My twin 7-year-old co-critics have lockdown fatigue like everyone else. Four months since the closure of theatres, museums and schools, the thrill of sheer resourcefulness no longer has quite the frisson it did back in March. The first Zoom gathering of their Year 3 class promised longed-for sociability but produced cacophonous frustration and the novelty […]
About Mary Beer
Our Man In Havana by Spies Like Us Theatre | Review
Graham Greene’s political farce about a vacuum cleaner salesman turned bogus intelligence source-for-pay to the British Secret Services has always been a brilliant example of the hilarity that can ensue when obsessions and avarice meet. Spies Like Us Theatre has seized the opportunity of a balmy pre-revolutionary Cuban setting inhabited by the British ruling class […]
I Think We Are Alone at Theatre Royal Stratford East | Review
Sally Abbott’s I Think We Are Alone is a simple, naturalistic and rather beautiful play about feelings and families. Refreshingly, it does not attempt to subvert theatrical forms nor beguile with meta-philosophical concepts. Tightly plotted and pacey, it takes us through six intertwined lives and emotions at key moments of love, loss and redemption. Although […]
I Could Go On Singing at the Southbank Centre | Review
With ticketholders directed to the Artists’ Entrance, this work of performance art begins before you encounter the performer. Audience members are corralled backstage, briefed and walked up two flights of stairs to the stage of the Purcell Room. A kind of friendly ‘company’ energy begins to take shape as the anticipation of what will ensue […]
The Rage of Narcissus at the Pleasance Theatre | Review
The thing about allocating stars to designate a production’s calibre within its type is that you first have to determine what its type is. If there is a subgenre of Samuel Beckett-inspired TED Talks in the True Crime strand at over-thinker conventions, then Sergio Blanco’s The Rage of Narcissus is a 5-star stand-out smash. Singularly […]