Review: Teeth ‘n’ Smiles
As Teeth ‘n’ Smiles ends, we’re left to feel the long withdrawing roar of the 1960s, and the bleaker horizons and disillusion Hare saw by 1975. A must-see.
Genre: Feminist Theatre 0
Review: Scary Mary
Daughter of Feminism, Mother of Sci-Fi, the original Goth girlfriend: Mary Shelley is spooky AF.
Review: Quartet in Autumn
Absorbing, a must-see for anyone asking questions of where we begin our endings.
Review: The Love We Think We Deserve
It could grow into something both exceptional and even more necessary.
Review: Murder, Margaret and Me
Brave, bold and really worth seeing above much else: even in a busy Festival.
Review: Allegra
As an example of a Peter Quilter soufflé, this is the best of his I’ve come across; and Maureen Lipman gleams with a supreme gravity-defying performance. Irresistible.
Review: Jane Eyre
Polly Teale has released the daemons, but Nettie Sheridan’s ensemble has delivered Jane Eyre’s feeling to a pitch remarkable even for BLT.
Review: Neddy Goes to Glasto
Corrina O’Beirne masters the demotic, the lyrical, the witty and metaphorical, all at once. A must-see.
Review: Flush
Timely, timeless and as real as a selfie you might wish you’d never taken when you look again. 80 minutes blink by, but you won’t miss it. Stunning.
Review: Evangeline
First-rate Fringe music-theatre. Artistic content, particularly songs and verse, as well as direction and acting ensures this will clearly travel. Do see it.
Review: Escaped Alone
It mightn’t quite be the droll, dry Churchill we know, but it’s certainly one we should greet. Absorbing.
Review: The Waves
A mostly outstanding – and theatrical - adaptation of an almost impossible-to-adapt novel.
Review: John Proctor is the Villain
The apotheosis is both thrilling and more than timely. At a moment where feminism is being closed down, this needs screaming
Review: The Authenticator
Absorbing, playfully swerving from where it might travel, The Authenticator mildly frustrates, mostly digs you in the ribs with questions. And thoroughly entertains.
Review: The Constant Wife
An outstanding revival and adaptation, a faultless cast, an award-winning set too. Brighton has been lucky in its last three productions. This though is the gem. Outstanding.
Review: 1.17am, or until the words run out
A cracking debut that picks you up and never lets go. Like any play that gifts us believable characters, it leaves you wondering what life, not just Hunter Gordon, will do with them. Highly recommended.
Review: Mrs President
Mrs President will continue to haunt and I suspect, develop. Be haunted though.
Review: The Playboy of the Western World
An impossible balance, but having seen Playboy at farce-speed, it’s good to weigh in with a loquacious backbeat of despair. Wholly absorbing.
Review: Ballet Shoes
A winter paean to wonder and possibility, Kendall Feaver’s and Katy Rudd’s Ballet Shoes has proved as evergreen as the book itself. Outstanding.
Review: Jobsworth
A must-see one-person coffee-black comedy, it lasts a full 90 minutes. Libby Rodliffe is a phenomenal performer. And uproarious.
Review: Kindling
Sarah Rickman and Ciara Pouncett have assembled a superb team. They need to revisit the script once or twice more and they’ll have a winner.
Review: We Are the Lions, Mr Manager
At a time of racialised targeting – a distraction technique born of the very forces Jayaben Desai fought – Grunwick speaks with startling relevance.
Review: Keep Your Sunny Side Up
In nearly every way exceptional. Hampshire is consummate and sets off Rouselle as worthy to inhabit Fields.
Review: Who Do They Think They Are?
A finely-written show, with tensions wrought individually to a satisfying whole.
Review: Cow/Deer
Emphatically theatre worth doing, worth attending, worth fighting to clarify and worth being changed for.
Review: Natasha Cottriall (God Save My) Northern Soul
Time will deepen the shadows and writer/actor Natasha Cottriall shows this in the very last moment
Review: Natasha Cotriall (God Save My) Northern Soul
Time will deepen the shadows and writer/actor Natasha Cotriall shows this in the very last moment.
Review: Sense & Sensibility
Austen fans can feel they’re delivered the story’s heft, if not all its socially pinched circumstance. It’s a small gem.
Review: The Wild Washerwomen, Brighton Open Air Theatre
Ella Turk-Thompson has scored something special here.
