FringeReview UK
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FringeReview UK 2017
Tim Key, Paul Ritter and Rufus Sewell dazzle in this Old Vic revival of ‘Art’ directed by Matthew Warchus. Reza joked of her Olivier Comedy award: ‘I’m surprised, I thought I’d written a tragedy’ and this visceral but almost (dare one say, given the subject) cubist probing of the hairline crack between the two both affirms and denies Reza’s claim she’s not a cerebral writer. She asks dangerous questions of just what the ‘art’ of friendship consists of, and why.
Sam Shepard declared that the wrong play got the Pulitzer. Buried Child was he felt crude by comparison with the later 1985 A Lie of the Mind. It joins the other meta-myths of America in the chopped sentences of demented individuals we see too much of. The extraordinary convergence of the ending seems not quaint and outdated but prescient again.
A Little Murder Never Hurt Anybody
With BLT there’s never anything less than carat quality production and as usual some treasurable performances. Do see this rarity and you’ll end up agreeing with playwright Ron Bernas, and the team here.
a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (-noun)
Eighty minutes absorb and assault us. Everything tucker green presents is nothing less, especially with this cast.
Victoria Hamilton dominates, but Albion’s a fine ensemble piece. Goold has given Albion the air it needs, and it breathes back: chilly, autumnal, an unsettling parable on forcing an identity of ourselves.
Carol Harrison’s written the band proud and plangent; her split hero strategies work to make this one of the best possible storylines of a British band, given hell-bent Marriott burning his talent at both ends, just like the decade.
It’s a stunning indictment of everything outside this little space of waste ground that in so many real places has had these tragedies, abuses and enforced slaveries thrust upon them. Anything Upton writes now will excite the keenest interest.
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.
Angels in America Part Two: Perestroika
Seeing Part Two reinforces the impression that in its virtues and a few vices, there’s nothing like this in theatre. An epic conveying a generational anger undergoing criminal abandonment, it blazons all corners of a nation. And the almost national multitude of cast and creatives Marianne Elliott’s assembled stands proud in this, almost beyond praise.
Angels in America: Millennium Approaches
Marianne Elliott with her superb cast and ramped-up effects towards the end ensure this episodic freewheeling fantasia hooks you compulsively, beating you over the head with angels’ wings as Part One shuts them hypnotically and we’re suspended.
We need more Calderon and more of the Court’s excellent International Playwrights programme. ‘Those who are still laughing’, Brecht claimed grimly, ‘have not heard the terrible news.’ Yet he always laughed and Calderon, in William Gregory’s idiomatic translation ensures this piece is memorable because we laugh, scratch our heads, perhaps look furtively at our bags.
Barber Shop Chronicles is a breath-taking revelation for those of us who had small inkling of a world in miniature. The act of barbering is more than an exchange of service with fringe benefits: it’s a profound act of human adjustment, including that vital glance in the mirror.
Beginning is the kind of play we all know we need: wincingly heartwarming, devastatingly joyous. It’s quite wonderful. Don’t miss it.
Franzmann’s intellectual clarity and tropes in this production are crystalline: just like the circular window as a womb showing the surrogate’s womb and embryo. For clarity and suggestive obliquity – language as mis-communicator – it’s an exemplary play ranging beyond the scope of most surrogacy dramas into the dark heart of desires becoming nearly ruthless, and those on both side of the exploitative border of becoming human.
This edgy new development, faithful to one incident, marks a more than worthwhile variation on such larger works as London Road. It’s more illuminating than the history it sheds music on.
Raine balances articulate ferocity with its opposite: a broken plea. Exceptionally well-written Consent’s clean logic and logic-chopping with consequences, amplified with a pinch of myth, indeed poltergeists, might well become a small classic.
This production of the 1987 small classic full of wondrous pathos furnishes theatre gold, as Griffiths’ tenderness and Phillips’ motions of trust produce a riveting diminuendo. It’s the version to see.
