new writing
Ismene Brown
The resurrection of female voices from ancient Greek myth is so common now that one might imagine a grand panjandrum behind the scenes had set down a long-range mission – rather as they do in the fashion industry – which makers and producers scurried to fulfil.Just a year after the Jermyn Street Theatre’s 15 Heroines put old Ovidian wine into new bottles, many of the same mythical women return in Colin Teevan’s The Seven Pomegranate Seeds, premiered at Kingston’s Rose Theatre, this time germinated from Euripides. (The title refers to the snack eaten by Persephone, abducted by the god of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Tuesday, 8 November 2016. Vera is in a New York hospital room giving birth to a son. On anxiously checked phones, the votes are piling up for Hillary, but the states are piling up for Trump. Vera’s world will never be the same again.Mathilde Dratwa’s new play, Milk and Gall (directed by Lisa Spirling, Theatre 503's Artistic Director), takes a searingly unsentimental look at 21st century parenting in the big city, mining plenty of laughs along the way. Speaking from experience, I can vouch that it’s all true – except, perhaps, that the reality is even worse!In her mid-thirties, Vera ( Read more ...
Robert Beale
Who will write the world’s first eco-concerto? Tom Coult, with his major debut piece for the BBC Philharmonic since becoming its Composer in Association, a violin concerto titled Pleasure Garden, has made his bid.Perhaps Vivaldi got there before him with The Four Seasons, but it must have seemed a great idea for the orchestra (in tandem with the University of Salford) to commission something to do with climate and the natural world for a concert timed to coincide with COP26. There’s more than just timing to it. Salford – or more precisely Worsley, a place some way from the city centre Read more ...
CP Hunter
“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Ruth Ozeki’s latest novel takes its name from a Buddhist heart sutra that meditates on reality and questions of human existence. It’s a big question for a big book. A Zen priest as well as a teacher, writer, and filmmaker, Ozeki tackles her subject on a series of meta-levels, which make this 500-pager fascinatingly complex, if also at times a bit overwhelming.The story begins with the death of Kenji Oh, a tragicomic accident that leaves his widow, Annabelle, and their son, Benny, stunned. Kenji leaves behind him a trail of trauma, which manifests in Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“We haven’t started yet!” Hannah-Jarrett Scott, dressed in Doc Martens under a 19th-century shift, reassures us as she attempts to dislodge a yellow rubber glove from a chandelier in the middle of the set of Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of). So begins this rollicking all-female adaptation of the timeless Jane Austen romcom, in which the servants recreate their famous mistresses’ and masters’ turbulent love lives.Written by Isobel McArthur, the play originated in Scotland in 2018 and has gone through several versions before pitching up in the heart of the West End. Directed here by Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is the Bosnian conflict of 1992–95 the war that Europe forgot? Maybe, although most fans of new writing for the British stage will remember its massacres as the inciting incident for Sarah Kane’s 1995 modern classic, Blasted. Certainly, this genocidal struggle in the heart of Europe not only etched its horror on everyone who heard about it, but also continues to inspire drama. The latest story, from British-Bosnian writer Igor Memic, is Old Bridge, which is also his debut. Winner of the 2020 Papatango New Writing Prize, the play is now getting a cracking production on the main stage at the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
What counts as offensive in these days of cancel culture? Ham-fisted pronoun usage? Culturally appropriated hairstyles? To remind us that other options are still available, the Menier’s new space, the Mixing Room, is staging a world premiere of a two-hander choc-full of old-school profanities, grotesquerie and gore: Brian & Roger, which comes with the subtitle A Highly Offensive Play and, indeed, it often is offensive. Don’t go if the c-word bothers you.Based on a podcast sitcom created almost accidentally, it seems, when the actors Harry Peacock and Dan Skinner started improvising chats Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Trigger warnings have become commonplace in theatres these days, but few chill the blood like the description "a new musical" on a playbill. There are so many things to go wrong, so few ways to get things right and, never far away, the dissenters who caught ten minutes of the Sound of Music during its annual Christmas TV airing and won’t stop telling you exactly how they feel about musicals.So, while the National Theatre gears up for its new musical, Hex, the RSC is commendably returning to its lockdown-postponed The Magician’s Elephant, both productions given the stages and Read more ...
Mert Dilek
"You need to get better at communicating", says one character to another in Isley Lynn’s albatross. Indeed, the same advice would fare well with many of those in the Anglo-American Lynn’s new play, where miscommunication plagues a range of relationships and chance encountersStructured as a loosely connected sequence of mostly two-handers, albatross. offers a panoramic look at the power dynamics coursing through everyday conversations among strangers and intimates alike.This production is brought to the Playground Theatre by represent., a repertory company dedicated to working with Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“Careful, there’s a hole in the floor.” The warning’s an unusual one, passed along conscientiously by the stewards at the door of the tiny Orange Tree Theatre.The hole in question is long and angular and will soon be filled with water, stretching around one side of the pristine white set of Rice, a new play by Australian-Hmong writer Michele Lee. It’s an intimate two-hander about immigration and belonging, directed ably by Matthew Xia – but, like its characters, it’s suffering an identity crisis.Our heroines are two women of colour: Nisha (Zainab Hasan, pictured below), a young executive at Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Few sights speak so eloquently of loss, of an especially cruel and painful loss, as one glass of wine, half-full, alone on a table. A man speaks to a partner who isn’t there, wishes her back, but knows that she has gone. Then another woman materialises to speak of of the futures he could have enjoyed - but now will not - and of the many, many futures that hunger for life, shut out of our world by deliberate action and unintentional chance. They crowd him, but only a child, bouncing with optimism, emerges fully to insist that he, this potential human being, will happen.Into her 80s but as Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Despite its painfully relevant title, How To Survive An Apocalypse was written in 2016. If only Canadian playwright Jordan Hall knew, eh? The end times aren’t just creeping but hurtling towards us, these days. Luckily for those weary of Covid stories, this play is more about millennials sensing impending doom, and how that experience impacts upon their personal relationships, than the doom itself. Jimmy Walters’ production for the charmingly intimate Finborough Theatre sparks intriguing ideas on which it doesn't quite fully follow through.Jen (Kristin Atherton, who really knows how to wear a Read more ...