new writing
Hymn, Almeida Theatre online review - highs and lows of a soulful brother bondingFriday, 19 February 2021
Contact without touch: among the many readjustments that the pandemic has brought to theatre, its demands that restrict direct contact almost to nothing must be among the most testing. We have learnt much about how rigorously any new production –... Read more... |
Julia Bell: Radical Attention review - a clear rendering of our withering attention spansMonday, 11 January 2021
You go out for a walk and leave your devices at home; your head feels a little bit clearer. But when you get back and plonk yourself in front of a screen, has anything really changed? Our unhealthy, deliberately engineered dependence on technology,... Read more... |
Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative, Royal Court online review – the news, but betterThursday, 24 December 2020
Edition 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... |
Overflow, Bush Theatre review – fear, fury and funSaturday, 12 December 2020
Travis Alabanza is black, trans, queer and proud. And they’ve got a lot to be proud about. In 2016, they were the youngest recipient of the artist in residence post on the Tate workshop programme, and two years later starred in Chris Goode’s wildly... Read more... |
GHBoy, Charing Cross Theatre review - drugs and sex but no rock 'n' rollTuesday, 08 December 2020
A 35-year-old gay man has to figure out which way to turn in GHBoy, the Paul Harvard play whose connection to the chemsex world is embedded in its title. Will Robert (Jimmy Essex) settle into a relationship with Catalan university student Sergi (... Read more... |
Hermione Lee: Tom Stoppard, A Life review - the last word on a theatrical wordsmithWednesday, 07 October 2020
"The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard, somewhere deep into the 865 pages of Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee's capacious (to put it mildly) biography of the... Read more... |
Declan, Traverse Theatre online review - compressed and compellingFriday, 28 August 2020
In normal times, Edinburgh Festival audiences would now be packing into the city’s invaluable Traverse Theatre, home to some of the most vibrant new writing in the country. Instead, the Traverse has created a new online venue, Traverse 3, that... Read more... |
Theatre Unlocked 4: Shows in concert and a contemporary classic comes to TVThursday, 13 August 2020
After months spent sifting amongst the virtual, I'm pleased to report that live performance looks to be on the (socially distanced) rebound. The week ahead sees the start of a six-week run at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park of the alfresco... Read more... |
Imagine... My Name is Kwame, BBC One review - interesting but incompleteFriday, 07 August 2020
Filmed, as one would, well, imagine, prior to lockdown, Imagine .... My Name is Kwame hearkens to what now seems a bygone era of full and buzzy playhouses and adventurous theatre-making that was about the live experience and not some facsimile... Read more... |
Theatre Unlocked 3: Signs of activity after a long siestaThursday, 06 August 2020
After a weeklong hiatus due to an absence of noteworthy material, this column is back heralding the return, as well, of something resembling live theatre. Okay, so the Simon Stephens premiere Blindness at the Donmar doesn't actually feature actors... Read more... |
Scrounger, Finborough Theatre online review – autobiography meets meta-theatreTuesday, 04 August 2020
During the current pandemic, stories about isolation have a particular resonance. Feelings of claustrophobia, loneliness and frustration slide off the stage and echo in our subconscious – yes, this is us alright. One of the most prescient is Athena... Read more... |
Jenny Diski: Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? Essays review - a posthumous collection from the pages of the LRBSunday, 26 July 2020
“Jenny Diski lies here. But tells the truth over there.” That was Diski’s response to daughter’s Choe’s observation that if she were buried – a friend had just offered her a spot in a plot she’d bought amid the grandeur of Highgate Cemetery – she’d... Read more... |
