new writing
A Guide For The Homesick, Trafalgar Studios review - warmly funny and deeply movingFriday, 19 October 2018
This blisteringly intense evening at Trafalgar Studios begins with two strangers in an Amsterdam hotel bedroom and – through a series of personal revelations – ends up spanning continents. With just 80 minutes and two actors, Ken Urban’s... Read more... |
Lavinia Greenlaw: In the City of Love’s Sleep review - curated livesSunday, 23 September 2018
Iris is a museum conservator with a pair of pre-adolescent daughters and a failing marriage. Raif is a widower and an academic who, since writing a book on curiosity cabinets a decade ago, has quietly sunk into a kind of irrelevance. Both have... Read more... |
Eyam, Shakespeare's Globe review - plague drama, dark and looseSaturday, 22 September 2018
The end-of-season contemporary writing slot at the Globe must be a proposal as full of promise for playwrights as it is perhaps intimidating. There’s the sheer scale of the space and the chance to write for a large cast; a historical subject seems... Read more... |
Foxfinder, Ambassadors Theatre review - too ponderous by halfFriday, 14 September 2018
A sizeable Off West End success nearly eight years ago looks more than a little exposed in a new, scaled-up production that is one of several shows on now, or imminently, to feature a Game of Thrones actor in a leading role. The particular TV name... Read more... |
The Woods, Royal Court review - Lesley Sharp triumphs againThursday, 13 September 2018
Blackout. Dark, the colour of childhood fear. Black, the colour of despair. Black. No light visible; no colours to see. Just pitch black, maybe even bible black. This is how Robert Alan Evans’s The Woods, which stars the brilliant Lesley Sharp and... Read more... |
Olga Tokarczuk: Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead review - on vengeful natureSunday, 09 September 2018
In a small town on the Polish-Czech border where the mobile signal wanders between countries’ operators and only three inhabitants stick it out through the winter, animals are wreaking a terrible revenge. The bodies of murdered men, united in their... Read more... |
Dance Nation, Almeida Theatre review - a tarantella through the convulsions of the teenage psycheThursday, 06 September 2018
Lycra, jealousy and pubescent ambition are put under the spotlight in Clare Barron’s provocative probe into the American competitive dancing scene. Dance Nation is a tarantella through the convulsions of the teen psyche as its characters respond to... Read more... |
Emilia, Shakespeare's Globe review - polemic disguised as a playThursday, 16 August 2018
It feels like Michelle Terry’s first summer season at the Globe has been building up to Emilia for a while now. The theme is Shakespeare and race, so Othello was something of a given. It's joined by The Winter’s Tale, as if the Emilias of these two... Read more... |
Homos, or Everyone in America, Finborough Theatre review - a complex pattern of glee and profundityFriday, 10 August 2018
I’m still not entirely sure what the full associations of the title of New York playwright Jordan Seavey’s new play – its second element, at least: the first speaks for itself – may be, but with writing this accomplished any such uncertainties fall... Read more... |
Pity, Royal Court review - whacked-out and wearingSaturday, 21 July 2018
The apocalypse arrives as a series of collegiate sketches in the aptly-named Pity, the Rory Mullarkey play that may well prompt sympathy for audiences who unwittingly find themselves in attendance. Less provocative by far than this same writer's... Read more... |
Charlotte Jones: ‘Plays come from your scar tissue’Tuesday, 10 July 2018
I think it’s always a dangerous sport to try and consciously unravel where your ideas come from. Lest you break the spell and inadvertently silence yourself…There’s always the superficial reasons, of course: the geography and the history of a play.... Read more... |
One for Sorrow, Royal Court review - imploding family dramaThursday, 28 June 2018
It’s the stuff of nightmares. There’s a massive explosion, the sound of smashing glass, falling debris and police sirens. Gunshots. Panic in the streets. It could be the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, in which the Bataclan venue was the scene... Read more... |
