Like thoroughbreds at a starting gate, The Working Actors Studio is launching four winning pieces of new writing, performed by a complement of 16 bold-spirited actors, who most recently graced the stage at London's Etcetera Theatre in Camden Town. As part of the Studio's Summer Show, each piece is performed by a quartet of characters in wildly serious but ferociously complicated situations. The performances kick off with Swings and Roundabouts, a witty piece about sex dens and car keys in … [Read more...]
Nothing in a Butterfly at Omnibus Theatre | Review
Actor/playwright Ric Renton's autobiographical debut play, Nothing in a Butterfly, is an economical piece of writing that punches hard in depicting the hellish world of drug addiction, degradation and endless encounters with a violent self. As a play crafted from Renton's own lived experience - with Renton playing himself - it wastes no time in exposing the tortured mind of a substance abuser, trapped by compulsions that can only lead to multiple arrests, imprisonment and death. It is a … [Read more...]
Henry V at the Donmar Warehouse | Review
The much-anticipated production of Max Webster's youth-punk version of Shakespeare's Henry V is a rousing mix of historical events played out in a modern-dress, music-pumping production. It doesn't always work. We've grown accustomed to characters spouting the Bard's famous prose in London east-end accents while wearing trainers, tracksuit bottoms and moving to a hip-hop beat. It's no longer innovative, smacks of laziness and requires a rethink for future modern-style productions. This … [Read more...]
When We Dead Awaken at The Coronet, London
When We Dead Awaken, Henrik Ibsen's last play, is a drama that questions the folly we human beings make of the gift of life. First performed at the Haymarket Theatre in London in 1899, it crosses the boundaries of two centuries to captivate London audiences once again. Currently at The Coronet in London, it is reimagined by the Norwegian Ibsen Company and directed by Kjetil Bang-Hansen, a director who considers the play to be Ibsen's most biographical piece of writing and, from the outset, there … [Read more...]
Rumble! by Yasir Senna at Drayton Arms Theatre
Anyone who's worked in investment banking knows it's largely an intellectually-free zone, polluted with people who calculate each other's value according to the price tag of what they own. Writer/Director Yasir Senna accurately highlights this in his play Rumble, set in the first decade of the Noughties but with a nod to a world heavyweight title fight between two boxing champions that took place in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). For those who follow the careers of … [Read more...]
The Bolds by Julian Clary at The Unicorn Theatre
We know the holiday season is upon us when fairy tales and children's storybooks run amok as stage adaptations to compete with the manufactured jolly of Yuletide cheer. The Bolds, Julian Clary's popular series of books about a family of hyenas living in Teddington, makes its stage transition to London's Unicorn Theatre in a near pantomime production that zings with music, slapstick comedy, dancing and corny gags. It's geared for children, six years old and up, with lashings of seductive, … [Read more...]
The Questors present The Browning Version | The Studio | Review
Terence Rattigan, the gift that keeps on giving. It would be easy to begin a review of The Browning Version by rehashing common tropes associated with the play since its first production in 1948 at the Phoenix Theatre, London. However, such is the respect and compassion playwright Terence Rattigan has for the human heart - its sufferings and humiliations - that we find in The Browning Version a universal tragedy that awaits each human subject, rather than a play simply about the repressed … [Read more...]