As theatrical Odd Couplings go, this one was always going to be at the dangerous edge. How could it be otherwise? Jon Kani’s bold two-hander is set in South Africa a quarter of a century on from the country’s first democratic elections after apartheid, and tackles head-on the personal implications of the supposed new equality. […]
Jack And The Beanstalk at Theatre Peckham | Review
Folk tales only become old because they speak about timeless issues to successive generations of the young. If they were to lose their relevance, they would fade and die, simple as that. No wonder then that Jack and the Beanstalk is as durable as they come, with its supernatural backdrop of a giant in the […]
INALA with the Soweto Gospel Choir and International Dancers | Review
It is more than thirty years since the South African male choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo achieved global fame through the unorthodox route of collaboration with an American rock star. The result of that was the landmark album Graceland, made controversial by the fact that the star in question, Paul Simon, appeared to be breaking […]
Prism starring Robert Lindsay and Tara Fitzgerald | Review
It is one thing to be a visually literate playwright; quite another to create a full-length drama which appropriates the techniques of the cinema as whole-heartedly as Terry Johnson has done in his latest play. Obeying the old principle of showing rather than telling, Johnson lays before us the life of the late and undoubtedly […]
The Entertainer at New Victoria Theatre, Woking | Review
They may not have called it a state-of-England play back then, but when The Entertainer was premiered in London in 1957, there could have been no doubting the author’s intention. Here he was depicting a fading music-hall hero desperately hanging on to his old and once-reliable repertoire of jokes while the newer media of TV […]