The word ‘immersive’ is overused, but Inna Dulerayn’s Mythosphere is so gorgeously transcendent in its ability to touch every sense with balance and profundity that, in the case of her production, that favoured adjective doesn’t quite go far enough. Sculptural staging, voluptuous costumes, enchanting live singing and other-worldly projections made me feel like I was deliciously contained within a psilocybinic music box as I watched a new world unfold before and spin around me. Whilst many … [Read more...]
About Mary Beer
Blithe Spirit at the Harold Pinter Theatre | Review
As theatre accelerates in its return (for now) from the pandemic that sent it uniformly dark in March 2020, the reunion of audience and stage is now seeming to exhibit its own array of antibody responses. By no means free from, at a minimum, the threat of continual disruption, I’ve seen producers and directors display two types of reactions, expressed both explicitly and implicitly. The first type is to apply relentless creativity to problem-solving: seeking to do what might be possible as they … [Read more...]
There’s a Rang-Tan in my Bedroom & Other Stories | Review
The Little Angel Theatre are undeniably puppet geniuses. There is always a delight in observing the sheer cleverness of their production design and the show-stealing puppets of all types. The lighting and set design to create different worlds of The Jaguar’s jungle or The Turtle's ocean and ultimately the palm forest that forced the Rang-Tan into the girl's bedroom was magnificent and affecting. Perhaps in some cases a little too affecting for the younger children. Here lies the rub: … [Read more...]
Coppelia by KVN Dance at The Cockpit | Review
Like most fairy tales, there is something dark, primal and advisory about the story of Coppelia. It seems no coincidence that in the age of Instagram and following a year when it became normative to express the self and its desires principally through machines, that this gothic fetish tale about falling in love with (and being jealous of) a mechanical doll should urge a re-telling. Visually stunning like a surrealist sculpture garden, Choreographer and Director Kevan Allen masterfully … [Read more...]
Dear Elizabeth by Sarah Ruhl at Theatro Technis | Review
In her revival of The Gate Theatre’s Dear Elizabeth (which itself is a revival from the 2012 US-based debut), director Ellen McDougall has chosen to add an additional feature to her 2019 staging’s twist on the original Sarah Ruhl epistolary play about the extraordinary three-decade friendship between poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert ‘Cal’ Lowell. Ruhl’s script is beautiful thanks to it deriving from the real-life correspondence between Bishop and Lowell that spanned from 1947 to 1977 … [Read more...]