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.
Genre: Short Plays 0
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: Short Plays 2022 New Venture Theatre, Brighton
Absorbing and a small feast of theme, acting and writing style.
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: The Revlon Girl
The Revlon Girl is a masterpiece of displacement as ritual. Tess Gill’s directed many fine shows for BLT, but she’s never bettered this.
Review: Morning Glory
A small masterpiece of amused, unflinching reveal, which does something no-one else has done at all.
Review: Silence
More of a scattering of earth, ashes and love than simply groundbreaking. But caveats aside, groundbreaking it is.
Review: The Poison Belt
So what could a Sussex-based sci-fi tale of 1913 by Conan Doyle – a space-borne poison belt of gas that hits the earth – possibly have to do with the week of the greatest temperatures known in the UK?
Review: Shake the City
A real play bursting out of its hour-plus length; with complex interaction, uncertain journeys, each character developing a crisis of isolation only resolved by sisterhood
Review: The Dance of Death
Highlights the truth of its bleak laughter. Humane Strindberg. Now there’s a thing.
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: Cancelling Socrates
Howard Brenton touching eighty is at the height of his powers. Tom Littler has assembled a pitch-perfect cast, reuniting two from his outstanding All’s Well. This too.
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: A Very Great Mischief
Winner of the Rialto New Writing Scratch 2020. Look out for this play when it returns.
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 Misfortune of the English
Pamela Carter’s schoolboys embody human connectedness, warmth, a final camaraderie before the chill of history. Unmissable.
Review: The Marriage of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
Such exquisite works find their time; speak to it again and again and again.
Review: When We Dead Awaken
Ibsen’s elusive masterpiece is so rarely performed seeing it is an imperative. Played with such authority as here, in Norwegian and English, it’s not a luxury but a must-see.
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: Two Billion Beats
Two Billion Beats was bursting with promise before. Now it delivers with a visceral yes.
Review: Footfalls & Rockaby
Charlotte Emmerson and Sian Phillips make their parts indelible, and add to Beckett’s stock of pity, stoicism and a window on death. Outstanding.
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: Statements After an Arrest under the Immortality Act
An important, scorching revival, Statements explores the limits of love in a forcing-house of oppression and racism.
Review: This Beautiful Future
Heartstopping. There’s an absoluteness here we need. We must prove desperate for it or die ourselves.
Review: The Twits
A summer must-see to charge you up for the autumn, and taking on the real twits ahead.
Review: On Arriving
On Arriving takes sixty minutes it seems we’ve been immersed in a Greek Tragedy of ninety. See it.
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: The Girl Who Was Very Good at Lying
Andrews vividly conveys what it is to be an undone thing, someone unravelling tales to live.
Review: More Grimm Tales
A rollicking production with razored timing, musical cues and ad-libs worked in to half-second slots. A must-see.
Review: Branching Out
Three very fine and one outstanding work, Scratches – the best kind of play on depression, self-harm, black holes. Because it’s screamingly funny and deeply connected to why we do theatre.
Review: Leaves
This haunting 45-minute tale is a superb small gem from Jermyn Street’s Footprints Festival.
Review: After All These Years
A superb play, it should as one director present said, be in the West End. With these actors.
Review: Chamberlain: Peace in Our Time
A light-filled small gem of a show, tuning into wireless crystals of a lost world.
Review: There’s a Ghost in My House
Stunning. Greet the nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.
Review: The Rape of Lucrece
The definitive way to experience this troublingly great, disturbingly unresolved poem
Review: Shaw Shorts
A joyous, heady and oh-so-welcome return to this intimate yet high-kicking theatre. An absolute must-see.
Review: Vagabonds My Phil Lynott Odyssey
An original off-kilter approach to elegy, tribute and becoming yourself.
Review: Two Horsemen
The glaring energy of this piece can’t disguise how it strikes profundity in its funny-bone.
Review: Hole
Don’t miss the chance to see this transcendent actor prove she possesses another dimension altogether.
Review: I Wish My Life Were Like a Musical
Flawless, a stunning pocket-sized musical you really must see.
Review: Sacrament
A revelation, superbly written and acted. Comparisons have been made with A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing. I can think of no higher praise either. You must see this.
Review: Living Newspaper #7
Like all the Royal Court’s Living Newspaper series, we need this. Watch a group of young dramatists take on the future
Review: Illusions of Liberty
A finely-calibrated solo play of what it’s like to enter that tunnel of near-undiagnosable but very real illness. Corinne Walker’s both authoritative and quicksilver. Do catch it.
Review: Vespertilio
Vespertilio marks Barry McStay’s emergence as a writer of distinction. Anything he writes now should be looked out for.
Review: Jew… ish
One of the wittiest but also truthful comedies about love, identity, sexual politics and gefilte fish I’ve seen
Review: Living Newspaper #6
Like all the Royal Court’s Living Newspaper series, we need this. Watch what this does with the future
Review: Living Newspaper #5
Like all the Royal Court’s Living Newspaper series, we need this. Watch.
Review: Outside
As with Inside, Outside not only fits us, they help us to move on, and become in their modest, unassuming and utterly transcendent way, part of how we learn to.
Review: New Moon Monologues April
As we saw in March, don’t be lulled by friendly colours and fluffy fonts. Queens of Cups again proves they’re a company to revel with and wait for heart-stopping reveals
Review: Icarus
After all the gods and their lack of choice, we come to the final instalment, the human dimension. Where we have one. A heartfelt, satisfying finish.
Review: Orpheus
A terrific reinvention, bringing gods and heroines up from the death of myth to an altered world.
Review: Living Newspaper #3 Royal Court Theatre
Hot off Sloane Square a team of writers, actors and creatives twist the news to truth
Review: New Moon Monologues March
Don’t be lulled by the friendly colours and fluffy fonts. Queen of Cups is absolutely a company to watch, and its showcase productions are literally unmissable
