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 grapples with what has become a defining feature of the British Muslim experience: complicity. Does silence confirm your collusion? Does speaking up qualify your … [Read more...]
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 has always been the nature of drama: fantastical tales that lure us from the banality of our lives, the spectacular … [Read more...]
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 to answer these questions, with varying degrees of success, in what is at heart an examination of the treatment of those who question … [Read more...]
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 adaptations, his writing often struggles to transcend the particular context and time in which he was writing. The Trollope Society, however - in … [Read more...]
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 the best of their respective bad situations. Within the broader context of a fervent feminist discussion that dominates dining-room table conversation from Balham … [Read more...]
Review of Smoke and Oakum’s Cornermen
Simple stories are something of a rare commodity in show-business today: between overwhelming 3D CGI in cinemas and bombastic theatrical West End shows, you might assume that the appetite for unfussy, no-frills fiction was completely dead. But when you look a little harder and delve a little deeper you can find productions like Smoke & Oakum’s Cornermen: quietly, honestly, and deliberately telling a modest but compelling story with a lot of heart. Life is cyclical, we are reminded by head … [Read more...]
Review of Love, Bombs and Apples at the Arcola Theatre
As part of the Shubbak Festival’s window on contemporary Arab Culture, Hassan Abdulrazzak has offered four vignettes that provide a witty and - at times - emotionally fraught insight into the deeply personal and extraordinary human stories that underlie the broader public issues facing the Arabic and Muslim communities across the world. Abdulrazzak gives us the plucky Palestinian actor committing his intimate act of unintentional public defiance (Love in the Time of Barriers) and the stifled … [Read more...]