London Theatre Reviews - West End & Off West End

‘Box set drama’ was the overarching theme for Crips with Chips, which seemed odd for an online scratch night – five ‘box set dramas’ in about an hour or so. The term ‘crip’ is, or rather was, a derogatory slang term for ‘cripple’, though it appears to be repurposed by the likes of Graeae and others for positive reasons. The word has been used by disability campaigners for decades – there was even a hashtag, #CripTheVote, first used for the 2016 United States elections to highlight disability … [Read more...]

The overarching theme of ‘Escape’ in the Response monologue series seems reasonably apt for these times in which so many restrictions, albeit for public health reasons, have been imposed on freedom of movement. This rapid-fire set of short plays, twelve wrapped up in about eighty minutes or so, collectively explore various means of escape, from the sublime to the ridiculous. In Living in Fiction by Lucinda Coyle, Holly Read’s character looks back to when she imagined she was in various stories … [Read more...]

There were moments in Two Billion Beats when one wonders if the youth of today really do talk in the way in which the script says they do. Do they really say, “Mickey Ds” instead of ‘McDonald’s’? Perhaps more pertinently, I found the implied assumption that schoolgirls would necessarily take their custom there slightly odd – other food outlets are available and indeed frequented by them. But who gets their dinner from where isn’t the salient point in Two Billion Beats, a reference to what … [Read more...]

SAFE is an unusual piece of ‘verbatim’ theatre put together and directed by Alexis Gregory in collaboration with Park Theatre and Hackney Empire, “exploring the themes of gender, sexuality, identity, childhood, family, addiction, relationships, religion, class, race... and what it means to be truly safe in today’s world.” He interviewed several homeless and at-risk LGBTQ young people that he met, using their actual words, together with some poetry by Yrsa Daley Ward. It is structured in a … [Read more...]

I have spent much of the last thirteen months of Lockdown (it seems a great deal longer!) in trying to avoid ZOOM meetings, but Dr Will Houstoun’s The Secret Connection is far and away the most enjoyable and intriguing 75 minutes I have spent on Zoom or anywhere else for a long time! Will Houstoun is an academic historian researching the history of conjuring, especially in the Victorian era, but his interactive show is anything but academic. Tickets are limited to 30 per performance so … [Read more...]