Bush Theatre
aleks.sierz
Harry Potter has a lot to answer for. The phenomenal success of JK Rowling’s books, and of their film versions, and of the stage play (now set to remain in the West End for all eternity), has created a template of extravagant cultural impact that must still be bewitching prospective authors of the next big thing, as well as their prospective publishers and prospective readers. The HP phenomenon also provides plenty of material for satire. Step forward Thomas Eccleshare, whose short but fascinating new two-hander opened at the Bush Theatre tonight.Although it’s only 55 minutes long, Heather Read more ...
aleks.sierz
A new baby is like an alien invasion: it blows your mind and it colonises your world. For any couple, parenthood can be both exalting and devastating, with the stress hugging the relationship so tightly that eventually all its lies pop out. In his new play, which opened tonight at the Bush Theatre, Chris Thompson takes this idea and chucks it at a broody gay couple and their surrogate mother: Daniel, a 46-year-old lawyer, and his husband Oliver, a 32-year-old freelancer, are having a baby with their best friend, Priya.As the story begins in their classy Shadwell flat, Priya is due any day, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Location, location, location. Jim thinks he lives in the “shittiest” small town in Scotland. It’s Mallaig, on the west coast, and he’s a deeply troubled 32-year-old, working for a fish merchant and as a nature guide, but having no friends. His flat is tiny and messy, and it smells bad. Still, he enjoys his own company, and has a great collection of crustaceans in formaldehyde. It’s his hobby. As actor Sophie Wu shows in her 80-minute debut play he has good reason to feel depressed. It’s because of what happened to him 15 years ago.Yet Jim is not totally solitary. He has a girlfriend, 19-year- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Donald Trump’s electoral success was, we have been told, fuelled by the anger of the American working class. But how do you show that kind of anger on stage, and how do you criticise its basis in traditional masculinity? One way, and this is the path chosen by playwright and performer Taylor Mac in Hir, a satirical comedy which was first staged in New York in 2015 and now gets its European premiere at the Bush Theatre, is to view the family from a transgender perspective. And, at first, this strategy looks very promising.Hir is set in a settlement somewhere in California’s Central Valley, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Bush is back! After a whole year of darkness, the West London new writing venue has reopened its doors following a £4.3million remodelling and refurb, a project close to the heart of its artistic director Madani Younis. Designed by architect Steve Tompkins, and including beautiful ceiling paintings by local artist Antoni Malinowski, the venue looks brilliant, with its new terrace, fully accessible entrance and extra rooms. These include a lovely new rehearsal space, expanded offices and a sedum roof (complete with two black cats). Plus, most significantly, a brand new studio theatre that Read more ...
Melissa Bubnic
In the opening scene of Boys Will Be Boys, the lead character, Astrid, talks about how there’s a boys’ world and a girls’ world. Boys’ world is where you want to be. That’s where power is, that’s where fun is. Boys get to be boys and that means holding all the cards, and doing whatever the fuck you want. How do women get into boys’ world when they’ve got a vagina?This play is about how women navigate life in a man’s world. The play is set in the macho world of fictional trading and broking firm, the very respectable Peterson Jones & Walker. Our characters embrace the work-hard-play-hard Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Poor Alice. She’s alone all day, with a six-month baby boy, while her husband Ben – a doctor – is out at work. Working all hours. She sleeps at odd times of the day, and at first seems to have just suffered some kind of catastrophic loss. Ben seems to be working too much, so the couple never see each other. I say “seems” because it is very soon apparent that things are really not what they seem in Québecoise actress and playwright Catherine-Anne Toupin’s brilliant 2008 play about one woman’s sense of self, and her conflicting emotions about motherhood. Oh, poor Alice.After a brief Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The war in Afghanistan has not exactly been neglected by contemporary British theatre, and the plight of returned soldiers is a standard trope of new writing. These distant wars function in our culture like worse-case scenarios, an excoriating version of hell on earth, where survivors come back to haunt the comfortable, and to tell us things about being human that we never really wanted to know. Some playwrights have found poetry among the ashes of hatreds and horrors – and writer Owen Sheers is one of their number.Dateline, Bristol, 2008: three young mates – Arthur, Welsh Taff and the mixed- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Past wrongs cast long shadows. Following the passing of the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, successive Australian governments favoured migrants from English-speaking countries in what was called the White Australia policy. Between 1945 and 1968, for example, more than 3,000 British children were sent to the antipodes and told they were orphans. They expected the sunshine of a new start; what they got was the darkness of abuse. Australian playwright Tom Holloway’s 2013 drama looks at one instance of this policy, and denounces a historical wrong while at the same time cradling a family Read more ...
aleks.sierz
With the election of lefty outsider Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership, are we entering a new era when upsets and surprises have become a new way of life? Is it really true that anything is now possible? As if to engage with these pressing questions, Tanya Ronder’s new play is all about how a perfect family is suddenly visited by some totally unexpected events. What starts with a dodgy doorknob escalates over 90 minutes into a full-scale domestic breakdown.The perfect family is composed of Gordon, his second wife Serena, and their young daughter Rachel. While the confident, if emotionally Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the age of austerity, it’s getting harder and harder to avoid cliché. Especially well-meaning cliché. For example, all cuts to welfare are bad; we must defend government support of the needy at all costs. But clichéd ideas rarely make good drama so when I first heard about Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s new play, whose theme is the cuts in the legal aid budget, I must confess that my spirits dropped. Was this going to be another case of theatrical journalism?Things didn’t really improve when I read the programme note: in this, Andrew Caplen, President of the Law Society, attacks the Legal Aid, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Today, terrorism means killing as many innocent people as possible. Fear is created by completely random attacks, so that no one feels safe. But there was a time, in the past, when political anarchists would focus their attacks on selected targets and avoid civilian casualties. For a year, begining in August 1970, the Angry Brigade brought armed struggle to Britain, setting off some 25 bombs, mainly aimed at the property of the rich and powerful (although one person was slightly injured). But they were a serious embarrassment to Tory prime minister Edward Heath and the whole Establishment.At Read more ...