Genre: Experimental 0
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.
Review: 4D Cinema
A historical and technological exploration of Marlene Dietrich, autobiography and live performance.
Review: In Fidelity
A fascinating look at love, cheating, and relationships with a live onstage date between audience members
Review: Here All Night
Sam’s all night shiner, Beckett’s Wake and Cabaret. Haunting, funny, unmissable.
Review: Dancing in the Dark
Inspired off-centre situationist drama from acclaimed Wired Theatre about family, grief and sexual identities.
Review: Sex, Strokes, Death, Denial
Jack Duffel's new play mixes extreme naturalism with verse in a play creatively probing death and displacement in the family
Review: Experience & the Girl
A story about how love, lust and everything in between can transcend religion.
