Review: Trygve Wakenshaw & Barnie Duncan: Different Party
Delightfully eccentric and inventive physical comedy!
Genre: Theatre 0
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.
Review: Ink
James Graham’s Ink persuades us of the combustion following a challenge to a cornered editor with everything to lose; and the irony of the most ruthless media operator in living memory given a desperate, humbling masterclass. In their friction it’s not only the Sun that bonfires every liberal vanity, but our naked selves.
Review: Anatomy of a Suicide
Is there a suicide gene? Alice Birch’s simultaneous triptych of three generations of women traumatised and depressed is so formally novel that its psychological heft gets subsumed in the sheer force of three narratives jarring for our attention. You must see this play; its dark releases a shaft of terrible light.
Review: Proof
This exquisitely-paced production is both heartwarming and satisfying, compassed with a trembling fragility. Lewis brings out the hushed velocity of this beautifully-constructed play. This is as good as you could hope for and a gem worth catching.
Review: Woyzeck
Boyega might be the key but Greene too takes on a centrality Marie’s never enjoyed before; the only pity is that this adaptation ducks adultery, making her too decent when the original Marie’s just trying to snatch a better life and a little joy. Still caveats aside, this is an interpretative milestone paving the way for even more fearless versions.
Review: These Trees Are Made Of Blood
A necessary piece of theatre, the band are superb; a couple of numbers will take residence in your ear. Theatrically it’s almost achieved too, and if it feels slightly clunky it’s that the brilliant conceit of political trickery can’t be sustained over the sombre facts the second act introduces us to. The end’s overwhelming. Two audience members sat quietly weeping together and could not move for minutes after. Others sat stunned.
Review: Fedele and Fortunio
One of the funniest, uniformly excellent productions of RND I’ve seen, it shows that Mullins enjoys a keen sense of pace, superb comic improvisation in scenes with a few props, and does what this pre-Shakespearean series claims: makes new what is in effect new to us, recreating plays from rags and patches of performing history.
Review: The Goat
Ian Rickson more than revives Edward Albee’s 2002 masterpiece The Goat, at the Haymarket. What emerges in one hundred-odd minutes is a deadly tread of Greek tragedy, pitched in a slow build punctuated by the shattering of plates.
Review: A Void
"For those seeking new and original plays this Fringe season, A Void is a must for your list"
Review: The Blue Door
A look behind the door, blue, of life in a facility for mentally ill young people.
Review: Ways to Shine
Children’s piece which unites day and night to show how cooperation should be the cornerstone of diversity
Review: Souvenir
Uproarious “kamikaze cabaret” history of Brighton Theatre Royal told through song and amusing anecdotes.
Review: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Lenny Henry’s magnificent, physically menacing deserves his place alongside Henry Goodman’s at least. If the cabaret and audience-rich production mightn’t replicate that production’s chill, it’s of its time, serves as a timely marker of a new nadir of western degradation. That gives it permanent Brechtian relevance.
Review: The Mikado
This Mikado not only redefines but rescues the operetta from an edgy oblivion, where we could never lose the melodies, yet increasingly hesitate to stage the work. It’s back.
Review: The Plain Dealer
Nicholas Quirke and D. A. F. T. will always confound expectations. Long may they do so. Quirke’s D.A.F.T. Theatre arrives at Brighton Open Air Theatre – or to crowd acronyms, B. O. A. T. - with Restoration dramatist William Wycherley’s 1676 The Plain Dealer. With hovering seagulls swooping for chicken legs, and a superb exit by Matthew Carrington f-ing everything then ‘F-ing interval’ it’s a sparklingly-observed revival.
Review: Killology
Gary Owen’s known for snagging at those twists fathers transmit to sons: more screw-up than helix. In this raw three-hander Killology’s a virtual game where you score points for creatively torturing those you’re about to kill. The snag: you suffer moral consequences. Sean Gleeson’s lean hungry voice saws into hurt with a rasp of desolation. Richard Mylan exudes the sociopathic svelte of privilege. Dave’s narrative which bifurcates in Sion Daniel Young’s consummate yawp.
Review: Richard III
Greg Hicks’ Richard has centripetal force; everything swirls inwards with him and only Richmond seems able to withstand it. We soon forget the walkways and possible contemporary resonance, ingest that later. The immediacy of deformed power is so glaring the you think the sun of York will never go out.
Review: An Octoroon
Of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ brilliance there’s no doubt whatsoever. With such a wonderful cast led by the stunning Nwosu this makes the most persuasive and certainly comical case for a re-fashioning that’s now (almost) the only way we can look at the Boucicault original of this play.
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: Wonderland
The ingredients are there: it’s a magical idea, and just needs a quieter rationale and – to make it a great show - a few more memorable numbers. But if you care for musicals, see it for an outstanding clutch of performers and a dream of something perennial.
Review: Blink
This is the most affecting bittersweet piece of theatre seen at the Fringe for a while and a masterly play. That Hall and Lacey invest it with such pathos humour and delicacy whilst working to pinpoint direction is equally winning, equally devastating and makes you dream sequels. It’s a must-see.
Review: 27 Wagons Full of Cotton
Fox and Hound Theatre Company’s trio of Tennessee Williams are a must-see. Not just because they premiere the 1981 Ivan’s Widow adding the 1953 Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen but the gem: 27 Wagons Full of Cotton from 1946. already famed for a Edinburgh Fringe sell-out. A superb piece superbly played.
Review: Ivan’s Widow and Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen
In his end lies his beginning: almost the last and first plays of Tennessee Williams yoked together before a devastating mid-period work are a must-see. Beautifully crafted performances, these rare Williams plays deserve packed houses and Fox and Hound themselves accolades for putting on three Williams plays in one night and proving a special attunement to them all.
Review: The Gabriel Trilogy
The Apple and Gabriel sequences are outstanding. Nelson stands apart. Seven plays in seven years seems of a piece, resonating now more movingly and terribly than they did when premiering in the exact moment. Despite himself Nelson has prophesied in The Gabriel Trilogy things he didn’t want to pass. It’s an extraordinary achievement.
