Theatre
Rachel Halliburton
This raw, joyous, irreverent take on Joan of Arc made headlines before opening night for its depiction of the fifteenth-century warrior saint as non-binary. Yet what shines out in Charlie Josephine’s fresh, deliberately pared-down script is that all of us struggle to fit precisely into the categories that language assigns to us. There’s no sense of the erasure of the female struggle in this re-examination of Joan’s legacy – the play features many strong women, not least the king’s mother-in-law, Debbie Korley’s stylishly fearsome Yolande of Aragon. The fact is that Joan of Arc was by anyone’s Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Who tells your story? Something of a theme in new musicals since Hamilton posed the question in those long ago pre-Covid, pre-inflation days. In Ride, the once famous cyclist who had hardly ever ridden a bike, Annie Londonderry, circumvents the problem right at the start, because she will – and she’ll also, a little reluctantly, tell the story of Annie Kopchovsky, the Latvian-born mother she once was.It was three years ago that Freya Catrin Smith and Jack Williams found Annie’s story and started to develop it as a musical, a version winning the Vault Festival Show of the Week in 2020. It Read more ...
Gary Naylor
What will get audiences back into theatres? Revivals of old favourites. Works from popular genres like musicals. Pantomimes. This production of Into The Woods kinda ticks all those boxes, but it also ticks the box that matters most. It is a unique experience – not podcastable, not downloadable, not multiplexable. Co-directors, Terry Gilliam and Leah Hausman, have worked together before and it shows in a vision that is both coherent yet also continually surprising, even a press night audience (who’ve seen it all – or think they have) going full “Wow” time and again, as the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A semi-staged concert performance of a musical is a little like a third trimester ultrasound scan. You should see the anatomy in development, the shape of what is to come and, most importantly, discern a heart beating at its centre. But you can’t tell if what will arrive some time later will be a bouncing baby or a sickly child. So it is with this iteration of a new British musical, Treason. We’re in a divided kingdom whose leader, Queen Elizabeth I, is about to die and whose successor is unclear – the audience did not need too much prompting to catch the contemporary parallels. Read more ...
David Kettle
Those working-class people really are appalling, aren’t they? Racist, sexist, definitely homophobic, violent too. Thank god our young hero can escape their clutches into the safety of a nice, bourgeois acting academy where he can be his true self.Okay, the degradations and brutal humiliations inflicted on the gay central character in Édouard Louis’s autobiographical 2014 trauma memoir The End of Eddy are undeniably horrific, and apparently unending. But to call Louis’s portrayal of his working-class background in northern France problematic is a bit of an understatement. He surrounds himself Read more ...
David Kettle
In many ways, The Stones is what the Fringe is all about: a new theatre company (London-based Signal House); a single actor; a small black-box space; just a chair, a bit of smoke and some almost imperceptible lighting changes for a staging. And with those modest ingredients, it generates a work that’s really quite unnerving in its quiet power, and magpie-like in its references.Out of the blue, Nick receives a text from an old schoolfriend – well, someone he used to taunt with sinister messages in the hope of attention. As a result, he dumps his boyfriend, quits his job, and – almost as if it Read more ...
David Kettle
Ode to Joy (How Gordon Got to Go to the Nasty Pig Party), Summerhall ★★★★★You receive a glossary on your way in to James Ley’s high-voltage, high-camp Ode to Joy in the ancient, steeply raked lecture hall-cum-theatre of Summerhall’s Demonstration Room. Or to give the play its correct title, Ode to Joy (How Gordon Got to Go to the Nasty Pig Party). And if you’re not up to speed on Mandy, Ket and Pig Play, that glossary might well come in handy.Ode to Joy is a raucous, breathless, larger-than-life hour of theatre, and one whose title sums the work up perfectly: it’s a paean to pleasure, a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Dystopian theatre takes many forms – but this is the first which is a jury-room drama. Dawn King has previously explored the world of double-think and the use of fear and fake news by oppressive regimes in her 2011 drama, Foxfinder, and now turns her attention to climate change litigation. With a twist. In The Trials, a jury of young people must deliver verdicts on the role of older individuals in contributing to the climate change. Since an overheating world is of burning interest to many young people, this Donmar Warehouse production is part of project involving schools and community Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s nothing quite like magic, live, up close and personal. Sure there are the TV spectaculars, the casino resort mega-shows and even The Masked Magician to pull back the curtains, but there’s a frisson in the air when the card that’s in your head appears in the conjuror’s hand. Roll in a spot of cabaret and circus and the tang of transgression tingles on the tongue, the grim world of the natural sliding away, the supernatural its welcome substitute. Such is the aim behind the West End’s new, purpose-built, magic/cabaret venue, Wonderville, the brainchild of creative director Laura Read more ...
David Kettle
"I feel I owe you an explanation." That much James Thierrée concedes partway through his sprawling, freewheeling, dream-like, hallucinatory Room in Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre. By which stage, most of the audience was probably in agreement. It’s a proposal he comes back to again and again during the rest of the show – but, of course, no explanation ever materialises, save a few strangulated noises, which seem about the best Thierrée can manage.With its weird, magical, disconnected images, its restless shifts in tone, its collision of dance, mime, acrobatics, music, circus, stagework and more, Read more ...
David Kettle
First, a bit of housekeeping. Maybe it was the three-and-a-half-hour duration, or maybe the unfamiliar Sri Lankan subject matter, or maybe even the very un-festival-like hot weather that put people off an evening inside Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre. Or maybe (very possibly) continuing Covid concerns. Whatever the reason, it’s dispiriting to see so few people in the audience for what must surely be one of the most ambitious and most powerful theatrical offerings taking place in Edinburgh this year.Counting and Cracking is a multi-generational, multi-lingual, multi-locational, decades-spanning Read more ...
David Kettle
Temping, Assembly George Square Studios ★★★★Sarah Jane is away in Hawaii. But don’t worry – she’s left plenty of instructions for your day temping in the actuaries’ office, checking voicemails, answering emails, updating spreadsheets. After all, it’s just numbers – it’s not like you’ll be dealing with people’s lives or anything.New York-based Dutch Kills Theater’s immersive, one-audience-member, performer-less show ushers you into a lovingly recreated workspace, all stress balls and cute family photos, and then sets you to work. To say more would spoil the surprise, but it’s a remarkably Read more ...