Theatre
Gary Naylor
Even if you miss the play’s title and do not recognise the writer’s name with the heft of reputation that comes with it, as soon as you see the black man and the white woman speaking in South African accents, you know that the tension that electrifies the air between them is real. "No normal sport in an abnormal society” was the rally cry of those boycotting the Apartheid regime, but there was no normal love, either – until, incredibly, the mid-80s. Yes, the mid-80s.Diane Page’s revival of Athol Fugard’s Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act at the Orange Tree Theatre howls Read more ...
aleks.sierz
For more than three decades, playwright Winsome Pinnock has been at the forefront of new writing, often experimenting with form as well as documenting the lives of black Britons. Her new play’s original opening at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester was halted due to you know what in March last year, so it was then broadcast as part of the BBC’s Lockdown theatre festival on Radio 3, and it now arrives at the National Theatre, having already won the 2018 Alfred Fagon Award. As the story moves between London in the present and in 1840, multiple perspectives on the black British experience Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
An ageing Nazi, stuffed into a slightly too tight white linen suit, sits at the opposite end of the dining table to a young Jewish woman. Between them is a dish of chicken stew that we, just moments beforehand, have seen her lace with poison.The tone is darkly comic – "I’ve dreamed about killing Nazis," she tells him. Drily he replies, "Do you want to talk about that?" Still he eats the stew, declaring "Poison can make you foam at the mouth, bleed from the eyes." There is a chilling silence. "In that way it’s very similar to gas."Playwright Josh Azouz – who is descended from Sephardic Jews – Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Bedknobs and Broomsticks has always suffered from not being Mary Poppins, the movie delayed in development and released in 1971 (it is a Sixties film in tone and technology) and always seeming to appear later on the BBC’s Christmas Disney Time programmes, after a bit of Baloo boogieing and a spoonful or two of sugar. It was probably more liked than loved. All of which may have played a part in its half-century long journey from screen to stage – but this new adaptation, on tour around the UK and Ireland through next spring, proves the wait was well worth it. The show's co- Read more ...
David Kettle
The popcorn on offer as you enter the Pleasance’s performing space at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre quickly fills the air with its rich, sugary scent. It’s a smell that sets the scene nicely for a show set in a cinema, but also an aroma that takes on increasingly heavy, cloying, sickly – and inescapable – connotations as Screen 9 progresses.Twelve people were killed and 70 injured in July 2012 at a mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, at the midnight premiere of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises. For its debut production, London-based Piccolo Theatre has devised a verbatim Read more ...
David Kettle
Ageing Mick wakes up on Portobello beach with two gold rings in his pocket, and embarks on the bender to end all benders in order to work out what or who they’re for. Young Gilly has a poorly pug named Mr Immanuel Kant, but can’t face having it put down. Gaynor has suffered from fibromyalgia for decades, but must put it aside if she’s to see her newborn granddaughter. Dougie and Ciara are preparing for their life-changing arrival with one last hedonistic night on the dance floor.On the face of it, Frances Poet seems to be following a well-worn path as the five Edinburgh lives in her quietly Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Belleville has lost its Prince Charming and, when his statue is graffitied, it loses its long held title as the most beautiful town, too. Its people fear the impact on their livelihoods and soon identify the gobby, gothy girl as the culprit – they go after Cinderella with actual pitchforks! Her only friend is another misfit, Prince Sebastian, Charming’s brother, who must now be married off in an extravaganza of a royal wedding in order to provide a circus to go with the hunky baker’s bread. And so, Cinderella, Andrew Lloyd Webber's new musical at the Gillian Lynne Theatre, gives the Read more ...
David Kettle
Fear of Roses Assembly Roxy ★★★One of the more disconcerting aspects to this year’s Fringe is different venues’ contrasting reactions to the easing of Covid restrictions. Some – like Army @ The Fringe and the Traverse Theatre – maintain limited audience numbers and careful distancing, as well as insisting on mask wearing. The Stand at the Corn Exchange even requires a negative lateral flow test for entry. Others, like Assembly, have performing spaces packed with audience members sitting shoulder to shoulder, and mask wearing apparently voluntary (though there are bars within the Read more ...
David Kettle
There’s always a tricky balance to be struck with site-specific theatre. What’s more important: the show itself, or its unusual setting? And to what extent does its location enrich or even impact on the essence of the text? Edinburgh-based site-specific specialists Grid Iron have been staging shows in parks, pubs and plenty of other unconventional settings for decades. Doppler, however, must surely rank as one of their simplest and most effective marriages of content and location.Doppler is a husband and father, and he lives alone in a forest near Oslo. He’s not sure why: it’s something Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Danny Robins tells us what we’re in for with his title, so we’re warned. And it’s not long before we get the “things that go bump in the night”, the creaking floorboards, the “I know this sounds crazy, but…” because they’re the essential components of the genre. Reviewing a ghost story and complaining about that stuff really isn’t on – like critiquing a pantomime for its audience participation. That’s not to say that any genre piece is easy to write or to stage. Since the structure is so tight, the expectations set and the narrative arc visible from curtain-up to curtain call, chiselling Read more ...
David Kettle
Tunnels Army @ The Fringe ★★★ As has already been noted, it’s a funny old Fringe this year: only a fraction of its normal size; with audiences that seem either Covid-wary or disconcertingly enthusiastic; with some venues taking advantage of restriction relaxations to open up to jam-packed houses (and infuriating many who’d booked on the basis of social distancing), and others maintaining Covid measures, with outdoor performing spaces and careful hygiene. In short, it’s a bit of a mess, but hey, isn’t that in the spirit of the Fringe? If anything, the smaller programmes in what Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This week is peak time to test out Nick Payne’s hypothesis of life as a series of accidents, narrow squeaks and near misses. While the Perseids are doing their August explosive thing, go home after the show and look in the night sky with a lover, and see whether both of you see the same shooting star – what are the chances?Not a lot, according to bored cosmic scientist Marianne, who has attracted master-beekeeper Roland with a chat-up line about licking one's elbow whose chance of success is surely even unlikelier than you and your lover catching the same flash in the sky.But Payne’s Read more ...