Genre: Short Plays 0
Review: Berberian Sound Studio
Thoroughly absorbing, full of walking shadows who throw vivid questions.
Review: The Father
Florian Zeller's masterpiece, in a production and central performance that would do it justice anywhere.
Review: Cyprus Avenue
Devastating drama about the DNA of bigotry; and it all starts in surreal farce.
Review: When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other
This cast’s exemplary dedication deserves watching for their sheer performative belief.
Review: Hole
Wow drama, the original Greek tragoidia. It invokes the same powers, almost the same gods.
Review: The Funeral Director
One of the most riveting few minutes of contemporary theatre I’ve seen all year.
Review: ear for eye
Listen for our commonality, don’t look for difference. Here’s a memorable place to start.
Review: Cock
A superb revival of Bartlett’s warmest, most ground-breaking, perhaps most enduring play so far.
A completely absorbing experience packed into a pulsing interior. Don’t miss it.
Review: Private Peaceful
This is as good as a one-person show of this kind gets. Andy Daniel should be up there above his own rows of five-star ratings.
Review: Stay Happy Keep Smiling, Fury
Where else in Brighton can you see two new acclaimed plays so swiftly?
Review: The Woods
Of this play's witness and power there can be no doubt whatsoever. Compelling and unmissable.
Review: Poet in da Corner
Exemplary, thrilling, adrenalin-shot and shout-worthy. There has to be a part two, and it ought to be soon.
Review: The Political History of Smack and Crack
As theatre it Catherine-wheels with anger. As an unsentimental education this takes some beating. Don’t miss it.
Review: Underground Railroad Game
The most radical piece of American theatre I’ve seen, and certainly the bravest. See it.
Review: Dance Nation
As an airborne metaphor for how you get to be grown-ups, what it does to you, Dance Nation takes as it were some beating.
Review: Pity
Those receptive to those energies unleashed in the Ionesco, or more fitfully in Saint George and the Dragon will readily see Mullarkey’s almost unique position. What he writes next might define him.
Review: Exit the King
We need such risk-taking theatre back. This outstanding production of Exit the King might just remind us how to get it.
Review: Lovesong
It remains a highlight of the season, a mostly wonderful celebration of this rare gift from Abi Morgan. Let’s have more drama like this.
Review: In the Night Time (Before the Sun Rises)
This production’s sheer inventiveness, the feral truth of the acting and fabulously exploding set surely reinvent something; and land this drama where it should be: in the bleak dark before a bleached-out dawn.
Review: Katie Johnstone
Most of all you take away the sheer bravura of Georgia May Hughes’ throwing everything up in the air. She carries the energy to a cheery bleakness. And you want to cheer.
Review: Flesh and Bone
Warren’s East London heritage is similar to other writers, and it’s his time to re-tell it now, with new notes and a love of language that muscles in and won’t let go.
Review: Spun
The genius and universality of this play is that Hussain writes stingingly of what it’s like to be working-class as well as Asian.
Review: Section 2
This is an urgent, compellingly written stunningly acted piece of naturalistic drama. It should be filmed for mental health awareness week, and acted wherever possible.
Review: No One is Coming to Save You
No One is Coming to Save You makes me want to see a lot more of Nathan Ellis.
Review: Utility
It’s a great phase of U. S. playwrighting, driven by women, and we’re lucky to be living in the middle of it. Schwend unleashes unexpected miracles and is one reason to see this hushed superlative of a play.
Review: Machinal
Only when we see the best of Sophie Treadwell’s other thirty-eight plays will Machinal’s lonely pinnacle be augmented. This triumphant revival by the Almeida could signal the start. You must see this.
Review: Fleabag
Original, raw, brilliantly funny and devastating. This production is Fleabag neat. Its harrowing streak of genius burns like a healing scar torn.
Review: Act and Terminal 3
everything – set, actors, script – come mesmerizingly and painfully together.
Review: random/generations
In a season featuring not before time several superb women dramatists – Enid Bagnold and Charlotte Jones follow – starting with tucker green is a proud moment for Chichester.
Review: Falkland
It’s a work with much to tell us: of the unlooked-for consequences of a buried war. Of elective affinities and choosing to adopt the war-bereft, whatever condition they’re in.
Review: Blue Sky Thinking
Many arts-driven people forced into the corporate world might well see this play answers their condition like few others.
Review: When the Wind Blows
BLT have produced in less than two weeks two outstandingly fine full-length productions. This latest offering confirms this theatre’s confidence in producing stark contrasts: an unfashionable yet horribly topical drop of silence into a bustling city.
Review: One Woman Alien
I can predict that by the end of its run, this should be the most outstanding one-person show you’ll see in the last week.
Review: She Wolf
So what did Harvey Weinstein and the fifteenth century European ruling classes have in common? Exactly. A lot. English has achieved a phenomenal amount. She co-ordinates everything as she directs and manages her own minimal props.
