Review: WHAKAPAPA
A powerful and heady mix of dance and film that blows your prejudicial cobwebs away.
Genre: Multimedia
Review: Morag, You’re A Long Time Deid
An affectionate portrait of the love of song across generations which is prompted by one piano.
Review: Bark Bark
Imaginative and creative show with gravitas, heart and a slightly mysterious edge - totally engrossing!
Review: Orchestra of Sound
Innovation…entertainment…imagination….you won’t believe your eyes and ears!
Review: Company RAus’s Dido
A multimedia portrayal of Dido's love and loss, in sound, light and solo dance
Review: Lived Fiction
Unique, spellbinding, groundbreaking; above all makes everyone more alive to the possibilities of being human.
Review: Ragnarök
A triumphant technical achievement with a story to tell of an end to our world, followed by a new beginning
Review: The Yellow Wallpaper
Stephanie Mohr’s adaptation is a remarkable manifestation (no other word seems more apt) of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story The Yellow Wallpaper, an important realisation of a key feminist awakening. It’s good enough for you not to want it depicted in any other way.
Review: SHOOT THE CAMERAMAN
Enthralling. Poignant. Unforgettable. Two cameras. One couple. A beautiful dance between the private and public world of this turbulent couple. Not to be missed!
Review: The Retreat
It’s extraordinary this play’s waited 27 years to arrive. But that’s true of three plays mounted by the Finborough this year alone. Another reason to beat a path there.
Review: Ghosts of the Near Future
An engaging combination of heroic journey, magic show, and story-telling about life and death. Ghosts of the Near Future took place in an atmospheric fog-filled amphitheater at noon on a sunny day. A home-made brew of great integrity, creativity and enjoyment.
Review: Now That’s What I Call A Lot Of Songs About Science
John Hinton performs hilarious songs of science from a very extensive repertoire
Review: Braw Tales
An innovative and bright response to the pandemic in cartoon and monologue that is as diverse as great to watch.
Review: and breathe…
Yomi Sode’s hybrid theatre is a compelling immersion of witness and poetry: we need more of it.
Review: There’s a Ghost in My House
Stunning. Greet the nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.
Review: Living Newspaper #6
Like all the Royal Court’s Living Newspaper series, we need this. Watch what this does with the future
Review: Roots
An Edinburgh International Festival, HOME Manchester, Spoleto Festival USA & Theatre de la Ville Paris co-production
Review: A Letter to a Friend in Gaza
Amos Gitai’s curating hope from the ruins, impelling the audience to construct a narrative.
Review: Doodle Pop
Magical visual storytelling with music, humor, mime, movement and innovative creativity
Review: Like Me
A solo talk that investigates the effect that social media has had on our lives from the perspective of one
Review: The female role model project
Original, thought-provoking, ambitious, funny, absorbing, interactive and no sign of the 4th wall
Review: Cuckoo
A fascinating examination of the South Korean financial crisis with video, a solo performer and not one but three cuckoos.
Review: History Of Ireland
“A slick combination of politically driven theatre, dance and comedy with more than a touch of the Blarney…”
Review: The Ballad of the Apathetic Son and his Narcissistic Mother
Mother and 14 year old son, sort it out through Sia.
Review: Mao That’s What I Call Music!
Des Kapital presents a strange brew of pop karaoke and Communist China
Review: A Life On The Silk Road
An Epic and Unique Journey Through Dance, Music, Puppetry, and Physical Theatre
Review: Letters For Peace
Haunting, poignant music from one of Scotland’s leading guitarist and composers
Review: There But For the Grace of God (Go I)
A rare instance of an actor knowing exactly how to direct himself. It’s a super-Fringe show well worth reviving, and Welsh clearly puts his life into it.
Review: Random Selfies
This is sweet, fleet story-telling with just the right amount of pitch and yaw for anyone to take, without it becoming too dark or didactic. Ten-year-old Lola’s engaging, and in Natalia Hinds’ hands utterly believable, energetically inhabited with a sense of fun clearly relished by this revelatory actor.
Review: Strangers on a Train
This ATG production should reach anyone who’s curious about Warner’s rather different outcome to the original, which Highsmith herself, writing later, might well have approved of; I prefer it too.
