Theatre
Blue/Orange, Young VicFriday, 20 May 2016
Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange is one of the best plays of the past two decades. First staged at the National Theatre in 2000, with the dream cast of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Andrew Lincoln and Bill Nighy, it won an Olivier Award for Best Play and has been... Read more... |
The Invisible Hand, Tricycle TheatreFriday, 20 May 2016
In the long tradition of fictional characters who embody their monikers, the naming of Nick Bright hardly counts as the most colourful, but it has a sardonic edge. Clearly the young American banker at the centre of Ayad Akhtar’s tight political... Read more... |
First Person: Tackling FGMThursday, 19 May 2016
I knew that if I was going to write a play about female genital mutilation, I would have to try and understand why any mother or grandmother would make their child undergo such a brutal procedure. In my research, I read many articles and accounts of... Read more... |
Monster Raving Loony, Soho TheatreWednesday, 18 May 2016
The sense of humour is a funny thing. It raises questions about whether what we find funny can tells us anything about who we are, or what we might become. The case of Screaming Lord Sutch, the semi-legendary rock singer and founder of the satirical... Read more... |
The Philanderer, Orange Tree TheatreWednesday, 18 May 2016
Gender deconstruction, fraught feminism and the perils of hook-up culture: George Bernard Shaw’s comedy of manners, penned in 1893, shows we haven’t come as far as we might think. It’s a point rammed home by Paul Miller’s choice of modern dress, but... Read more... |
'We played to the Queen of Denmark. We did a turn for Barack Obama'Sunday, 15 May 2016
A few days after two Taliban rockets had quivered in the Afghan skies above us, I found myself looking up at an altogether different set of heavens in the Sistine Chapel. Moments of reflection on this tour were, out of necessity, brief; our schedule... Read more... |
Brighton Festival: The Complete Deaths, Theatre RoyalFriday, 13 May 2016
The Complete Deaths refers to the complete onstage deaths in Shakespeare’s work, all 75 of them, including the “black ill favour’d fly” in Titus Andronicus. The latter becomes a persistent theme throughout, appearing even as the audience take their... Read more... |
Brighton Festival: The Encounter, Attenborough Centre for Creative ArtsThursday, 12 May 2016
Simon McBurney and Complicite have made plays about many things – maths, circuses, immigration, Japan, old age – but, at core, they’re all really about the same subject: storytelling. Their latest project is no different. The Encounter takes its... Read more... |
The Busker's Opera, Park TheatreWednesday, 11 May 2016
Satire, we’re solemnly instructed in Dougal Irvine’s new musical The Busker's Opera, “has to strike a fine balance of entertainment and teaching”. Well yes, but it’s also generally wise (discretion, valour, and all that) to keep the theatrical crib... Read more... |
10 Questions for Playwright Joe PenhallTuesday, 10 May 2016
Joe Penhall first thwacked his way to the attention of British theatregoers more than 20 years ago with a series of plays about schizos and psychos and wackos. An iconoclastic laureate of lithium, his early hit Some Voices (1994), about a care-in-... Read more... |
Brighton Festival: Smoke and Mirrors, Corn ExchangeTuesday, 10 May 2016
Smoke and Mirrors is a show based around circus skills. It’s by the Ricochet Project, a performing unit consisting of Berlin-based US performers Cohdi Harrell and Laura Stokes. However, those expecting a spectacle offering visual pizzazz and the... Read more... |
Brighton Festival: Digging for Shakespeare, Roedale AllotmentsMonday, 09 May 2016
Of all the 400th anniversary tributes to Shakespeare, this ramble through an allotment just outside Brighton has to be one of the oddest, and most unexpectedly moving. Brighton Festival has a reputation for site-specific work, rediscovering secret... Read more... |