Review: Waiting For Curry
Susanne Crosby’s Waiting for is a four-hander with a social reckoning, and very unexpected plot point. The audience was packed. There’s a quietly sad magic to this low-key play; people recognize themselves in it. It speaks.
Review: Not Talking
Not Talking is a superb, affirmative debut play, up there with Bartlett’s finest, prophetic of much later work.
Review: The Sorrowful Tale of Sleeping Sidney
This is a gem of many colours. Do see it. The miraculous construction’s matched by Jordan’s storytelling and sense of dark mischief. In Jordan’s hands it’s a re-possession of lost innocence by a strange sleight of a knowing child.
Review: The Fall
It’s a play which for theme, formal handling and ingenuity would be highly recommendable alone. Coupled with the excitement of ten young actors getting the measure of this and themselves provides a thrilling reach into tomorrow, including the tomorrows we hope never come.
Review: How It Is
You’ll have to see this. It’s in no way a continuation of their previous Beckett. and it’s immersive, outstanding, unrepeatable and unimaginable anywhere else: Gare St Lazare, and in the UK, no-one but the Print Room it seems would dare to stage it.
Review: Metamorphosis
If you decide on one storytelling piece of theatre in this half of the Fringe, I doubt you’ll do better than experience this.
Review: Grotty
Know the Dalston lesbian scene? Verbally and dramatically as well as breaking new ground, this sings. Do see Grotty at the Bunker and be illumined. It’s rare to see such brutal tenderness laugh itself to the lip of the balcony.
Review: Nine Night
Natasha Gordon emerges as a playwright whose capacity to balance seven characters in profound ambivalence – and shuddering proximity - to each other is both thrilling and wholly assured. Anything Gordon does now must be eagerly anticipated.
Review: 4.48 Psychosis
An outstandingly imaginative, fearless recreation of Kane’s testament in another medium. It triumphs and is easily the most remarkable, necessary opera to have been produced in years.
Review: Moormaid
Bott asks serious questions. How can a terrorist redeem themselves, and how do individuals negotiate this? Can art play any part in rehabilitation?
Review: The Writer
This is necessary, exciting, playful, and still unsettling, not just because of what it asks but the manner of narration. It’s also seminal.
Review: Mayfly
Mayfly’s a play conscious of its deft artistry. Equally though it’s a work that despite its buzzing coincidences never loses the pulse of its profound ache. That’s why it’s so heartbreakingly funny, tender, even affirmative. A superb debut, the first it’s to be hoped of many others here. Joe White’s one to watch, and so is the magnificent Orange Tree, invariably staging a mighty reckoning in a little room.
Review: The Prudes
Neilson’s piece twists an unexpected root out of recent debates over power and sexual abuse the Royal Court has addressed so consistently. Uniquely Neilson’s made the faintly horrible full-on hilarious.
Review: The Gulf
Gould’s team have made this as authentic as some of U. S. casts who travelled over from The New York Public Theater for the Nelson plays. There’ll always be some who don’t get this kind of theatre, but there’s an increasing appetite for and understanding of it. When you do, like Kendra’s Betty, you’ll be hooked.
Review: Instructions For Correct Assembly
As an ingenious commentary on everything from genetic manipulation to over-determining children’s achievements, Instructions For Correct Assembly is a necessary unforgettable object lesson, in all senses.
Review: Reared
Reared is above all forgivingly funny, John Fitzpatrick’s comedy exquisite in group dynamics but sometimes on a telling image also contains create one of the most gripping story-telling scenes in recent drama.
Review: Maria
Scott has a finely-grounded tone with an acuity of insight and a lyrically-charged gift that literally pictures the un-nameable pearl-grey blanket of depression occluding Maria’s living.
Review: Love Me Now
There’s an almost tragic power to the two endings, amidst glimpses of redemption. How difficult it seems to admit love, particularly for men in the toxicity of casual sex where people become apps and black voids to delete. Unmissable. Michelle Barnette’s next play will be worth waiting for.
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: Black Men Walking
There’s a resolution and a few late epiphanies. It’s an important work, satisfying in its refusal to over-imbue a situation which needs less plot-driven conflict than to lay open its stories like a knap of stone revealing the shine.
Review: The Engagement
James Allen’s new version of The Engagement proves one of the absolute highlights of 2018’s Hove Grown Play Festival.
Review: Old Fools
There’s truths to discover here. Indeed, to remember love, happiness and life vigorously to combat the oblivion surrounding it. It’s still a hidden gem of a piece, and you should see this brief hour-long odyssey, either to reflect from its early evening finish or if visiting, as a sweetly sad, perhaps wiser prelude to whatever you choose from the later lights.
Review: Bad Jews
This is a play supremely worth seeing: for its flayed comedy, acerbic wit, farce-dipped dynamics, monster roles, wincing and raw truths. It’s a triumph from all parties in the best NVT American vein. Don’t miss it.
