Far removed from the school hours spent uncomprehendingly tripping through Hamlet’s soliloquy a line at a time, Howard Barker’s Gertrude – The Cry is abundant in sexual manipulation, self-destructive obsession and finally a female perspective on what is arguable Shakespeare’s most famous play. Perhaps Mr Eaton would have […]
‘Middle-aged man in crisis deals with his issues in an anonymous hotel room’ is becoming an overcrowded genre. The film Lost in Translation (whose movie poster this production deliberately echoes, though with what purpose is unclear), and much more recently the brilliant Anomalisa were of this sort, and […]
Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck is a play from 1836, but because it was left unfinished has been taken as the jumping off point of a number of celebrated and unorthodox interpretations, most notably perhaps Alban Berg’s 1922 opera Wozzeck. What happens is considerably less important than the way in […]
Following hot on the heels of his success with Pornography at Sedos, brilliant young director Chris Davis has scored another hit with this extraordinary production of a play which caused such controversy at its first run in London that it was banned. I don’t know whether The Children’s […]
This play is diverting and entertaining but entirely unremarkable – most notably let down by the hackneyed phrases and unoriginal dialogue of Gavin Davis’ script which is full of rehashed scenarios and family dynamics. The play begins at an interview in a therapist’s office where dialogue between Chris […]
After the success of last summer’s ‘DNA’, ‘The Young Pretenders’ are back with their contribution to the National Theatre Connections 500 Festival, with their performance of Stacey Gregg’s ‘I’m Spilling My Heart Out Here’; a fairly shallow play about the trivial difficulties of teenage life. The script […]
This is a play of dual narratives, the stage dominated by two monolithic vertical sections of railway tracks. In 1973, sullen teen Dinah (Hannah Stephens) arrives from care to be fostered by batty but endearing widow, Lotte (Juliet Welch). In World War II, Lotte (Hannah Stephens) is sent […]
With the distinctively unique smell of dry ice clogging my nostrils I shuffled down the isle of seats in the gloomy half-light of the Arcola theatre. Musing away the minutes before the show started, I dwelt on previous theatre experiences; dry ice always puts me in mind of […]
Armed with the pretentious opinion that no vocalisation can ever do justice to the beauty of Wilde’s words, and the somewhat contradictory conviction I was going to thoroughly enjoy the evening’s performance, I sank into the seats of Trafalgar’s small, intimate theatre. I admit I was filled with […]
A play about the 7/7 bombings shouldn’t be synonymous with pornography, and yet this play provides an explicit window into the world of Londoners that, whilst not titillating, is engrossing. We meet a series of characters that are seemingly unconnected, starting with a working mother [Bex Parker-Smith] whose […]
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