Bush Theatre
Matt Wolf
As lockdown continues, National Theatre at Home has announced its final sequence of plays, and several of the very best are being saved for last. That certainly applies to this week's offering, Small Island, whose dissection of Britain's racist past couldn't be timelier. Broadway's Lincoln Center Theater, meanwhile, mined a bygone theatrical period in the comparably epic Act One, whilst the week's offerings also accommodate in-the-moment protest theatre, an acclaimed West African Hamlet, and a recent Olivier Award-winning actor playing a peacock, as you do. For more on the latest amalgam of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Queer people of colour face a double discrimination: racism and homophobia. Against this sickness of negation and stupidity one of the best antidotes is a culture of celebration. And in this theatre can play its part. At the Bush, last September, the revival of Jackie Kay's 1986 play, Chiaroscuro, in the form of a gig, injected a heady dose of lively music and poetry into a story about two young black lesbians. Now this venue is staging The High Table, a powerful and moving debut by new playwright Temi Wilkey whose plot revolves around a gay marriage. And it's great!Set in London, Lagos and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s such remarkable symbiosis between material and performance in Irish dramatist Margaret Perry’s Collapsible that you wonder how the hour-long monologue will fare in any future incarnation. I don’t know how much Perry had the performer specifically in mind when she wrote the piece, nor whether they developed it together in rehearsal, but the fusion feels total. It transfers to the studio space of the Bush Theatre from last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, where Holahan won The Stage’s Edinburgh Award for her performance.The space at the Bush gives it a poised but fraught intimacy, highlighted Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Family dramas are a staple of British new writing, but as well as talking about our nearest and dearest, can they also say something about the wider society? The Arrival, by director turned playwright Bijan Sheibani, who won an Olivier award for Bola Agbaje's Gone Too Far! in 2008, has ambitions to be a study of masculinity in crisis. After all, Agbaje's play was about brothers, and both of his recent directing hits – The Brothers Size and Barber Shop Chronicles – were pungent with testosterone. His new one opens at the Bush Theatre, which is enjoying a great run of plays in new artistic Read more ...
aleks.sierz
True stories, even in a fictional form, have the power to grip you by the throat, furiously shake your body and then give you a parting kick in the arse. This is certainly true of stand-up comedian Richard Gadd's Baby Reindeer, a blistering monologue which was first seen in Edinburgh this summer, and is now at the Bush Theatre in West London. Apparently based on his true experience with a female stalker, this is an obsessive story about about obsession, and one which asks pertinent questions about what it means to be a victim, complicit or not, and how difficult it is to recover from trauma. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Identity politics has been around for decades. One of the great things about the Bush Theatre in West London is the fact that it not only stages new plays by a diverse range of playwrights, but also successful recent revivals of modern classics such as Winsome Pinnock's Leave Taking and Caryl Phillips's Strange Fruit. Now it is the turn of Scottish poet, novelist and playwright Jackie Kay, with this revival of her 1986 play, Chiaroscuro, presented this time in the exciting form of gig theatre.It's a story about female friendship: although one of its central aims is to question simple Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The best kind of two-hander is the play about couples. And the most dramatic way of saying something about relationships is to show a couple who are in trouble, bad trouble. Crisis. Especially if they start off well together. Kenny Emson's smart, sharply written new play, which arrives at the Bush on its way to the High Tide and Edinburgh fesrtivals, does just that. Its main theme is honesty in personal relationships and if you think that its title, Rust, suggests a corrosive decay of hope you wouldn't be far wrong.The couple are Nadia and Daniel. Both in their late-30s, she is a middle-class Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Director Madani Younis, who since 2011 has transformed the Bush Theatre in West London into one of London's most outstanding Off-West End venues, is leaving in December, on his way to becoming the creative director of the Southbank Centre. For his last show at the Bush, he has chosen a project close to his heart, Vinay Patel’s An Adventure, an epic reading of one Asian family’s global migration story. It’s a typically ambitious choice, a beguiling tragi-comedy whose narrative is original and which, more importantly, makes its political points deftly and unobtrusively, using a three-part Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Arinzé Kene is having a bit of a moment. He won an Evening Standard Film Award for The Pass opposite Russell Tovey in 2016, is about to appear in a BBC drama with Paddy Considine, and has just finished lending his lovely tenor to Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country in the West End. He’s somehow also had time to write Misty, directed by Omar Elerian at the Bush Theatre, at once a powerful meditation on how we tell stories and a raw, beautiful Odyssey through the heart of London. Clocking in at a tight two hours, Misty begins, true to its title, with a lot of fog. A thick green Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Lila had breast implants at the age of eight. Karen, her mother, is required to take psychotherapy sessions on account of the fact that she arranged for the operation. Tessa (played by Monica Dolan, pictured top and below) is a psychotherapist who is treating Karen.In the course of The B*easts, a tight hour-long monologue written and performed by Dolan, Tessa lounges in an easy chair and drinks and puffs, occasionally fielding calls from her mobile. She is frustrated and wired (possibly through fatigue) as she relates Lila and Karen’s case history, which emerges as a prism through which to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Do boys never leave the playground? Just when I was reasonably sure that the crisis of masculinity was an old-fashioned trope – I mean, so very 1990s – along comes a one-man show that investigates how lonely young men, seething with resentment, surf the internet, attracted like flies to shit by tech-savvy extremist groups of both secular and religious persuasions. And boy are they persuasive! Javaad Alipoor explores this dark world in The Believers Are But Brothers, his Edinburgh Fringe hit from last year, which now visits the Bush Theatre in west London.Because it’s about the internet, the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The political story of our time is the upsurge in support for Jeremy Corbyn, leftwing leader of the Labour Party, mainly by young activists who are both idealistic and energetic. But what would happen if one of them decided to go freelance, and pushed their protest beyond the bounds of reason? James Fritz’s resonant and beautifully structured play explores this kind of question. It won the Judges Award of the 2015 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting, run by the Royal Exchange Theatre, and now arrives at the Bush Theatre in West London.Kat is a young wife and mother, and Fritz tells her story in Read more ...