new writing
Katherine Waters
With power comes responsibility. One without the other is sickening -- and both iterations are on show in Emma Kinane's searing new play about a child runaway in New Zealand. Social worker Anahera (played by Acushla-Tara Kupe, pictured above right) is at the house Liz and Peter (played by Caroline Faber pictured above left and Rupert Wickman), the parents of seven year-old Imogen and eleven year-old run-away Harry, while social services attempt to find him. In Emily Bestow’s canny design it's a clean, formal house. A square marble table occupies a washed rug. An orchid sits sculptural Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Reality follows dreams in José Eduardo Agualusa’s latest experiment in quixotic political fable. The book opens with journalist Daniel Benchimol waking at the Rainbow Hotel in Angola’s capital, Luanda: “I saw long black birds fly past. I’d dreamed about them. It was as though they had leaped from my dream up into the sky, a damp piece of dark-blue tissue paper, with bitter mould growing in the corners.” The birds seem to have escaped the innards of his dreamworld; they stain the sky with an uneasy, oneiric presence. That, or perhaps these birds – seen but already dreamed – occupy a zone of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You can’t fail to feel the ghosts in Appropriate at the Donmar Warehouse: they are there in the very timbers of the ancient Southern plantation house that is the setting for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s fraught – and often very funny – family drama. In the best traditions of that genre, when the three children of the Lafayette clan come together following their father’s death for the auction of their old Arkansas home, the experience proves difficult on all fronts – before it’s catapulted to new extremes when they discover an album of old photographs that depict horrifyingly Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Jeanne – employment, age and appearance unknown, motives unknowable – is building a collection of penises. In street after street, she feigns dizziness; on the inevitable approach of a man eager to lend his help, she leads him to a hotel room. After the encounter, she does not retain any recollection of this man’s face, body or name; in the intricate interior of her memory palace, only the textured details of the penis, the "shape, the form, the particular warmth, the density, the smell", are carefully preserved. She is the protagonist of Nina Leger’s provocative novel which imagines the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The thing about Wilderness is that it’s just so jolly decent. Acres of decadence, sprawled safely over the yawning magnificence of Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire, combine to create a scintillating country fair reverie – a heady mix of good music, high end food, luxury outdoorsyness and companionable folk.Yes, their fashion choices might be bold, but there is no one here who isn’t game for a laugh, or on hand to help out a neighbour. Plus you’re far more likely to be worried about their judgement of how fine your wine is than whether or not they’ve nicked your camping cooker.Revellers have Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Emmanuel (Anthony Ofoegbu) runs Three Kings Barbers in London. His assistant, Samuel (Mohammed Mansaray), is the son of his erstwhile business partner, who is currently in jail. Emmanuel is boss, surrogate father and — occasionally — verbal punching bag: Sam is a whizz with the shears and just as cutting with his tongue. It's not just London in which Inua Ellam's riotous play Barber Shop Chronicles — newly transferred to the Roundhouse from the National Theatre — takes place. Scenes in barber shops in Lagos, Accra, Kampala, Harare and Johannesburg intercut the action in London, where Read more ...
Robert Beale
Ivo van Hove’s reputation precedes his work as a rumble of thunder goes before a storm. The Manchester International Festival, intensely proud to have on board the man some see as the most original theatre director around, has presented the UK premiere of his 2014 show The Fountainhead, even as memories are fresh in the mind of Van Hove's West End All About Eve and The Damned at the Barbican and he gears up for a major new Broadway revival at the end of the year of West Side Story.First seen at Van Hove's home base on the continent just over five years ago, this is a marathon of a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Few theatres have done as much to promote new young talent as the Royal Court; few theatres have done as much to stage plays about the pains and pleasures of the digital world; few venues have tackled the themes of race and gender in contemporary society more effectively. Now, once again, it's time for a young writer to make their debut in the upstairs studio space. Step forward Jasmine Lee-Jones, whose new play, Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, has an arresting title, and has been advertised as an exploration of "cultural appropriation, queerness, friendship between womxn and the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“How much does she owe us?” So ponder the now estranged parents of a former tennis pro, as they calculate the very literal investment they’ve put into their daughter. This probing new play from Oli Forsyth – well timed for Queen’s and Wimbledon – examines the consequences of achievement by proxy and a familial relationship that becomes transactional.Construction worker Ade (Jonathan Livingstone) and carer Nina (Phoebe Pryce, both pictured below) think tennis is “for other people”, but when their daughter excels at a free trial, they encourage her to pursue it – and a leisure activity Read more ...
Stephanie Sy-Quia
Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is written as a letter to his mother, who cannot read. She cannot read because, when she was five, her schoolhouse was burnt to the ground in an American napalm raid. “Our mother tongue, then,” writes Vuong, is the “mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”Vuong, whose debut poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, won the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, was born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1988 and emigrated with his mother and grandmother to Hartford, Connecticut via a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Irish playwright Dylan Coburn Gray's new play won the Verity Bargate Award in 2017, and his reward is a fine production of this beautifully written account of one Dublin family over several decades. It is a light-touch epic which is partly a humorous account of ordinary people's daily lives, partly a meditation on time and partly a social history of changing attitudes to family, and to sex, over the years in Ireland. Coming to the Soho Theatre after opening at the Abbey in Dublin last month, it is a short poetic tribute to the nitty-gritty of quotidian living.Opening with a taxi driver, and a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In one lifetime, the many loves that once dare not speak their names have become part of everyday chatter. But it would be shortsighted to believe that ancient prejudices are easy to overcome, or that change does not run the risk of creating familiar problems. In this new play, Wife, Samuel Adamson explores several decades of the trials and tribulations of forbidden love in a piece of epic theatre that is also exquisitely personal. At the same time, he has also penned a fan letter to the theatre, taking Ibsen's A Doll's House as a template against which to measure social progress.The story Read more ...