Review: AETHER
A show about knowing nothing... and it's jam packed. Lightning-quick, clever, feminist, and always entertaining show about discovery
Review: The Lolita Apologies
A sharp, two-person confrontation with Lolita’s cultural legacy, where minimal staging meets maximum emotional stakes.
Review: That’s Why Mums Go to Switzerland
A stunning portrait of three generations of women and the impossible weight one must carry.
Review: UnTethered
UnTethered could be outstanding and groundbreaking. What Tara Sirois does next could, and should, unnerve everyone; including herself.
Review: Extraordinary Women
For a bijou summer in a bottle, this can’t be beaten. Exquisite, painfully funny, and hinting at the depths Mackenzie found to his own chagrin. A gem.
Review: Lynn Nottage Intimate Apparel
Everything built up, like a corset, is unloosed. What we thought we knew we don’t. Outstanding.
Review: Claire Dowie H to He (I’m Turning into a man) Finborough
A must-see for anyone who loves breakthrough: genre-defying, then genre-defining theatre.
Review: Sarah Ruhl Eurydice
Sam Chittenden coaxes provisional miracles from her cast and space. The medium’s playful, even fun. The message though is bleak; and love is still in the letting go.
Review: La Ultima Muñeca: A Theatrical Quinceañera
Profoundly beautiful immersive theatrical work about the end of girlhood
Review: Charlie Josephine: I, Joan
Daisy Miles, supremely, Laurits Hiroshi Bjerrum and Rhys Bloy excel in a fine cast and prove this clarion of a play can rise again triumphantly.
Review: Beth & Josie EXPOSED: F*&# De$antis
A stand-up comedy show that is a big middle finger to DeSantis.
Review: Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens After The Act Royal Court Downstairs
Most of all this musical is necessary. With four outstanding multi-roling performers, a message both affirmative and defiant; and with a fierce joy that makes it a must-see.
Review: Athena Stevens Diagnosis
Over 50 minutes, a compelling, unique and disturbing vision unravels: prophesying prophesy is invisible. That’s why as many as possible should see it.
Review: Corrina O’Beirne With Ruby & I
Corrina O’Beirne ‘s a name to seek out in future and in Kempell and her cast and creatives, she’s found first-rate advocates. A must-see.
Review: Helen Edmundson The Heresy of Love
A brave undertaking – typical of Gerry McCrudden and his teams - and a rare opportunity to see this superb, all-too-topical play.
Review: Lula Mebrahtu I Am – OommoO
Everything you’ve heard is true. Lula Mebrahtu is memserising, and I Am – OommoO like its creator has vast potential.
Review: Playhouse Creatures
When Doll Common claims “Life’s like a storm. Don’t get in its way” one thinks of the stoicism of those in the eye of it, and their audience. A consummate revival.
Review: Men’s Business
A quietly phenomenal, ground-breaking play, blistering in sumps of silence. See it.
Review: Jane Upton (the) Woman
A ground-breaking play, fully deserving of its London run. Catch it there.
Review: Son of a Bitch
Anna Morris heightens tragedy and misogyny with gags, humour and farcical horror. Do catch this fleeting gem, running for just two more weeks before it touches down
Review: Khawla Ibraheem A Knock on the Roof
What and who can you choose is something more people are forced to decide as the century rolls. But Mariam’s plight is specific, ongoing, now far worse and essential viewing.
Review: Belly of the Beast
Belly of the Beast should be a set text in schools. And should definitely tour there.
Review: Treasure Island
First-rate youth theatre, creatives and cast excel: detailed, funny, not to be taken over-seriously, then quite a bit more so.
Review: Sara Farrington A Trojan Woman
An acclaimed pocket tragedy which yet carries Euripides’ weight in Farrington’s framing, it more than touches the heart: it snatches it and hands it back as a sad and angry consolation.
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: My Fanny Valentine: Rebirthed
Megan Juniper is the Disney Princess of Gynaecology in this hilariously funny mix of stand-up comedy, musical theatre, and vagina facts.
Review: Women Who Blow on Knots
As fine a realisation as anyone could manage. The immediacy, cries, reveals are inherently theatrical and precious. A must-see.
Review: The Welkin
The sheer acting catches fire: not a weak link. With their most ambitious production ID triumph. There’s nothing like them at full stretch.
Review: Autumn
This is a partially bewitching production and it might send you back to the novel or quartet
Review: Salomé
Dramatically this is the most creative response I’ve seen live. Here, a director’s reach should exceed their grasp, or what’s a production for.
Review: Abrasion
If high school health class had been this entertaining, I would have paid far more attention.
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.
