Review: Shirley Valentine
Prenger’s brought depth, perfect timing and the art of the comic pause. Above all her orchestration of risk, raunch and recovery comes like a peroration, an enormous yes as someone over in Hull once said. Launched into comic stardom beyond her singing roles, Prenger like Shirley Valentine is ready for anything now.
Review: Silent
A mesmeric and enthralling 90 minutes in the company of the dignified dispossessed, given voice in a solo performance of majesty, poise and grace.
Review: The Elephant Girls
It’s history, so believe it. For over a century an all-woman gang marauded London from Elephant and Castle. Margo MacDonald’s explosive one-woman play which she both wrote and acts in, asks what you might expect in a series of evenings with Maggie Hale, an amalgam of two Maggie Hs, in 1937. MacDonald’s riveting throughout, rasping her laments, lusts and long views to the dogged interlocutor. A superb performance of a remarkable play and subject, whatever its provenance.
Review: Blocked
It’s as if Billie Piper’s Yerma does stand-up. Caroline Byrne’s Blocked reveals a writer whose images stamp a scream-out-loud theatre drawn into an arc of devastation. Curnick inhabits a performer’s meltdown from a technique and emotional agency as strong as… a recording black box. Why? Find out. Superb theatre.
Review: The Cocktail Pianist
The Cocktail Pianist is ultimately radiant with self-knowledge. Hatchard is a phenomenally gifted pianist even on an electric keyboard. His touch, mercurial dispatch are not of the medley kind. A first rate show with enduring things to say, it’s also a comment on how we treat our gifts and they us.
Review: Richard III
This is an outstanding distillation of an exceptionally prolix if often brilliant early Shakespeare history drama. It could not really be executed more compellingly.
Review: Model Organisms
Donkin’s artistry as writer isn’t in doubt, and Newton-Mountney’s performance is compelling. This is eminently worth seeing especially if you like dystopian narratives of the possible near-present. The story’s complete, but this journey’s just begun.
Review: Now you see it
A rich and spellbindingly disconcerting piece of physical theatre, which captures the looping, cyclical, ordered chaos of our lives.
Review: Wet Bread
What’s Left must be right. But the country’s voted, Right. Do catch this! Left-wing activist Adele is just the dominant voice when Morag Sims puts on the best single act of a whole cast I’ve seen in a long time.
Review: Eglantyne
What’s in this name? Eglantyne means a prickly rose and smells by any name bittersweet. Founder of Save the Children who burned herself out in its service. This is enlightening and moving in equal measure, not only rendering a great service, but asking after Eglantyne Jebb’s breath-taking leaps of empathy, how far we’ve come since.
Review: The Trials of Harvey Matusow
Informative, infuriatingly endearing it’s also Cohen’s first masterpiece, however small-scaled. For that reason too, it holds a particular freshness, a discovery of a remarkable voice. Or two.
Review: Motherhood:(Un)speakable, (Un)spoken
Ninety seconds into this newly-revised one-woman play, Joanna Rosenfeld - emerging in a poke of fingers from a cagoule of brown paper - over-voices herself giving witness to tens of verbatim experiences we hear. This tells us the baby’s a parasite, sucks all your nutrients, calcium from your teeth for instance, causes injury, often permanent, can kill. This is - literally - epic interior theatre.
Review: Motherhood: (Un)speakable, (Un)spoken
Moments into this one-woman play, Joanna Rosenfeld - emerging in a poke of fingers from a cagoule of brown paper - over-voices herself giving witness to tens of verbatim experiences we hear. This tells us the baby’s a parasite, sucks all your nutrients, calcium from your teeth for instance, causes injury, often permanent, can kill. This is - literally - epic interior theatre.
Review: No’s Knife
We’re enormously privileged to be living in such a rich age of Beckett performance, and here, a soaring creative response Beckett encouraged has claimed these texts as dramatic. Somehow Dwon avoids dissolution with her tensile strength and staggered, staggering vocal range, brushed with a tang of mortality.
Review: The Magnetic Diaries
An intelligent and challenging poetic narrative exploring modern day female depression.
Review: A History, w Nowell Edmurnds
An uncomfortable reflection on our society’s adoration of fame.
Review: The Moira Monologues by Alan Bissett
Humour and pathos from one of Scotland’s foremost comedic performers.
Review: Just let the Wind Untie My Perfumed Hair … or Who is Tahirih?
A haunting account of the Iranian poet and radical feminist Tahira played by Delia Olam who has impressively written, composed and performed the entire show based on the true accounts of this once forgotten heroine.
Review: Tomás Ford’s Craptacular!
A crazy hour of anarchic cabaret karaoke with audience participation from Tomás Ford.
Review: Team Viking
"A while ago my best friend Tom died of heart cancer. His last wish was for me to give him a Viking Funeral. So I did."
Review: Operation Love Story
A charming, intimate and disarmingly direct story of matchmaking in the big city
Review: Life and Death (But Mainly Death)
A warm and thoroughly life affirming show (mostly about death)
Review: Jeu Jeu La Foille: Frontal Lobotomy
Burlesque, poetry, puppetry and the history of frontal lobotomy
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: Joan, Babs & Sheila Too
A stunning traversal of Joan Littlewood’s life by Gemskii and Conscious Theatre. Without her, there would never have been A Taste of Honey, Oh What a Lovely War, or much of postwar British theatre.
Review: Something Rotten
Scintillating subversive and original take on Hamlet’s unhappy uncle, weighed down by doubts and too many jokers. Beware of complicity.
Review: First Love
Conor Lovett lightens his pitch Becket’s exploration of lust, sexual disgust and the intolerable consequences of generation.
Review: The End
Conor Lovett rivets with a naturalistic pitch in this cut-down stand-up Beckett diminuendo of an ex-inmate’s prospects. More tour de force in a tour de farce of Beckett’s genius.
Review: The Marlowe Papers
A diamond in Shakespeare’s or Marlowe’s ruff? Ros Barber’s novel adapted for the stage, starring vaulting Jamie Martin.
Review: Thorn
Tremendously energised one-man play about an Australian minister's son on a mission, but which one?
Review: Outside the Box: A Live Show about Death
A thought provoking, funny and moving performance by a masterful story teller, requiring us to think carefully about death and dying before it is too late.
Review: Hip
Hip is a must see show. A Brighton-spirited séance with tequila, nibbles, tenderness and laughter.
Review: Mummy or The Art of Saying Goodbye
A brilliantly conceived, directed and performed piece of tragi-comic, food-for-thought theatre. If you get the chance to see it, jump at it.
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