been.
Review: Caligari
a 1920's silent film about power and illusion retold by a talented young company of musician/actors
Review: Ghislaine/Gabler
A spell binding multi layered exploration of privilege, entitlement, and the desire to control…
Review: Artificial Intelligence Improvisation
Professional improvisers beware. The robots are after your jobs.
Review: The Dream Train
Contemplative and beautiful to watch, 4 characters interact in juxtaposed realities underscored by Bach's Goldberg Variations
Review: San Francisco Fringe Festival 2020 Sneak Peek!
Catch a taste of what's to come at the 2021 San Francisco Fringe Festival!
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: A Letter to a Friend in Gaza
Amos Gitai’s curating hope from the ruins, impelling the audience to construct a narrative.
Review: Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation
The most consistently satisfying work of Tim Crouch I’ve seen.
Review: Timandra Harkness: Take a Risk
Timandra Harkness is an intelligent and interesting performer, calmly steering us through a show exploring the concept of risk taking, that didn't need to work hard to keep our attention.
Review: The Voices We Hear
A moving and intimate exploration of life and connection after an apocalypse in a unique zero waste venue
Review: The female role model project
Original, thought-provoking, ambitious, funny, absorbing, interactive and no sign of the 4th wall
Review: Where Are You Really From?
Quirky, creative, and thoroughly entertaining exploration of cultural identity
Review: May I Speak About Dance?
“A playfully contemplative lecture performance, posing challenging questions about the language of contemporary dance.”
Review: End Times: An Immersive Adventure
A Thought Provoking and Sagacious Escapade into an End of the World Immersive Experience
Review: Loving Androids
A beautifully-constructed play, small in compass, big in scope and deft at managing the transitions
Review: Berberian Sound Studio
Thoroughly absorbing, full of walking shadows who throw vivid questions.
Review: Shipwreck
A superb ensemble piece. Of all dramas on these interesting times in America, it’s the one truly necessary.
Review: The Lady From the Sea
A groundbreaking production. Even outside its unique terms it’s outstanding.
Review: When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other
This cast’s exemplary dedication deserves watching for their sheer performative belief.
Review: An Experiment with an Air Pump
A great painting by Joseph Wright of Derby - brought to life on stage.
Review: Hole
Wow drama, the original Greek tragoidia. It invokes the same powers, almost the same gods.
Review: Billy
Billy is a listicle advert for useless misogyny, a constructivist nightmare, an IKEA bookcase and a durational comedy. GET IT? Good!
Review: Square Rounds
Proud Haddock have delivered their own stamp on Harrison’s verse-play, and it’s mostly thrilling
Review: No One is Coming to Save You
No One is Coming to Save You makes me want to see a lot more of Nathan Ellis.
Review: Creation (Pictures for Dorian)
A Transformative Night of Voyeurism and Exploring The Nature of Beauty
Review: Blaas (Blow)
Tender, otherworldly, explorative and extraordinary, this is an exquisite show that is more than worth the trip out of town.
Review: For King and Country
Terrific immersive fun. If you want to know what might have happened in an alternative December 1940, this is as exciting, informative and perhaps as authentic experience as you could encounter.
Review: Grimly Handsome
If you want theatre to change your life a little and wonder where our DNA and urges trek to, you could do infinitely worse than shiver here.
Review: Minefield
Minefield is for its unique and singularly consummate exploration of its themes, outstanding, in a class apart from any show you’ll see, perhaps even of Arias. Her work must be acknowledged here now.
Review: In Memory of Leaves
On a moored barge Natasha Langridge re-enacts her own In Memory of Leaves updated from a run last year to include this year’s tumultuous events. This is a fine, necessary work inevitably in progress. Let it settle in the water a bit more, and glitter.
Review: Thebes Land
It’s good to welcome the return of this cage. Franco-Uruguayan Sergio Blanco’s Thebes Land drops back into Arcola’s Studio 1 after its acclaimed run in 2016. It’s where this will go, what both prisoner Martin and writer T are left with, that begins to shine out of this extraordinary, ground-breaking work.
Review: The Majority
If Rob Drummond’s /Bullet Catch/ charmed and alarmed at NT’s The Shed and Brighton Festival in 2013, here Drummond starts his odyssey of political immersion in a prison cell; for throwing a punch at a neo-Nazi. Opening three days after the Charlottesville murder, the timing’s eerily prescient and more charged than even Drummond might have imagined.
Review: Anatomy of a Suicide
Is there a suicide gene? Alice Birch’s simultaneous triptych of three generations of women traumatised and depressed is so formally novel that its psychological heft gets subsumed in the sheer force of three narratives jarring for our attention. You must see this play; its dark releases a shaft of terrible light.
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: Nuclear War
Simon Stephens has been exploring music and now dance in this piece inspired by his collaboration with choreographer Hofesh Schechter. Maureen Beattie’s intensely committed central performance is worth absorbing, the ensemble make flesh as much of Stephens’ text as could be asked. This feels like a text that needs to risk pushing through more specificity without fear of losing its suggestiveness.
