Average, the bear, is nervous about going into hibernation, but we are all there to celebrate the great event. Michelle Brasier's standup routine turn gig comedy turn monologue is a fascinating self-exploratory response to grief and pain. Average’s pre-hibernation drinks are a big deal, but her friends haven't turned up, instead, we have a human entertainer, who is Michelle Brasier, playing herself. Brasier comes on stage and starts to sing about who she is and what she does. Very … [Read more...]
Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel at Battersea Arts Centre
Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel is an irksomely resonant, aggressively metatheatrical existential tear-down of theatre. An experience, masquerading as theatre, deconstructs and pushes theatre to its very limits in a fascinating post-performance experience. Tim Crouch walks in, and crowns himself with a virtual reality headset, apparently entering a classical production of Shakespeare's King Lear. He then proceeds to tour us around the theatre, articulating who made up the audience, from the … [Read more...]
Grenfell: System Failure at The Playground Theatre
Damning, bleak and intense, System Failures: Scenes from The Grenfell Inquiry is a brutal condemnation of the corruption at the heart of this deeply preventable disaster. Richard Norton-Taylor & Nicholas Kent continue their work reminding us of the prevalence of Grenfell as it slips dangerously into the background of our political landscape. The performance is comprised of a curated selection of scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry played as meticulously and accurately as possible. There … [Read more...]
Mortality at the Hope Theatre | Review
Three teens who don’t have long to live, a clock on the wall counts down, and the audience bears witness to their existential breakdowns. This new play attempts to grasp an understanding of what it means to face your end with a total lack of agency but fails to find the depth of character that would make this a meaningful tale. The play is very straightforward. Three teenagers, who all know they are not long for this world, muck about trying to work out what will make a mark, both on … [Read more...]
Home at the Vault Festival | Review
A child plays with an orange, and the old man works himself into the ground. Playful, rough, intimate and touchingly funny, Home is a piece that will hang around in your mind, a story of both conflict and affection, loss and life. The piece kicks off with a puppet sequence showing a man leaving a doll's house, rustling an orange out of a tree and driving to work, and then the same in reverse. The puppetry, under the direction of Santi Guillamon, is deliberately unpolished, and in that … [Read more...]