Cast and crew are beyond praise. It’s quite possibly the finest production of this huge, skirling ride of a play that’s ever been mounted. Outstanding.
Escaped Alone frames four women chatting in deckchairs in this everyday talk of tea and catastrophe - just as one of them steps into the void to prophesy a smorgasbord of Armageddons. The protean Churchill touches yet another dimension too. Do we have to wait to her eightieth in 2018 to proclaim her our greatest living playwright?
A finely-balanced play, not on the issues, which Beaton takes as open-and-closed. But in shading the opposition to Anne Reid’s reluctant campaigner Beaton shows warmth, humour and touches of compassion. Anne Reid comprises dignity and resolute panache in equal measure. James Bolam, apparently a beat behind, charms and rivets attention by turns. Harry Hadden-Paton’s PR Joe is a magnificent, unrepentant performance of sheer nastiness and Michael Simkins’ hapless oilman surprisingly sympathetic. A play that sharpens our tools for thinking and falling about with blunt laughter.
It’s an essential drama, and an even more essential document for navigating the Syria we don’t know, that of ordinary non-opposition Syrians making the best of it and thus the worst. Perhaps a pared-down version might one day follow. It’s too good to miss for the sake of a few shaggy scenes.
Hughie, and The Real Inspector Hound
This is a very fine revival of The Real Inspector Hound, counting on timing as much as the consummate Hughie counts on pauses. Potton is the commanding presence in Stoppard’s farce, whilst Messingham’s Erie is an exceptionally observed teeter to despair and a sudden lurch back. You wonder what he would have made of the 1930s, and how O'Neill might have answered him.
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.
In a production fraught with controversy, Barker also refuses neat answers when he can fray us with questions. He’s certainly managed that, both inside and outside the play – which should be remembered, paradoxically, as one of his warmer offerings, in a memorably hypnotic and beautifully wrought production. But it’s time Barker brought himself in from the cold too.
James Graham’s Ink persuades us of the combustion following a challenge to a cornered editor with everything to lose; and the irony of the most ruthless media operator in living memory given a desperate, humbling masterclass. In their friction it’s not only the Sun that bonfires every liberal vanity, but our naked selves.
What’s so distinctive in Torben Betts is his misleading us into an almost farcical comedy that turns darker. Just as stereotypes settle, plots unravel them. The climax is devastating, not explosively but in revelatory shudders. A fine unexpectedness marks both this superb play and outstandingly-acted revival.
Gary Owen’s known for snagging at those twists fathers transmit to sons: more screw-up than helix. In this raw three-hander Killology’s a virtual game where you score points for creatively torturing those you’re about to kill. The snag: you suffer moral consequences. Sean Gleeson’s lean hungry voice saws into hurt with a rasp of desolation. Richard Mylan exudes the sociopathic svelte of privilege. Dave’s narrative which bifurcates in Sion Daniel Young’s consummate yawp.
A play easily moving to classic status, this production supremely re-affirms its poetic ambivalence, opening up more than itself, even the play’s medieval setting. It persuades of a world crookedly trekking straight towards us.
La Cage aux Folles one might say comes home to Brighton’s Theatre Royal in this revival by Bill Kenwright Productions directed by Martin Connor. There’s no mystery why Brighton gets two weeks of this.
Amanda Whittington’s feelgood Ladies' Day finds Seaford Little on fine turf. Wright and James particularly together are a delight, and Faulkner’s pitch-perfect Donegal Patrick not only brings the whiff of paddock and angst but allows Forshaw to glint, contrasting her well-founded characterisation. Picott paces a sterling production from a small house, with moments of brilliance.
This very fine 2007 work by Jonathan Brown strikes a blow for tolerance and inclusivity now as it did a decade ago. Brown’s superlative writing and acting is ridiculously confined to this city.
