Genre: Theatre 0
Review: Mary Go Nowhere
An acerbic take on living the modern suburban American ‘dream’ with lovely ensemble performances and laugh out loud dialogue.
Review: Seven
A stylish ensemble piece with a bold premise, that playfully explores the issues that face women in a very near future
Review: Edison
Clash of the electricity titans, in a clash of theatrical conventions. Sparks will fly.
Review: Border Tales
Brilliant - creatively devised, provocative, well performed, poignant and moving!
Review: So You Say
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.
Review: Ingo’s War
Delightful and meaningful story - imaginative, creative, moving and extremely well done!
Review: F*ck Boys for Freedom
Late night comedy that saws the knuckle off rather than comes near it.
Review: Places
A one woman show, that takes us through the disgrace and grace of a silent film star, long gone but revived for us here in an engaging performance
Review: Out of the Bad
A touching tale of the morning after the night before, commemorating 103 days of yesteryear that thankfully avoids nostalgia but still make us think of the past
Review: La Cage aux Folles
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.
Review: Shell Shock
And astounding performance in both a measured and frantic performance that brings PTSD from Tommy's living room into your conscience.
Review: The Edelweiss Pirates
A very theatrical and competent account of a highly brave movement in counter activities to the Hitler Youth that ended tragically for some of their number.
Review: Chips and Cheese
A popular Glaswegian snack turns into a funny comic journey round yer nan and yer papa meeting yer English boyfreend.
Review: Trygve Wakenshaw & Barnie Duncan: Different Party
Delightfully eccentric and inventive physical comedy!
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: Cirkopolis
Highly skilled entertainment. Lyrical, dramatic, beautiful, spirited, exciting and intriguing!
Review: Fred and Rose
A powerful look at how the two of the most infamous Gloucester residents almost evaded capture.
Review: Bella Freak
A verbatim condemnation of how you disappear once you are pronounced as special.
Review: The Last Queen of Scotland
A largely one woman show that manages to effectively tell the tale of how the Ugandan Asians, thrown out of their country ended up in the UK through the eyes of one of the children who came across and ended up in Dundee, like…
Review: Whore: A Kid’sPlay
An episodic trip through what your mom is from the perspective of children and young people who find adulthood a scary place.
Review: Mia: Daughters of Fortune
A poignant and heart wrenching indictment of “caring” for, rather than with, the learning disabled who wish to be parents
Review: Out of Love
An exceptionally well structured tale of friendship and love between friends which is tested constantly
Review: Heartwood
A family tale that has a heart of gold rather than wood but plenty of mileage to get through which will soften yours.
Review: The Tale of the Cockatrice
A superior piece of children’s theatre that tells an ancient tale with plenty of new tricks.
Review: Hide
An enthusiastic and youthful rendering of a dystopian future which is challenged by rebellion.
Review: The Drive
Intriguing new play - friendship, memories of two women on an unexpected road trip.
Review: Atlas
A dramatic and engaging trip back to the 17th Century when four thinkers thought outside of a box and changed philosophy and science forever.
Review: Performers
A black comedic dramatic trip back to the 60’s where films were made and sex was cheap with a couple of gangsters who are just a pony short of the full shilling.
Review: Adulting
The joys and agonies of being caught between childhood and adulthood at the tender age of 25 as told by 4 25 year olds.
Review: Sink
A highly effective retelling of the loss of arguably China’s greatest 20th Century writer thanks to the persecution he suffered at the hands of his own government.
Review: Wall
An enthusiastic musical which promises to view the world from an alt left American perspective given current world posturing
Review: Jason and the Argonauts
An impressive modern take on the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece with contemporary power and focus.
Review: Committee
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.
Review: Doomed Resistance
"an exciting, pacy performance mixed with wit, World War 1 and one-liners."
Review: Meeting at 33
An immersive meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous with truth, dignity and power in the performance
Review: How to Act
Dramatic play with humour - entertaining, engrossing, well acted, written and directed. Wow!
Review: Bubble
A silly boo, boo, a social media storm and all told via the internet as sexism goes from the locker room to the slutty University lecture theatre told by way of a verbatim piece in a seated universe.
Review: Happier or Better
One woman goes to find herself in a dramatic journey that takes us from waking up physically to waking up emotionally.
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: Road
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.
Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream’s ideal for open air summer nights: The Brighton Shakespeare Company produces the most joyous, certainly sweetest Dream I can remember. It’s fresh, certainly but also enormously warm-hearted. You feel the ‘silver bow new-bent in heaven’ has unloosed a shower of happiness.
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: 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.
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: Jane Eyre
It’s what you’d not expect that thrusts this version before anything else you’ll imagine before hurrying back to the novel. An extraordinary exhausting ultimately incandescent in all senses version of this classic.
Review: Short Play Festival
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.
Review: Queen Anne
It’s perhaps no coincidence both Queen Anne and the Almeida’s Mary Stuart should be revived simultaneously. You have to go back to Schiller to find such a historic power struggle between two women on stage. This small miracle of historic compression and power-play reaches a dramatic conclusion worthy of someone fatter than the maligned Anne. Her voice is her journey, worthy of attendance.
Review: Blue Remembered Hills
This is by any standards a remarkable production that at BOAT has found its time and avatar. Sheridan and Cook lead a production that takes Blue Remembered Hills back to somewhere near its source.
Review: 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.
Review: The Philanthropist
The play really is worth seeing, a credit to Trafalgar Studio’s courage in continually taking risks – ironically with an established drawing-room comedy.
Review: Shirley Valentine
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.
Review: Common
D C Moore’s Common set in 1809 twists language in a collision of cultures as landed land-grabbers of Enclosure expel the last gleaners from common land. Comedy radiates from Anne-Marie Duff’s downright siren Mary. A sexier Mother Courage crossed with Churchill’s protean fairy Skriker, she’s plausible without magic. Common will continue to gnarl and root beyond its run. It’ll be well worth seeing how it ages.
Review: She Stoops to Conquer
Felicity Clements has paced this production with alacrity and probing clarity. She also brings out, with a superb ensemble, the truth of Goldsmith’s characters, several like Marlow and Lumpkin emerging as minted as their fortunes. You’ll not see a more joyous, clear or truthful production of this perennial for years.
Review: All or Nothing
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.
Review: Salomé
Here’s a great divider of critical heads. Yael Farber who made a great impact last year directing Lorraine Hanbury’s Les Blancs returns with her own Salomé at the Olivier. Anyone who saw the Hanbury will recognize the ritualistic use Farber makes of the Olivier, though Susan Hilferty’s set is stripped for swoops of spectacle.
Review: The Rise and Fall of Little Voice
Jim Cartwright’s 1992 play with music The Rise and Fall of Little Voice sings out of damage into heartbreak and redemption. Those who don’t know the play or its outcome should see this, even those who have. Jade Clarke making her second LV might now be the go-to choice in this part of the country for some time to come. LLT’s on its best form, and following the éclat of Mr Foote’s Other Leg the other highlight of the season.
Review: Silent
A mesmeric and enthralling 90 minutes in the company of the dignified dispossessed, given voice in a solo performance of majesty, poise and grace.
