‘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 ...
‘Between cliché and profound.’ Think Sex and the City (and Robots) meets a purple-coded Black Mirror, and you are close to David Head’s hit one-man Edinburgh fringe show. But with dystopia very much blending into the daily news, how do you invigorate a crowded genre? I, like many writers, am a bit of a nerd. Big-budget sci-fi sends my pulse ...
‘The preciousness of youth’ At the age of about 30, nostalgia really starts to kick it up a gear. If you’re over that great age, I am sure you will scoff and chuckle at this naive statement. If you’re under 30, or specifically, under 20, stop reading and go and do something foolish that you can be nostalgic about later. ...
‘Simply crafted but staggering’ Sometimes you stumble down a flight of stairs into a basement and are gobsmacked. That wasn’t meant to sound dirty. Also, technically we didn’t stumble, as my editor organised the tickets weeks in advance, and other people were there, including The Hobbit’s Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman). I’m getting sidetracked. My point (vaguely) was that the most ...
‘With a little bit of luck, we can make it through the night’ Just a little before my time, the mid-nineties UK garage scene’s pulse kept pumping. It had flooded the world of pop by the time I could walk, shake my hips and try to sneak into clubs. The period had a dark side though, wreathed in the sexualisation ...
‘Occasional flashes of comedy’ January is a tense month, isn’t it? Cold and tense. Everything seems portentous to the coming year. My first dinner out in 2024, my first run, my first breakdown, my first trip to the theatre. Speaking of, my first tumble on the boards is a resurrection of a long-forgotten Michael Hastings play. Hastings’s work, although not ...
‘An overall flat and emotionally stale feeling’ Haruki Murakami, master of Literature. Rambling global settings and gnawing sense of loss have cemented themselves as staples in his style, along with a lack of concise endings. Bryony Lavery’s recent adaption wrestles with a lesser-known work, Sputnik Sweetheart. Having very little to do with space (sadly) narrator K (Naruto Komatsu) has a ...
‘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 ...
‘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 ...
‘Undeniably a tough sell’ 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 ...