How do you tell if you’re starting afresh or writing a longer suicide note than Labour’s 1983 manifesto? Even if he can’t nail the specifics of the volte-face, Waters comes tantalisingly close to defining such a political moment in this short drama of the founding of the SDP. With acting as superb indeed commanding as this, it’s a privilege to come away watery-eyed from raw leeks.
Claire McIntyre’s Low Level Panic might seem a slight play at seventy-five minutes of apparently low-key plotting and vestigial images, but after thirty years it loses nothing in impact. Time’s conferred both an indictment and uneasy classic status to this masterly first sliver of a much-missed dramatist.
Man in a Room & The Ruffian on the Stair
One brave attempt on a recent play cast as it were in the dark; and one really fine stab at another darkness, in Orton’s debut one-act play.
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.
Mosquitoes is as ever with Kirkwood hugely ambitious, says far more about emotion than its dazzling light-lectures, and humanizes a whole scientific race in depth. Colman and Williams provide a mesmerising sister act that others might wish to follow after a suitable interval, and Colman it’s hoped will return to the stage more often now.. Anything Kirkwood does now must be awaited with the same breathlessness that switching on CERN’s collider provides.
As a snapshot of political compromise and impossibly contrary pressures African politicians encounter, it’s of the keenest interest. Agboluaje’s characters are vivid, and in one great scene they breathe fire.
Richie’s layered and occasionally skewed avuncularity brings a troubled warmth to Grace, a baffled tenderness. Nothing is as it seems and though McKenna has telescoped and altered the ending as such, the plot as presented falls apart in impossibilities. James is praised for exceptional plotting and vital elements – perhaps mere moments - are missing. It makes for a thrilling if improbably ending.
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.
Oslo is the kind of recent-history thriller to place with Michael Frayn’s Democracy, the riven vagaries of Copenhagen, or more distantly, of a scope not so far removed from Rona Munro’s James Plays trilogy. You’ll soon see why it won a Tony.
This play’s so clear on the failure of closure and reconciling loss that it’s an index of how Poison in fact addresses, even helps us confront them.
This exquisitely-paced production is both heartwarming and satisfying, compassed with a trembling fragility. Lewis brings out the hushed velocity of this beautifully-constructed play. This is as good as you could hope for and a gem worth catching.
An exemplary revival of Jim Cartwright’s Road, with uniformly memorable performances. Michelle Fairley (particularly) Mark Hadfield and June Watson with Lemm Sissay enjoy one or several memorable parts, Shane Zaza’s and Fay Marsay’s long duetting is the most riveting scene. Cartwright refuses to judge directly, though his obliquity writes deprivation and abandonment in invisible ink that won’t fade.
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.
Sam Holcroft modestly demurs her comedy Rules for Living is truly Ayckbournesque: she merely aspires to master some of his technique. It’s Season’s Greetings designed for robots. It’s a variation worth nailing though, not least because it interrogates a therapy many believe works.
This is an unsettling, unsettled play. Creating its own world, it asks something of substance no-one else is quite doing – not even Rory Mullarkey previously in The Wolf From the Door. His adaptation of the Oresteia for the Globe has after all come between. It’ll be intriguing to see where this big-boned, big-themed dramatist will venture next.
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.
This puts New Venture Theatre onto a new footing. Six new plays – two by actors taking part - and six directors, all developed by NVT’s nurturing over the past year culminates in this short festival. There’s If it was an annual, even bi-annual event, it would change things in the south east.
Dramatist Sam Chittenden asks a profound question: just what we can choose to experience of our experiences? It’s a small gem of inward acrobatics, and makes one eager to see even more ambitious work from this rising dramatist.
Quilter’s best known for Glorious! and End of the Rainbow. His output’s devoted to theatrical experience; his obsession’s fed into performative actors, mainly women. Quilter doesn’t allow obvious endings, or neat ones in this touchingly funny homage to theatrical living. This production does as much for The Actress as any revival anywhere.
The End of Hope is anything but what its lugubrious poetic title advertises, cackling with jokes and expletives. This superb hour-long play is more than the sum of its hilarities, which is saying something. The heart comes pounding through the mouse suit. Do see it.
