sat 15/03/2025

new writing

A Guide For The Homesick, Trafalgar Studios review - warmly funny and deeply moving

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...

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Lavinia Greenlaw: In the City of Love’s Sleep review - curated lives

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...

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Eyam, Shakespeare's Globe review - plague drama, dark and loose

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...

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Foxfinder, Ambassadors Theatre review - too ponderous by half

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...

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The Woods, Royal Court review - Lesley Sharp triumphs again

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...

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Olga Tokarczuk: Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead review - on vengeful nature

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...

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Dance Nation, Almeida Theatre review - a tarantella through the convulsions of the teenage psyche

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...

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Emilia, Shakespeare's Globe review - polemic disguised as a play

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...

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Homos, or Everyone in America, Finborough Theatre review - a complex pattern of glee and profundity

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...

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Pity, Royal Court review - whacked-out and wearing

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...

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Charlotte Jones: ‘Plays come from your scar tissue’

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....

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One for Sorrow, Royal Court review - imploding family drama

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...

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