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 […]
Dead End (Theatre Lab) This light-hearted one-act from playwright Jonny Sun and director Michael Orlando is the perfect Halloween-themed diversion in Toronto’s current sea of self-serious theatre. Sun traps bantering high school pals Christian Smith and Chris Wilson* in a dead end hallway as they flee the zombie horde that’s taken over their school, inviting […]
The opening monologue, performed off-stage and possibly prerecorded, brews the promise of a ‘neo-noir fever dream’ into a disgustingly tactical succession of phrase. Its programme says the show ‘changed from a fiction wrapped in a concert to a concert sprinkled with words.’ That’s true. There are now only two worded segments among a relentless soundscape, […]
Theatre about TV, created by theatre producers, produced by TV creators, staged like theatre on a TV stage, shot like TV to be seen as theatre- this is the contradiction that is Late Night, the latest from writer/director Kat Sandler and her indie hit-making company Theatre Brouhaha (executive produced by ZoomerLive’s Moses Znaimer). Sandler’s […]