Butterworth’s masterpiece The Ferryman rightly draws comparison with Sean O’Casey, for one, Conor McPherson and Brendan Behan’s The Hostage. It’s a homage taken boldly by a mainland British dramatist who stands in this play worthy of comparison with any of them.
Ian Rickson more than revives Edward Albee’s 2002 masterpiece The Goat, at the Haymarket. What emerges in one hundred-odd minutes is a deadly tread of Greek tragedy, pitched in a slow build punctuated by the shattering of plates.
In the best sense this production’s stupefying, a spectacle shot through with theatrical tropes suggests that, if Evan’s revelations could be more frequent, Kid would be dramatically breathtaking too. And it is thrillingly itself.
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.
There’s a current trend in American playwrighting, post-Mamet, that favours hyper-naturalism. David Storey though got there before anyone, in this and other plays. Storey has much to tell us of distress and how it’s denied, displaced, coped with. He’s got as much to say about the slag-heaps of social history too, and refuses the obvious. It’s time he was more thoroughly revived. We need more of this.
Aisling Loftus’ Anne has chosen to have her experiences dramatized, to become a commodity of herself. She’s in flight. It’s the way Anne’s airbrushed out of her own story but also out of her life before this concludes, disappearing because the story’s more real than Anne is, that carries such a deadly sting nearly a quarter of a century later.
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.
This is an outstandingly-conceived show, generous to cast and audience alike, superbly choreographed and performed in what might seem challenging spaces. The last blast of summer’s breath: enjoy.
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.
There’s a fizz and pop to this play: Miguel the electrician has electrocuted himself. He’s done more than that though. Philip Ayckbourn should be feeling just a little proud of the professionalism of the cast, crew and his own script.
Lindsey Ferrentino’s 2015 play Ugly Lies the Bone confronts three issues in one. PTSD and military women power many debates, as does virtual reality therapy. The play’s double thread means fruitful collisions in this open-ended approach suggest a scope that can’t be worked out in either. Despite slightly pat consolations, this drama that readily breaks out of those intentions. Fleetwood’s on stage virtually as it were the whole time, overwhelming in her shuddery defiance.
This eco-warning musical can hardly be billed as feel-good but the music is. Mark Hollmann’s music and lyrics are as fresh as they were in 2001, and Greg Kotis’ book and lyrics are sadly prescient. This ambitious professional standard musical is something we almost take for granted with BLT. In festival time, we lose sight of some regular theatre work But this is overall the finest Fringe theatre event I’ve seen so far.
Jonjo O’Neill and Sharon Duncan-Brewster give performances as fine as this rich if obliquely dramatic material allows. Their alienation, the very tread of words in Thorpe’s syntax, confers a halo of otherness, an unnerving posthumous existence. They’re like ghosts in their own machine. It’s a vision worth absorbing.
Susanne Crosby’s Waiting for Curry – a title suggested by friends as they indeed waited for a takeaway – is a four-hander with a social reckoning, a denouement, and a very unexpected plot point. An excellent play and cast needing wider circulation; the audience was packed.
Could this be the pilot to a melancholically-observed sitcom like Vicious? One audience member suggested it. Whilst The Romance of the Century is beautifully observed and deftly revivifies a much-fictioned historical turning-point, The Weatherman is outstanding comedy, as are the performances.
Erin Doherty gives a quite brilliant portrayal of someone rendered nearly voiceless who on occasion has to find a desperate authority and at other moments, aspire. Rarely have the terrible antimonies of work and benefits system been so precisely notated, and never the combined effect calibrated to crush out young lives so mapped. It’s an essential play that charts the betrayal of a generation.
Some fine and one excellent performance in this Lewes Little production of Woman in Mind – Ayckbourn being a house speciality. Despite the occasional lack of shadows, there’s much to bask in and it’s more than worth seeing this production if you don’t know the play, or refreshing your memory if you do.
