Tao Dance 4+9 starts with the audience in the dark. And that’s more or less how it finishes, too. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t have any desire to know what’s going on for about an hour, while a group of four, and then nine (hence the title) dancers mosh and bounce around the stage in matte grey and black outfits. Well, I’ve got good news for you. Tao … [Read more...]
Bromley Bedlam Bethlehem at the Old Red Lion Theatre
Theatre doesn’t have to be enjoyable. I get that. Bromley Bedlam Bethlehem certainly isn’t a comfortable night at the theatre. I was left wondering exactly what I’d subjected myself to. Was it provocative theatre, or was it just uncomfortable? The premise of Rachel Tookey’s hard-hitting play is the idea that mental health issues, specifically suicide, ‘run in … [Read more...]
Michele Sinisi in Richard III at Draper Hall | Review
Is it winter now? Now, is it winter? How soon and wintery is now? Such rambling, semi-incomprehensible, apparently ironic reiteration and reinterpretation laid the tone of the entire 45 minutes of Michele Sinisi’s performance of Richard III. The programme tells us that Sinisi has made the “brave” decision to perform only the first monologue of the entire play. For … [Read more...]
Avalanche: A Love Story at the Barbican Theatre | Review
Maxine Peake’s one-woman show is something of a plodding, steady snow drift, rather than an avalanche. She tells the story of Julia Leigh’s memoir (the play is adapted by Anna Louise-Starks from a book of the same name) tracking the turbulent and traumatic experience of trying for pregnancy at the latter end of fertility. She begins by hooking up with a partner … [Read more...]
Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake at New Wimbledon Theatre | Review
Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, now nearly 25 years old, is as sharp, sexy and silly as ever. Though audiences might be somewhat less shocked than when this show, now a Christmas treat for families, opened, it doesn’t seem to have lost any of its edge, or indeed, darkness. Despite its Christmas associations and deeply romantic narrative, Swan Lake is a gloomy tale of … [Read more...]
Going Through by Estelle Savasta at the Bush Theatre | Review
Going Through passes along smoothly and of silently. But don’t mistake silence for softness. Told by Nadia Nadarajah and Charmaine Wombwell, as Nour and Youmna respectively, in a combination of French Sign Language, speech, writing and sound, Going Through is a play about child trafficking, family, motherhood and childhood. On the face of it, a pretty gruelling 75 … [Read more...]
Top Girls by Caryl Churchill at the Lyttelton Theatre | Review
Caryl Churchill’s 1982 play Top Girls isn’t really for the slow. It’s stop-start, jumpy, fast and slow. Highly comic, instantly tragic. This is a script which shows the full capacity of a brilliant writer without holding anything back. The first scene opens on a ‘gals’ catch up in an expensive looking restaurant in London, 1981. The twist is that they are all … [Read more...]
Good Dog by Arinzé Kene at Bernie Grant Arts Centre
Arinze Kene’s Misty ran at the Bush Theatre to huge critical acclaim before becoming only the second black writer to have a second West End transfer at Trafalgar Studios. His lesser known earlier show, good dog premiered at Watford Palace in 2017, exploring many of the same questions. The show returns to the Bernie Grant Art’s Centre, in Tottenham. There is a sense … [Read more...]
Frankenstein: How To Make A Monster – Battersea Arts Centre
Shelley’s 1818 classic novel, Frankenstein, is a tale for the ages. Its themes of genius, greed and godliness are pertinent across time. The dangers of unchecked research and creativity, the violence of the creations of man, Shelley’s text is ripe for reinterpretation in almost any setting; but there’s the rough: we have to ask why Frankenstein now, rather than any … [Read more...]