Review: Female Parts
Adult Orgasm Escapes from the Zoo. That title, from the 1983 version of one of the plays presented here summarises what you can expect. Sadly, subversion has to be rationed. Franca Rame and Dario Fo’s five short plays from 1977 Female Parts, get two outings – they’re joined in a similar bid for self-determination by OneNess Sankara’s The Immigrant, the first black woman in space. Go: it’s likely someone will vault over your head.
Review: Girls & Boys
When you hear an opening like: ‘I met my husband in the queue to board an easyJet flight and I have to say I took an instant dislike to the man’ you relax. Too soon. Thus the chippy wit of Carey Mulligan’s opening of Dennis Kelly’s monologue Girls & Boys at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs, directed by Lyndsey Turner stretches ninety minutes into something else. Fourteen years after her debut on this stage, it confirms Mulligan as a great stage actor.
Review: Gundog
This Theatre Upstairs production lends a striking suspension of time to the middle of a sheep nowhere. Simon Longman’s Royal Court debut Gundog exudes the kind of stark belonging his plays seem made of. With such faultless direction and acting, Longman’s reach is patent.
Review: How To Be a Kid
More than an enchanting diversion Sarah McDonald’s play does ask just how quickly we need to grow up, even when we have.
Review: Black Mountain
Brad Birch has won awards recently, and in Black Mountain he shows in part how fine he can be. It’s in the speech by the partner of man who’s cheated on her. That’s the rich ore mined on this particular mountain. That, and an ear for dialogue that shows Birch will do even finer things.
Review: Out of Love
There’s much in this sweet, fleet and heart-breaking narrative of female friendship over thirty years that needs to be seen, including the poignant and unexpected epilogue. It’s a thumbnail classic.
Review: The Open House
It’s a wholly original drama, and if you like the super-naturalist verismo of Amy Herzog’s Belleville recently at the Donmar or Annie Baker’s John at the National, you’ll enjoy this sidling from that. It’s conceptually even more original. Do see this. It’s a masterly play - in a theatre famed for its dishevelled uniqueness.
Review: Medea Electronica
Like the recent Suppliants, in a very different way, Medea Electronica asks just what we mean by Greek tragedy, what our conceptions of drama without music are. An essential experience.
Review: Ken
Terry Johnson’s two-hander might seem a low-key hommage but his script’s brilliant. It’s a re-affirmation of Campbell’s comic epic theatre, and inspires you to look out for what his daughter Daisy might be bringing to us at the Brighton Festival.
Review: Belleville
Poots and Norton achieve a quivering fright and tenderness that alone make this a must-see. but if a touch incredible in one choice, it shows Herzog’s ability to combine the new post-naturalism with a rare character-driven ride to apotheosis, recalling dramas more ancient and elemental.
Review: Woman Before a Glass
Judy Rosenblatt’s reading irradiates Robertson’s and indeed Peggy Guggenheim’s rationale into a morphology, something felt along the gut. The appalled and occasionally appallingly purity of Peggy Guggenheim is laid bare. More widely, this work addresses the limits of patronage, of rescue, of greed and altruism, of comic high-Bohemianism and sexual affirmation before the sexual revolution. Which of course began in 1963.
Review: The Claim
Ultimately this is a play putting humanity and the limits of empathy on trial, the whole refugee crisis and bureaucracy’s way of distorting, dishonouring witness a corruptive glare that’s universal. It’s a vital, seminal work on how we misunderstand our humanity.
Review: My Mum’s a Twat
‘Have you ever tried to sustain a relationship with a twat?’ Some debuts establish more than a new voice. Anoushka Warden’s My Mum's a Twat certainly revels in its compelling and sassy distinctiveness; but it nails to this a cause. Beyond this though is the thrill of a debut writer with the tang of their own voice stinging the air. As Warden says about something else: ‘You’ll have to take my word on that.’ So see it.
Review: Rita, Sue and Bob Too
A first-class revival of a timely, still-urgent play, from an untimely-ripped dramatist, this is a must-see for anyone who cares about British drama, British history, and its more thoroughly-beleaguered people.
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: Dear Brutus
The clarity and truth Jonathan O’Boyle and his cast bring to this tricky, infinitely moving and sometimes maddening play, couldn’t be bettered. It’s a magically sad examining of how we limit ourselves, shutting off the forest of possibilities. Quite outstanding.
Review: Large Trash Print
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.
Review: Barber Shop Chronicles
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.
Review: Bad Roads
Leading Ukraine dramatist Natal’ya Vorozhbit won’t indulge the luxury of exploring just one outstanding tableau in isolation in these six harrowing vignettes. Infinitely more than postcards from the edge of the redacted west, they nudge then kick us back out of our own barbaric comforts.
Review: The Suppliant Women
In one of the most radical productions ever mounted of Aeschylus indeed any Greek tragedy we’re literally taken to its roots: as in Greece, a community chorus of fifty, twenty-one of them the suppliant women of the play’s title. In this outstanding production, everything to resurrect this astonishing vision has been invoked.
