Rona Munro’s world premiere of Mary serves as her latest addition to a cycle of six other James plays of Scottish historical drama. Whether well-acquainted with the Stuart monarchs or not, Roxana Silbert’s production of Munro’s latest work is one of those shows that benefits from some context. Grand in its production design and dramatically sumptuous in its oratory and performances, I was surprised that Mary was presented as a single act, straight through, and kept expecting an interval that … [Read more...]
The Boy With Two Hearts at the National Theatre
I desperately wanted to love Phil Porter’s stage adaptation of the Amiri brothers’ memoir of their family’s escape from Afghanistan - which started in 2000 when the Taliban vowed to execute their mother for speaking in favour of women’s rights. Hamed and Hessam’s odyssey as two young boys (played by Farshid Rokey and Shamail Ali), with their older teenage brother Hussein (Ahmad Sakai) and parents, eventually led them to Cardiff where they settled into school and Hussein graduated from university … [Read more...]
Ravenscourt by Georgina Burns at Hampstead Theatre
Debuting her first full-length play, Georgina Burns’ Ravenscourt shows her tremendous promise as a writer. Hampstead’s Associate Director Tessa Walker brings great skill to the production - keeping its pace tight and overseeing exemplary production values that you wouldn’t necessarily expect in a studio space staging of a writer who has only recently graduated from the theatre’s emerging writers programme, INSPIRE (which is led by big-hitting playwright Roy Williams, whose latest work, The … [Read more...]
Leave The Light On For Me – Southbank Centre’s Unlimited Festival
The return of the Southbank Centre’s Unlimited Festival, exhibiting work by and featuring disabled artists for the public along with an industry strand for the creatives themselves, is an important occasion. Delivered via a hybrid of live performance and online events, some of the in-person events were once again looking threatened with cancellations due to the new extraordinary external circumstances of last week - plus various shows intended for outdoor performance had to move indoors due to … [Read more...]
Gabriel Byrne’s Walking With Ghosts
There are some shows for which it’s best to know as little as possible before entering the theatre. Gabriel Byrne’s Walking with Ghosts is such a show. Whilst it would be unlikely that anyone would buy a ticket if not already an admirer of the play’s star and author, Byrne’s story - which begins with a gentle meandering through near archetypal tales of mid-century working class Irish family life - gathers power with its surprises. As performer, Byrne narrates and enacts - building a world … [Read more...]
Attenborough & His Animals at Wilton’s
I had booked this show back in June on the basis of my biology-loving 10-year-old daughter’s fan girl devotion to Sir David Attenborough – an affinity I admired but never quite appreciated until I discovered at the performance that she could mouth Sir David’s narration word for word. For some reason (probably my own lack of attention to a gig that popped up three months ago) I had been expecting a puppet-driven production like a mini-Life of Pi for kids. But the clue to the joy of Clownfish’s … [Read more...]
Black, the Clown by Pablo Sorozábal and Francisco Serrano Anguita
Although not entirely perfect, this staging – the first ever in the UK – of Pablo Sorozabal’s Zarzuela (Spanish Operetta) is brilliant, atmospheric, moving and one of the most satisfying productions I’ve seen this year. Imagery of the clown (el payaso) - and specifically the Pierrot of Comedia dell’arte - has long represented social outsiders and the disenfranchised, as depicted in Picasso’s rose period or more recently in Alex de la Iglesia’s Spanish Civil War darkly comic 2010 film The Last … [Read more...]