Asif Khan will be familiar to London audiences primarily as an actor, but in Combustion, he proves to be as adept a playwright as a performer. With this new work, he joins a small but growing canon of writers offering a counter-narrative to an increasingly shrill chorus of Islamaphobic and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Fundamentally, the play […]
A Year From Now at Tristan Bates Theatre – Review
Our viewing diet has become so saturated with bamboozling and bombastic storylines it is often difficult to remember what good storytelling is about. Mega-million-dollar blockbusters treat us to outlandish superhero narratives, and West End smash-hits hit us around the face with overblown chronicles detailing lurid sex lives or outrageously scheming sociopaths. To some extent this […]
Review of Dinosaur Dreams at The Etcetera Theatre
What happens when your perception of reality diverges from the shared experience? Are hallucinations the audio/visual manifestation of past trauma, or the tricks a self-destructive mind plays on itself? When you can’t trust the information relayed through your brain, how can you be expected to trust those around you? Will Adolphy’s brooding new play attempted […]
Review of Lady Anna: All At Sea – Park Theatre
In some respects Anthony Trollope remains something of a hard-sell to modern audiences: his popularity diminished greatly during his own lifetime, and neither is his legacy as distinguished nor his work as avant-garde as that of many of his contemporaries (Dickens, Eliot, or James). Indeed, while his novels remain a staple of genteel TV costume-drama […]
Review of Bruises at The Tabard Theatre
The Woven Voices Theatre Company has set out to use the “transformative power” of performance to shed light on and give a voice to the marginalised members of our society. As such, in Bruises, writer Nadia Cavelle offers us two portraits of best friends Banana and Jacqueline, both drawn from the underbelly of society and trying to make […]