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
Genre: Contemporary 0
Review: The Way Old Friends Do
In a show celebrating the revival of friendship, twice, through the love of a non-binary ABBA tribute band, it’s good to know who you can rely on. You can rely on this scintillating, bittersweet play too. Absolutely recommended.
Review: Quality Street
Don’t miss this exquisite confection. After this production, there’s possibly no return to the original. It’s a rethinking paying homage to both the sentiment, which it never upstages, and the brand and its factory-workers the comedy gave its name to.
Review: Home, I’m Darling
There’s a clever containment in Home, I’m Darling that reminds us yet again of Laura Wade’s lucidity and power. Since she’s written it, it seems more like a prophesy.
Review: Phaedra
Stone suggests only someone as demonstrably damaged and damaging as Helen (Phaedra), in other words a politician, might pursue self-destruction so relentlessly; and devastate so many. It’s brilliantly achieved elsewhere than with the core relationship.
Review: You Bury Me
An essential play so rich in its one-hour-forty you emerge dazed with possibilities. Director Katie Posner hopes it’ll change you. So do I.
Review: Pussycat in Memory of Darkness
Neda Nezhdana’s play is a world: not simply a map of pain and war footage. Both essential and in the mesmerising Kristin Millward’s and Polly Creed’s hands, with this team, it’s almost a compulsory visit.
Review: SAP
SAP will endure as both a superb play and key witness in a struggle for acceptance, to be heard. See it.
Review: Sugar Coat
Essential theatre. Five singer-actors, memorably punchy music, witty and heartbreaking – most of all groundbreaking – storytelling. 90 minutes of this and you’ll know just what to do with the patriarchy.
Review: Out of the Frying Pan
If you know Judy Upton as a playwright you might have an inkling what to expect in this debut fiction. Witty, observant, self-deprecating, very funny, full of subversive glee, with its own moral field. I’d put nothing past this extremely gifted writer
Review: Beginning
Beginning is the kind of play we all know we need: wincingly heartwarming, devastatingly joyous. It’s quite wonderful. Don’t miss it.
Review: BLACK SUPERHERO
Sharp, shapely dialogue, sizzling humour, ambitious theatricality a compelling story wrapped in baggy metaphors. There’s never a moment when the play’s proved less than engaging, sometimes riveting. A must-see debut play.
Review: Wish You Were Dead
There’s a good enough story for this to be recalibrated. Though If you’re a James fan, you’ll need to see this.
Review: Mad(e)
A mind-altering experience, and in writer and director one of the most inspiring partnerships I’ve seen
Review: Graceland
Understanding traumatic narrative from the outside: seeing through a skylight, darkly. An impressive debut
Review: Fisherman’s Friends: The Musical
A glorious night out, a wonderful cast and in Shahmir a mesmerising star in the making.
Review: Romeo and Julie
A gentle, heart-warming, occasionally hilarious play, and strikes a fresh redemptive note in Gary Owen’s work. Callum Scott Howells and Rosie Sheehy blaze across this play like meteors inexorably entering the earth’s orbit, seemingly doomed to break up or worse. And did I say it showers screamingly funny one-liners too?
Review: Duet For One
Kempinski has crafted an enduring drama of what it’s like to lose the joy of a life worth living.
Review: Sound of the Underground
It’ll remain one of the break-out, breakthrough, certainly ground-breaking shows this year.
Review: In the Net
See In the Net for its ambition, its occasionally gorgeous language, Offie-worthy lighting and in Carlie Diamond, an actor to greet and watch, making I predict one of the most assured debuts of the coming year.
Review: Django in Pain
Poignant, charming and meaningful play that is imaginative and vibrant in vision and message.
Review: James and the Giant Peach
With memorable music and ensemble singing added to a first-rate BLT production, there’s no better Christmas show in town.
Review: Mother Goose
This is more than panto: it’s an affirmation of something that panto here welcomes in, in our time uniquely invoking layers as only Elizabethan/Jacobean drama can.
Review: Henry V
Bracing, fresh, wholly re-thought in every line, emerging with gleaming power, menace and wit. And I defy anyone not to smile at this new take on Shakespeare’s downbeat ending.
