It breathes many breaths, beats as one heart. Maureen Beattie as the woman appears to be a woman lost. Lost in the circles of people who swirl around her like personified nuclei, lost in her own nuclear reactor and the forces of life it connects her to, but which she...
As UK theatres fret over how to respond to the increasing national and global crises that are hitting or emerging from our shores in wave after wave of tsunami like proportions: Brexit, Syria, the refugee crisis, Russia, Crimea, Ukraine, Belarus, the Greek meltdown, Egypt, Spain, the Occupy movement, Trump, Brexit,...
There’s an air of expectancy in the National Theatre's Dorfman, a buzz back grounded by nervous laughter. No wonder, this is the NT’s response to leaving the EU and they have made a verbatim play taken from hundreds of interviews from people of all ages and backgrounds from the UK...
A narrow stage runs 3/4 round the outer edge of the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs. It serves as a walkway and platform for its love obsessed characters A, B, Man, Woman and Younger Woman. Merle Hensel’s back walls are painted green, reminiscent of old school blackboards. The characters in the...
Andrew Scott is a lean and yet crumpled waif of a Hamlet who looks like he buys his clothes from Zara. Appearances are deceptive and helpless innocence isn’t everything though. As he waits as Angus Wright’s Claudius ignores his nephew in favour of Luke Thompson’s more buoyant Laertes he becomes...
The safety curtains part the stage like an eyelid. A spotlight flicks on and a woman, barely recognisable from her face or from her tight bandage wrapped body, stands awkwardly and unevenly, gripping her support frame for all she is worth. A voice (Buffy Davis), like the computerised Siri, takes...
This take on Arthur Schnitzler’s sexual debacle La Ronde is a welcome venture into the sex, love and death lives of the older generation by Visible, but ultimately feels less than the sum of its parts. The seven vignettes, where each character’s story is pushed forward into the next scene...
This Dream is a bit of surprise- silent weavings of the spirit (or fairies) explode at the end of director Joe Hill-Gibbins' interpretation to give us something in the epilogue that is both nightmarish and joyful and brings new meanings to the play’s normal tranquil self. To this end it...
A tall narrow bookcase dominates Iona McLeish’s set design on director Mehmet Ergen’s stage. It’s never ending length, reaching to the stars, and with a cherry tree exploding up and ripping through its belly, is a metaphor for Mme Ranevsky’s pipe dream that somehow her family estate will be saved...