The blatant irony of a title like Breathing Corpses, as with something like The Walking Dead, is that it is the ostensibly living characters who are all to some degree deceased: both because their lives are caught in a deadlock, and also because by the end of the play we know that many of these […]
The Belarus Free Theatre has taken on a challenge by putting on Tomorrow I was Always a Lion. Portraying mental health onstage, especially schizophrenia, is no easy task. Because many people do not know how to address the issue, it can be a little overwhelming to go see a play that is entirely centered on […]
Nightwood Theatre defines itself as a feminist theatre company whose mandate includes providing an ‘essential home for the creation of extraordinary theatre by women.’ These two pieces, currently on stage at Buddies in Bad Times, certainly hit that mandate. Quiver Written and performed by Anna Chatterton, Quiver is a story about a mother and […]
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 […]
I am not normally a fan of plays where the action moves around, with the audience moving with it. My ideal theatre experience is sitting down, quiet and comfortable. At Keffiyeh/Made in China, I am forced out of my comfort zone: to move around and interact with the space and the audience and the actors […]
If there is one subject that makes most people uncomfortable, it is that of homelessness. Rare are those who stop and speak to homeless men and women on the street, let alone go see a play about it. Although it may feel uneasy at first, Cuckoo Bang’s Choosers, written by Holly Mallett, does an excellent […]
Unless you are blessed from an early age with extreme self-awareness, patience, and unshakeable self-confidence, then your adolescence was (or is going to be) probably very fraught. It’s a period of time that upends the life you’ve lived up to that point: everything becomes more complicated, less secure, and a little more threatening. You simultaneously […]
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 […]