A lot of Royal Court’s Upstairs programming is too dry for its own good. Not this. Nathaniel Martello-White’s Torn wears complexity on its sleeve. Angel arranges a circle of seats and then her family into a room, like an AA meeting, and wants to tackle the wrongs in her life. We don’t know […]
Stringberg’s 1901 work A Dream Play is historically important: its lack of structure, condensing of characters to social roles and narrative current that winds along by way of thin associations between people and places mean it was a herald of dramatic surrealism and expressionism. A dream-like tapestry that eschewed the trappings of realism that Ibsen […]
A few years ago, Bletchley Park became a minor academic obsession of mine. After discovering the code-breaking history of this British installation, I read everything about Bletchley that I could get my hands on, from books about the history of Bletchley and its hard-working inhabitants to Alan Turing’s biography and his paper on computable numbers. […]
All My Sons This Arthur Miller drama feels a-typical for the company that’s made its name on Shakespeare and its money on musicals. Though modern drama isn’t Stratford’s usual racket, Martha Henry’s smartly cast and emotionally wrought production might be the best thing at the festival this year (well, maybe second to Breath of Kings: […]
Second World War stories always seem to be crowd-pleasing, bringing in elements of tragedy, violence, treason and, in this case, …
Kill Your Parents in Viking, Alberta (Storefront Arts Initiative & Blood Pact Theatre) A vibrant, fraught, fast-paced new tragi-comedy from playwrights Bryce Hodgson & Charlie Kerr, the oddly named Kill Your Parents in Viking, Alberta plays out in real-time in the kitchen of young mother Susan (Allie Dunbar, hilarious in her immovability) as she attempts […]
J. Stephen Brantley has a distinct voice for re-creating the New York of yesteryear – to paint a picture of the gritty pre-Giuliani New York that I only know from films and rerun credits of Saturday Night Live. Of course, living in the city during that time was bound to have some lasting effects, and […]
‘The Pussy Riot performances cannot be reduced just to subversive provocations. Beneath the dynamics of their acts, there is the inner stability of a firm ethico-political attitude. In some deeper sense, it is today’s society that is caught in a crazy capitalist dynamic with no inner sense and measure, and it is Pussy Riot that […]