Linda Anderson reviews Bad Roads at the Royal Court Part of the International Playwrights programme at the Royal Court, Bad Roads provides a series of savage snapshots of the war in Ukraine. Told from a female perspective, we see how women adapt to find love, avoid abuse and […]
Simon Ward reviews No Place Like Hope at The Old Red Lion, Islington Even by the standards of theatre-rooms-above-pubs, the Old Red Lion is a particularly intimate space. If you sit at the front you are almost part of the scenery, or intruding on someone’s privacy. Especially […]
Simon Ward reviews Dracula at Sutton House, Hackney Like his fellow icons of horror, Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde, Dracula has a cultural resonance out of all proportion to the few people who are familiar with the 19th-century source material. They seem to tap in to atavistic […]
Simon Ward reviews Tom Stoppard’s If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank at The Hen and Chickens First things first. The setup of this play will be virtually incomprehensible to anyone under the age of about forty – it takes us back to the days when there was […]
Simon Ward reviews Fever Pitch The Opera at The Union Chapel The Union Chapel can lay claim to be the very heart of Islington, with the Town Hall just down the road, and the old Highbury Stadium a short walk away for the fans streaming out of the […]
Jasper Cunningham reviews Circa: Humans at the Underbelly, Edinburgh In a surprisingly spacious circus tent a group of people all the way from Australia put on a show that is both spectacular and bizarre. This piece of physical theatre combines gymnastics, dance and circus with precision that is […]
Jasper Cunningham reviews Dust at the Underbelly, Edinburgh Dust is a long way from the stand-up comedy the Fringe is known for. It is a harrowing tale told in hindsight by the protagonist, Alice, after her death. It is another example of a one-woman show done right. At […]
Jasper Cunningham reviews Victim at the Pleasance, Edinburgh With a cleverly simplistic style, Victim explores the lives of two characters; a female prison warden and an inmate in the same institution. When a new inmate with a particularly harrowing backstory arrives, the natural order of prison life is […]
Anna Hadley reviews Trashed at the Underbelly, Edinburgh Trashed is a dark, tragic show that haunts the Fringe and stays with its audiences. Written by Sascha Moore and performed by David William Bryan, the play is based on one man’s experience of the loss of a child, the […]
Charles Blake reviews Rhapsodes at the Pleasance, Edinburgh Improv doesn’t get much harder than this. Adam Meggido and Sean McCann, stars of Showstopper! The Improvised Musical, return to the Fringe as “Rhapsodes”—a term used in ancient Greece for competitive poets. Over the course of an hour, they create […]