Review: The Twilight Zone
I’d like to see a more thorough-going homage to Serling’s work in particular and it’s good he’s at least well-represented here. His acute questioning, exploration of a more human agency and refusal to play too much with inexplicable spectacle marks him out as a more earthy but far more imaginative writer too. His stories are still absolutely contemporary ones: the others have dated as the future often does.
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: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Any first-time play-goer should have this etched as a memory forever. It can’t be anything other than outstanding. Enjoy as an early Christmas gift to yourselves.
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: Wings
Stevenson’s performance mesmerises, appals, thrills and re-asserts her unique straddling of classic and unquiet modernist in a few dizzying months. Poised somewhere between Happy Days and inevitably Peter Pan, here she’s immobilised everywhere she flies, imprisoned far more than Winnie with her vectors of sand and invisibility. There’s no doubt Wings proves its life in the theatre here. It breaks new air.
Review: Against
Starring Ben Whishaw as rocket-billionaire-turned-visionary Luke, Christopher Shinn’s Against furnishes a brave sad update to Simon and Garfunkel’s 1960s refrain: They’ve All Come to Look for America. Luke looks for answers in the heart of violence. The ballad of Luke and helpmeet Sheila though haunts its refrain.
Review: The Wedding Singer
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.
Review: Earthquakes in London
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.
Review: The Imaginary Radio Show
A devilishly satirical comedy, taking a darker look at American pop culture
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: Bodies
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.
Review: The Tempest
You won’t forget the spectacle. But it’s the lonely spectators of their own powers that’ll beat on your mind. Gregory Doran’s RSC production realizes that more fully than ever before. Simon Russell Beale’s riven letting-go of a man’s potency relinquished along with his moral son sounds deeper plummets still.
Review: Mosquitoes
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.
Review: The Effect
A superb way to get to know a superb play. It’s difficult to conclude anything but a kind of dopamine’s got into BLT recently; perhaps we absorb it there too. Everything they touch is enhanced, there’s a uniform excellence of cast and production here that’d look perfectly in situ in any off-West End theatre.
Review: Life of Galileo
Thrilling, especially Brendan Cowell in the lead role. It’s unlikely we’ll see another Life of Galileo with the scale and reach of this for a long time, though perhaps for no better reason than we’re almost alienated from Brecht at a time when at least looking up and asking questions is what keeps us on our toes, when people talk of strong leaders.
Review: Lulu
Though occasionally uneven this Lulu is a must-see, and should it ever tour or return it might prove a classic interpretation.
Review: Collisions
A simple, disarming story of balance and tradition undone by cutting edge science and technology - delivered by cutting edge Virtual Reality technology - that leaves us questioning the complexity and unintended consequences of progress.
Review: Fall of Duty
Not so much another First War narrative but a parallel rediscovery of singalong music, song and dance, stars and tears in their eyes. Tightness of video, the engagement of audience and extremely well-counterpointed denouement makes this a memorable show. And did I mention the Childs can sing?
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: Mobile
Fringe theatre at its best. A unique intimate experience with outstanding production values.
Review: The Kid Stays in the Picture
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.
Review: Seeing Stars
Here’s Tycho Brahe to lead us by his gold nose. You can never start star-gazing too young; this Rust and Stardust production is a dazzling place to start. Enchanting, informative and exhilarating in equal measure; Conlon and Sommers’ singing sets a magical seal on this star-breaking look at the universe.
Review: The Wizard of Oz
It beggars belief that on one tiny stage we can be subjected to so many scene stages so expertly handled, so many backdrops and scenery shifts, not to mention a cast of twenty-two who can all sing. This production is good enough for a larger professional stage. If you get a chance, ask for a ticket or return.
Review: Whose Sari Now?
This is consummate storytelling, and Moorthy’s narrative variables attest to pitch and speed, a charactering that gifts all it can to the individual and in some cases real tales. There’s much here we cannot forget.
Review: Love and Information
Stunning ensemble play, Churchill’s flickering meditation on how we communicate and convey love and every other shade of being.
Review: Here All Night
Sam’s all night shiner, Beckett’s Wake and Cabaret. Haunting, funny, unmissable.
Review: A Really Really Big Modern Telly
A re-imagining of the myth of Narcissus and a contemporary fable blending live theatre & projection, which questions what happens when the consumer becomes the consumed.
Review: Loud Poets
Bold, loud, passionate and engaging – poetry for the masses with a wonderful energy
Review: Distortion
Disquieting premiere about sexual abuse torturing the memories of a child, her adult self, and her abuser
