Battersea Arts Centre Change is something all couples go through to some degree, nay all humans. Typing this as someone in their 9th year of relentless relationship tectonics I can confirm. But do many of us want to open up one of the most fundamental changes a person can go through to the paying public? Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill ...
The Yard As a card-carrying whoopsie, Soho resident, and culture writer for the paper you are perusing, The Yard’s most recent play seems to tick my every box. The Flea Circus is in town, exploring a scandal that rocked Victorian London. Gays, promiscuity, and central London? Clearly, some things never change. The Profumo and Thorpe affair, the trial of Oscar ...
Arcola Theatre, ‘Ripping ride of dark comedy’ Covid ruffled many things: the concept of a staycation, my flimsy attempts at sobriety and, more glaringly, many a theatre kid’s dream. Yet hope flutters its feathered eyelashes. More than 1,200 days after its planned premiere, Matt Parvin’s new play, Gentlemen, rises from the virus-tinted gloom and returns to its rightful place at the ...
Gielgud Theatre Brunch on Old Compton Street, matching miniature dogs, or London Fashion Week are all, in their way, pretty gay. But nothing compares in magnitude of camp delightfulness to Old Friends, crafted by three grand dames of the theatre: Stephen Sondheim himself, Cameron Mackintosh, and Mathew Bourne, and star-studded like the Orion Nebula. As the orchestra tunes up, the ...
New Wimbledon Theatre and Touring First, the film rocked a newly minted millennium, then the musical shook Broadway seven years later, next a revitalised production swayed the West End for another three years. Now everyone’s favourite green ogre is on the road again with a UK tour. But how does the delineation of Shrek land with audiences perhaps unaware of the 22-year-long ...
Royal Strafford East 30 years ago, in 1993 Jonathan Harvey wrote and performed something beautiful at The Bush Theatre. Now on the anniversary, the hit play turned TV movie, then big screen sensation settles into the grander of Theatre Royal Stratford East before touring the UK. What a long way it has come. A little extraneous background. As a gay-ling ...
Arcola Theatre ‘An astounding achievement’ According to the Social Care Institute for Excellence, there are 209,600 people diagnosed with dementia each year in the UK. My nan was one of them. Matthew Seager’s perceptive play, In Other Words, pulls us into a couple’s microcosm, making us willing and, at times, unwilling spectators. Arthur and Jane. Unremarkable, remarkable people. They meet at ...
The Almeida Everyone loves a wedding, or at least that’s what you’re meant to say. But you know what nobody loves… an oppressive political regime. Sam Holcroft, building from her tremendous success at The National with Rules for Living (2015) provides a dark new drama, set under the gaze of totalitarian baddies. Much is expected from Holcroft after her celebrated ...
Central School’s Format Festival kicks off with work by Advanced Theatre Practise MA students. In the depths of a basement in Camden, we get splattered paint, and bubbling desire. Sign me up and then some! Me Looking at Her Looking at Me (or MLAHLAM as it will now be named) has brush strokes of fine art and performance art, specks of naturalism, ...
Grimeborn Festival crashes into the Arcola Theatre for the 6th year, disputing Opera’s elitist title. Homerton Hospital is the setting for a new piece by the mysterious creative duo Muelas+Ward. A micro-tragedy for the modern age. A&E digitally premiered at the Tète-á-Tête Opera Festival in 2020, and elements of the socially distanced staging are kept throughout. Now a physical premiere takes place in ...