As the lights go down at the end of See Me Now’s press night the audience rise collectively to their feet in outright admiration. This display of elation is not born out of left liberal values, but out of respect for the performers, for the gutsy real life stories they...
There’s plenty of drama in Michael McLean’s Years of Sunlight about friendship and the exodus of Liverpudlians living in 1960s slums to new purpose built town Skelmersdale, but Mark Rice-Oxley’s Paul, best friend of parent-less Emlyn, is directed by Amelia Sears to stand as still as one of Anthony Gormley’s...
Critic Mark Shenton wrote of the 2016 Escaped Alone production, now back at the Royal Court for a second run that he wouldn’t be surprised “if we woke to headlines today that described exactly what she'd foretold.” The play by Caryl Churchill premiered before the UK left the EU, a...
The Beslan School Massacre in Russia began on September 1st 2004 and lasted for three days before special forces brought it to an end. Of the 1,100 hostages held by the Chechen rebels, around 385 were killed, 186 of them children. Us/Them is a physical theatre response by playwright Carly...
This production directed by Helena Kaut-Howson and translated by Jeremy Brooks and Kitty Hunter-Blair really is in the anguished lows as it opens the Arcola’s commemorative Russian Revolution season. It’s Maxim Gorky’s best known play, heralds the birth of theatrical social realism, made his name in 1902 but was lambasted...
Overwhelming problems face Tamsin in Katherine Soper’s debut Bruntwood Prize winning 2015 play. Her younger brother Dean has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and cannot leave the house. Even so his benefits are being disputed and are at risk. The only place Tamsin, lacking in qualifications, can find much needed work, is...
Director Phil Wilmott’s Three Sisters in a version by Tracey Letts (August: Osage County) is full of micro aggression. In a small space such as the Union Theatre’s new venue, nothing can be bigged up too much: subsequently this production is full of nuances sometimes so macro you’d miss them...
Hedda is down, but Ibsen is up in this crystalline razor sharp new translation of the playwright’s supposedly realist play by Patrick Marber and directed by Ivo van Hove. The Belgian director and his years long collaborator designer Jan Versweyveld have removed every inch of realistic detail that made Ibsen...
Once in a Lifetime is a show about the tenuous and complicated relationship between creativity and destruction. Re-adapted here by Chris Hart, son of one half of the original writing duo Moss Hart and George S Kaufman, the show may well be set in 1930s Hollywood just as the talkies...