“That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Uncle Walt’s verse gets renewed life on stage in the millennial classic Dead Poets Society – an ode to nonconformity and self-expression in a world that vows to stamp out individualism in favor of conservative practicality. Despite its flaws, the film remains one […]
There’s a lot to love about this series. The way it deals with society’s criminalization of clothing, of black culture and black people. The heavy stylizing of Harlem and the characters who inhabit it, going past caricature and into something deeper, into what it means to be black. But I think my favorite part of […]
Big British playwright David Hare offers The Red Barn, a new work which adapts La Main, a novel by prolific Belgian Georges Simenon. Simenon was a guy who wrote thrillers and he wrote a lot of them, and Hare mentions in the programme that his novels generally concerned those at the ‘bottom of society’. For […]
Two short plays written by Charlie Howitt and produced by Reverend Productions, both featuring the same cast of four, the first titled Jekyll & Hyde and the second Nerve. Performed at the Greenwich Theatre. Jekyll & Hyde Taking its title from the Robert Louis Stevenson classic, the play centres around a surgeon named Ellie Jekyll […]
Trayvon Martin’s death marks one of the most significant moments in the history of the hooded sweatshirt (henceforth referred to as a hoodie). The hoodie has been made to seem synonymous with Black American culture, but it’s also lent its stylings to thug culture, criminal culture, “badassery” culture and anonymizing culture. As an item of […]
In one sense, it’s the ultimate indulgence to a craving no-one asked for. I don’t mean “ban experiment; bring on the potboilers”, I mean that this production feels irrelevant, and that irrelevance is compounded by the awkward pose of its prose. No’s Knife is an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s obscure mini-tales, Texts for Nothing, and […]
Adapting a novel for the stage is certainly no easy feat. Sacrifices and changes must be made to slim down what can be a lengthy and detailed narrative into a coherent, streamlined and more visual medium. The risk lies in the impact this conversion can have on the end-product, specifically whether what works on the […]
We live in a world that is full of people. We see some of them every day, we recognize the big names and the prominent celebrities, but we also face familiar individuals, people that interact with us on the interpersonal level, individuals who do not affect the world at large, but small parts, microcosms, samples […]