Simon Ward reviews Watershed at Playhouse East Emma Hickman’s witty play shares some ideas with movies like The Truman Show and The Lego Movie – the world presented here is carefully choreographed and ‘everything is awesome’. Unlike in those films, however, Annie (Chessika Warin-Boyd) does seem to know […]
Simon Ward reviews Poison at The Cockpit Theatre The setting of Poison, written by Dutch playwright Lot Vekemans and here translated by Rina Vergano, seems to be set in continental Europe. The fact that our two protagonists, He (Martin Maynard) and She (Lynne Livingstone) are English and Scottish […]
Simon Ward reviews Player at the Riverside Studios If Matthew Lyon’s new play has a distinctly Berkoffian look and feel, that is hardly surprising as Lyon explicitly credits Steven Berkoff’s Actor as the inspiration for this rumination on the trials and tribulations of the actor’s life. On a […]
Simon Ward reviews Stanislavski Can’t Save Me from the Apocalypse at the Barons Court Theatre Written and directed by Maggie Dickinson, Stanislavski Can’t Save Me from the Apocalypse is a dark comedy based partly on what must be Dickinson’s lived experience of Theatre Camp. That curious American obsession with spending […]
Simon Ward reviews Core Values at the Hen and Chickens Theatre Written and directed by co-star Alice Dempsey, Core Values is a series of vignettes – snapshots and brief scenes to provide insight into the lives of protagonists here known as Player A (Cécile Fayter), Player B (Alice […]
Simon Ward reviews The Sequel at the King’s Head Theatre Lucas Closs’s new comedy-drama The Sequel is a hugely entertaining extended riff on what it means to be a writer and what any writer owes to the people and places where they find their inspiration. It is a […]
Simon Ward reviews The Witch and The Whistleblower at The Glitch With all due respect to modern-day followers of Wicca, we would normally associate witches with either fairytales or the distant past. By contrast, ‘whistleblower’ is a much more recent term with connotations of corporate or professional wrongdoing. […]
Simon Ward reviews Rowling In It at the King’s Head Theatre Written and performed by Laura Kay Bailey, and directed by Dominic Shaw, Rowling In It is a fictionalised account of what she experienced when she agreed to play the part of JK Rowling in a show at […]
Simon Ward reviews Lifeline at the Southwark Playhouse Elephant Fresh from a run off-Broadway, Lifeline comes to the Southwark Playhouse for the its UK premiere. In various guises it has been around for a few years – it arrives here as a slick, well-funded musical that grabs the […]
Simon Ward reviews Monologues of Men at the Old Red Lion Theatre Long time collaborators Francis Saunders and Dean Stalham have teamed up again, this time with Saunders writing and performing, and Stalham directing. I have long been an admirer of Stalham’s work (see Waiting for God and […]
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