Review: Here
A major talent with a distinct voice, and the consummate assurance to express it with stamp and precision
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: The Seagull
A Seagull for the initiated, a meditation rather than the play itself, it’s still a truthful distillation, wholly sincere, actors uniformly excellent
Review: Cher A New Musical
See it here first before you feel compelled to travel to pay West End prices.
Review: The Solid Life of Sugar Water
What theatre can do, how it can change us, how completely different it is from any other experience, has few examples that come close to this.
Review: Jews. In Their Own Words.
It’s Jonathan Freedland’s and Tracy-Ann Oberman’s brilliance to bring off-kilter, casual devastation to the stage; in raw unsettlings that for many keep the suitcase packed.
Review: Silence
More of a scattering of earth, ashes and love than simply groundbreaking. But caveats aside, groundbreaking it is.
Review: The Girl Who Was Very Good At Lying
An outstanding powerful, imaginative and funny exploration of the stories we tell to escape who we are and where we are.
Review: Waiting For God
Sarah Mann and Nathan Ariss lead a fine company into a dash to eternity and back. With a memorable finale of two weddings and a funeral.
Review: Caligari
a 1920's silent film about power and illusion retold by a talented young company of musician/actors
Review: 9 Circles
A monster play of words and ideas that leaves you speechless. Astute, political and personal.
Review: All Of Us
As Ken Tynan once said of another debut, I don’t think I could love someone who doesn’t love this play.
Review: Waitress
Halfpenny raises soaring music theatre, an ounce of gold in the throat and stars six inches above it.
Review: That Is Not Who I Am
Lucy Kirkwood prophesies what’s in store with savage fury, and no-one’s exempt, least of all her.
Review: The Southbury Child
Perfectly freighted; each character pitched with just enough choice to make us wonder what life, not Stephen Beresford will do with them. Outstanding.
Review: Consent
Raine balances articulate ferocity with its opposite: a broken plea. Scott Roberts’ revival improves on the NT premiere. In his hands Consent’s a small classic.
Review: Marys Seacole
No simple swapping of heirs and originals, but a dream of the future by Seacole, or equally present dreams raking the past. Do see this.
Review: Cock
A superb revival of Bartlett’s warmest, most ground-breaking, perhaps most enduring play so far.
Review: Double Murder: Clowns / The Fix
An extraordinary choreographic exploration of murder and hope
Review: God of Carnage
Acting here is tighter than any version I’ve seen. This revival of a modern classic has to be the best of the Fringe so far.
Review: Accidental Birth of an Anarchist
A thoroughly absorbing play whose polemical agency is none the less tempered by the people it’s refracted through.
Review: Cocky and the Tardigrades
Bonkers brilliance. Cocky couldn’t have been premiered with two more stunning actors, and the author’s flawless stepping-in remains remarkable.
Review: The Paradis Files
Not so much an event as a concentration of Errollyn Wallen’s genius celebrating the life of blind composer Maria Theresia van Paradis, in Graeae’s world-class production
Review: Unsanctioned/Measure 2 Measure
You must see this intriguing, ingenious and superbly acted double bill.
Review: An Hour and a Half Late
Don’t miss this authentic, touching, devastatingly comic anatomy of a marriage as soufflé, supremely served by Rhys-Jones and Dee.
Review: Dark Sublime
Sublime acting, light-filled production. Do see this quirky, off-beat play given its finest outing so far.
Review: The Da Vinci Code
Actually improves on Brown with theatrical humour and bold gestures; with a set that tells the story almost as much as the strong cast.
Review: Two Billion Beats
Two Billion Beats was bursting with promise before. Now it delivers with a visceral yes.
Review: Rice
Do see this work of understated virtuosity, rich in character, substance, a shape-shifting singularity.
Review: What If If Only
Churchill’s anatomy of grief is what abides. Its emotional plangency and pulling the future open is unique.
Review: Walden
Amy Berryman’s Walden is a remarkable play where the earth itself’s at the cross-planet, and travellers in space have inner and outer choices.
Review: Mary Stuart
A new take on Schiller’s play that removes the men and truly heightens the drama.
Review: Language Games
A quirky and delightful play of language and ideas in a short film depicting 4 characters in philosophical conversation (overseen by a giant, verbal rabbit).
Review: The Twits
A summer must-see to charge you up for the autumn, and taking on the real twits ahead.
Review: Misfits
An important play, tackling the deadly serious with laughter that all too easily could lead to stark tragedy.
