‘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 ...
‘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 ...
‘Happy New Queer to you all!’ As you might have guessed from the title, this will be a reasonably adult review, for a very adult show. So, snatch the paper away from your 7-year-old, or turn off their iPad. Done? Have they gone? Now it’s just us grownups. As Storm Darragh rattled around outside, another maelstrom was raging inside The ...
‘Snappy, sharp, and sensational’ When playing nurse and patient gets out of hand. Sami Ibrahim (of Royal Court Two Palestinians Go Dogging fame) explores the culture of aid, grief, and international culpability, all over Tesco meal deal sandwiches. I will explain the latter one, don’t worry. Rosie Elnile’s set is like a cake slice of a training room. Think of ...
‘Plummets headfirst into one of humanity’s most inhuman periods’ Covid rather dominated the end of 2019, starting 3 years of global upheaval that we are still paying for. However, 2019 was the year of return, marking 400 years since the first enslaved Africans touched down in Hampton Virginia, stolen from Ghana by the British. An international tragedy that dwarfs the ...
‘Queer joy and friendship must be celebrated’ As someone who has been rewatching the same four 90s sitcoms for the last ten years, I could not be called good at “endings”. So at least I have something in common with Mary Higgins and Ell Potter as they explore the phenomenon from all angles. I mean mainly from the theatrical one, ...
‘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. ...
‘Awkward, unhinged and unimaginably good’ On an ice-laminated night, when the world – or at least the London transport system – is in full freefall, we trundled our way to Hackney Wick to be warmed by the princess of the experimental theatre world, Lucy McCormick. I say warmed, but I think we were boiled like the apocryphal frog blissfully smiling ...
‘The play never quite gets into orbit’ (In my best Captain kirk voice) “Space; the final frontier”. But a frontier that theatre generally sticks clear off due to budget and practical constraints. It’s a tall task, but a task that Vinay Patel’s new reimagining of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard laughs in the face of, perhaps foolhardily. Written originally in 1904, the ...
‘Crossing theological, geographical, and genre boundaries’ On a red-carpeted platform, a circular plunge pool quietly ripples. But what follows is a far cry from any jubilant christening or happy summer days splashing about in a paddling pool. Myth and Mental health form a treacherous undertow in Dipo Baruwa-Etti’s choppy new play. Rosie Elnile set echos the inside of a church, ...