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 […]
About Mary Beer
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 […]
The High Table by Temi Wilkey at the Bush Theatre | Review
Temi Wilkey’s new play is an entertaining night out – with diverting moments of domestic drama and comedy blended with a highly theatrical and musically-infused view from the gods (reminiscent of many a classical Greek production) – but frustratingly buries one of its most interesting aspects late in the second act and, when it finally […]