‘hope to recontextualise the past, improve the present, and hopefully change the future’ Now I am a history girlie, chuck me a bustle, a hoop skirt, a cod piece (cheeky) or a corset and I’m blissful. However uncomfortably, I am a feminist, and so often the voices of women are absent or drowned out from the past. Enter Ava Pickett! ...
‘Luminous prose, weaving emotion and poetry’ When London feels like it’s having a hot grey bowl of diffused sunlight pressed down upon it, many flee to the AC-wafted basement of the Barbican. But what is clicking along down there pulls more of a crowd than just those on the hunt for a cool troglodyte refuge. Samuel Beckett returns to one ...
‘Go on down, get drunk and have a dance, spend some of your hard-earned doubloons, experience some queer magic, cabaret, and fight with your feet!’ Another queer venue to be struck down: Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club is tottering, reopening, and running but with the shadow of eviction looming. However, some heavy hitters (Equality) have rallied behind the banner, an ...
‘Sombre symbolism’ “The play is memory,” states narrator Tom Wingfield, challenging the audience in the first five minutes. In this case, he is referring to the fractured recollections of a life-changing night in the 1930s. In a wider sense, it feels like a nod to the past 14 years of The Yard Theatre ahead of its imminent transformation. Crumbling mental ...
‘Cynical and soulless’ 210 years ago Jane Austen published Emma.180 years later in classic 90s fashion it was America-fied into the film Clueless, and a mere 30 years after it has leaped genre once again on stage in another brat-turned-benevolent-branching. Now I have had my fair share of eighties/nighties remembrance recently. In the last year, I have seen beloved films ...
‘In 2025 with the spectre Orwell feared rising again in a different form, Animal Farm is never more relevant, especially with such a variegated restaging.’ What flutters into your mind when you think of Valentine’s Day? Cards, chocolates, overpriced steak? Or in antithesis Galentines Day? Fuzzy friendship and nothing even remotely resembling a heart? But unless you are a certain ...
‘A curious and questioning piece with such scope.” Breathing: involuntary, critical, and often taken for granted. Diane Samuel’s premiere starts with the familiar in-and-out heaving of meditation. Gonging steel pan drums and a lead facedown in lotus position unfurl to a convulsive tale of Europe’s greatest shame and the essence of life itself. Isabella Van Braeckel proves that a basement ...
‘I would defy anyone with a beating heart to stay dry-eyed at some of the masterful performances.’ As Blue Monday billows into our lives, instead of fighting it, why not lean into the misery? Musical Theatre fans rejoice in a rather wet way for this evening of classics, mashups and lesser knowns. Buried deep in the soil of the West ...
‘A middle-of-the-road tale’ Originally an earnest memoir by Sergey Fetisov, Firebird: The Story of Roman morphed into a middlingly successful 2021 film written by Peeter Rebane and starring/written by Tom Prior. Now the King’s Head Theatre has given this tale wings once more. But is this flight doomed to end in a cooking pot? The gist, in case both book and film passed ...
‘Yet in a regularly over-serious world satire is just the kick under the table we need.’ Nick Cassenbaum’s smash-hit Edinburgh fringe show gets its London premiere. Exploding into The Yard is a blast of mimed gunshots, uproarious comedy, and biting satire about the Jewish diaspora. The first show of a new year is an important step in any cultured adult’s ...