‘Impressive depiction of crumbling mental health’ Your enjoyment of a show can be as fickle as a spring breeze. Sometimes the stars don’t align, and a serene work might fall on deaf ears or a closed heart. The day you have led leading up to the anticipated evening obscures the trip itself. This is the conundrum I find myself in ...
‘ongoing inventiveness and a truly madcap script’ 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 ...
‘A play that keeps on pulling rabbits out of the hat’ 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. ...
‘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 Arcola. Studio ...
‘Camp delightfulness’ 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 ...
‘Not only missing much of the film’s arch humour but also subtracts a lot of its charm and titular characters’ 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 ...
‘Has a lot to say about the state of the nation in the 90s and the ongoing struggles for acceptance’ 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 ...
‘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 a bar ...
‘Like layers of an onion’ 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 ...
‘Little is happening and not much is conveyed’ 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 ...