Royal Court
Curious, Soho Theatre review - a young playwright puts herself centre-stageMonday, 04 October 2021Jasmine Lee-Jones has a hard act to follow – namely, herself. Her award-winning 2019 debut play, seven methods of killing kylie jenner, announced the arrival at the Royal Court of a blistering writing talent whose two sparring women made... Read more... |
Is God Is, Royal Court review – blister, flare and burn, baby, burnThursday, 16 September 2021God is a tricky one. Or should that be One? And definitely not a He. So when she says take revenge, then vengeance is definitely not only hers, but ours too. American playwright Aleshea Harris’s dazzlingly satirical 2018 extravaganza is about two... Read more... |
Constellations, Vaudeville Theatre review - a starry revivalFriday, 02 July 2021A cosmologist and a beekeeper walk into a barbecue. Or a wedding. The beekeeper is in a relationship, or married, or just out of a relationship, or married again. The cosmologist shares the secret of the universe with him: it’s impossible to lick... Read more... |
Living Newspaper, Edition 3, Royal Court online review – bleak news, sharp wordsSaturday, 03 April 2021“The crocus of hope is, er, poking through the frost.” When he uttered that dodgy metaphor back in February, Boris Johnson probably didn’t predict that it would become the opening number of the third edition of Living Newspaper, the Royal Court’s... Read more... |
Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative, Royal Court online review – the news, but betterThursday, 24 December 2020Edition 2 of Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative, an experimental new piece of online theatre from the Royal Court, doesn’t mess around. Within minutes, a cry of "Tory scum" is echoing around the Jerwood Theatre – the refrain of an anarchic... Read more... |
My White Best Friend (And Other Letters Left Unsaid), Royal Court review – raw but generousWednesday, 22 July 2020The strength of the response to the re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter campaign has provoked some theatres to create provocative new work. Often, the keynote is personal feeling. One recent example is the Bush Theatre’s Protest: Black Lives... Read more... |
Cyprus Avenue, Royal Court Theatre online review - a mind in mesmerising meltdownTuesday, 07 April 2020One of the most blistering stage performances in recent memory gets a renewed lease on life with the streaming of the 2019 screen version, aired last autumn on BBC Four, of Cyprus Avenue, the David Ireland play in which Stephen Rea unravels to... Read more... |
Shoe Lady, Royal Court review - Katherine Parkinson is a footsore BeckettianTuesday, 10 March 2020On my way to see this show, I see an urban fox. Before I can take a photo, it scrambles away. And I'm sure that, as it goes, it winks at me. This weird moment is a great prologue to EV Crowe's new play, virtually a monologue starring Katherine... Read more... |
Scenes with Girls, Royal Court review - feminist separatism 2.0Wednesday, 22 January 2020Last night, I discovered the gasp index. Or maybe just re-discovered. The what? The gasp index. It's when you see a show that keeps making you exhale, sometimes audibly, sometimes quietly. Tonight I gasped about five times, then I stopped counting... Read more... |
A Kind of People, Royal Court review - multiculturalism falls apartThursday, 12 December 2019The trouble with prejudice is that you can't control how other people see you. At the start of her career, playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's work was set in her own Sikh community. But, like other playwrights from similar backgrounds, she has tended... Read more... |
Midnight Movie, Royal Court review - sleepless and digitalWednesday, 04 December 2019Eve Leigh is an experimental playwright who has tackled difficult issues for more than a decade. Yet most members of the public will know her, and her actor husband Tom Penn, as the neighbours who recorded an altercation between Boris Johnson and... Read more... |
On Bear Ridge, Royal Court review - Rhys Ifans's tragicomic masterclassTuesday, 29 October 2019Memory involves places, people, things and words, especially words. This abstract proposition is given knotty life in Welsh playwright Ed Thomas's extraordinary new play, On Bear Ridge, which comes to the Royal Court after opening at the Sherman... Read more... |