site-specific
aleks.sierz
Some site-specific theatre feels like a really good fit. You could say, in this case, that it seems like poetic justice. Agatha Christie’s 1953 play, Witness for the Prosecution, used to be a rep standard, and now gets a compelling new production in the echoing surrounds of the Council Chamber at London County Hall, which is situated on the South Bank, next to Westminster Bridge. The drama, which the Queen of Crime adapted from her own short story of the same name (originally published in 1933), centres on the trial of Leonard Vole for the murder of Emily French, a wealthy older woman who has Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Port Talbot (population 38,000) is a town on the south Wales coast famous for two things: steel and actors. The birthplace of Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen made a rare foray into the national consciousness at the beginning of last year when Tata Steel threatened to close the plant that employs 10% of the town. It had been making a loss of £1m a day, largely due to flooding of the global market by China. National Theatre Wales have returned to the scene of the greatest triumph in the company’s short history, the perhaps unsurpassable Passion (starring Sheen), for Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s not often you need a passport to get into a theatre show. But then the journey required to get to Scottish site-specific experts Grid Iron’s Crude does feel like something of a pilgrimage – first get yourself to Dundee, then find the Science Centre car park, and hop on a coach to transport you deep into the restricted, ID-required heart of the city’s port.To an immense industrial hangar, modestly named Shed 36, a mere corner of which has been transformed into a multi-level stage for Crude, Grid Iron’s masterful exploration of the seductive, destructive power of oil. The Edinburgh-based Read more ...
Veronika Szabo
On a sunny afternoon in April four young women pile themselves into a toilet at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. They lock the door. They have come here to make some intimate recordings. Awkward giggles develop into discussion and discussion turns into confession. They are talking about their bodies. Something is always too small or big, or not the right shape.You might ask, what happened when these women started opening up in front of each other and sharing memories about when they felt beautiful, embarrassed, sexy or ugly? When they admitted their guilty pleasures from the Read more ...
Heather Neill
"In such a night as this..." begins Lorenzo's beautiful speech in Act V of The Merchant of Venice. Watching Shakespeare's play in the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo on a balmy evening under a darkening navy blue sky, with cicadas providing a busy background recitative, it might have been tempting to be lulled by the romance of the surroundings. Belmont itself could scarcely be more delightful than Venice on a moonlit summer night. But Lorenzo and his new bride Jessica talk not of their devotion to one another, but of unfaithful lovers and lack of trust. And the experience of watching this challenging Read more ...
Miriam Gillinson
Storage space units are not a nice place to hang out. Chilly and quiet, vaguely depressing and horribly lit, they bring on a desire to leave almost immediately. The same impulse is palpable in Dante or Die’s site-specific show, Handle With Care, which attempts to inject a little life into a storage unit in Old Street, but falls horribly short. The bizarre thing is that Dante or Die are – despite signs to the contrary – experts in site-specific theatre. In 2013 the company received great reviews for I Do, a roaming show which followed a wedding party around a fancy hotel in Islington. It Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
International Dance Festival Birmingham (IDFB) is one of the unsung heroes not just of dance in Britain, but of festivals. It treats anyone within striking distance of the West Midlands to an exciting range of performers and public dance events over three weeks, and is cleverly scheduled in May – when lengthening days and bank holidays make us want to go out and have a good time, but it's not quite warm enough for camping. With IDFB 2016 opening in three weeks, on Sunday 1 May, theartsdesk casts an eye over the programme's highlights and finds out from festival founder and director David Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This is set in “a world midway between Elizabethan pageant and haute-couture catwalk”, a programme note for Scena Mundi's production says, and the initial signs certainly point to that. The aisle of the glorious Grade I-listed French Protestant Church in Soho Square – one of the few remnants of England's rich Huguenot history – is covered with a vivid blue plastic sheet running most of its length, as if in a fashion show runway, and the cast, some dressed to the nines, make their entrance in a sort of dumbshow with heightened dance steps and arm movements.But thankfully, that's the last we Read more ...
Dylan Moore
The brackets around {150} are ambiguous, almost apologetic. The 150th anniversary of Y Wladfa (The Colony), the semi-legendary "oasis of Welshness" in the Patagonian wilderness has given occasion in Wales for the celebration of a most unlikely story. One hundred and fifty men, women and children left their homes all over Wales and created a new life for themselves, against all the odds, at the other end of the world. Sixty-six came from the villages around Aberdare and Mountain Ash in a valley 15 miles north of Cardiff.The Royal Opera Stores, a hangar-sized warehouse on an industrial park Read more ...
theartsdesk
Punchdrunk entered the world of theatre through a side door in the basement. The company navigated a strange path around abandoned warehouses on the edge of town, via the odd wrong turn and sundry culs de sac, and fetched up two years ago at an old Royal Mail sorting office next to Paddington station. It was here that they performed The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable.The company has been going since 2000, but it was in Faust (2006), inspired by Edward Hopper’s images of alienation and set in a warehouse in Wapping, that they attracted their biggest plaudits and audiences so far. Later came Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Enzo Green, Shirim, Raethro Red, Raemar Magenta. Everything has a name. But beyond the meaningless but musical sounds of their titles, the light projections and installations on view at Houghton Hall by the leading American light, land and skyscape artist James Turrell are an ineffable art whose presence and effect is subtle, substantial, utterly memorable and almost beyond words. Descriptions, yes, as light projections make the spectator believe that these are solid if translucent slabs and walls, voids and curves, convex, concave, real: the brain and eye respond in innumerable Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The Langham has marked its 150th anniversary in theatrical fashion by commissioning an original drama spanning several decades – and floors – from emerging company Defibrillator, whose Tennessee Williams trio at this venue impressed last year. Now Ben Ellis checks in with a tailored play that gains substance the further it reaches into the past.The first of Ellis’s three half-hour two-handers is the weakest, offering a tired spin on the needy pop diva. It’s present day – as multiple references to Twitter and Instagram make clear – and imploding singer Jade (Hannah Spearritt), due to make a Read more ...