A leap into the unknown - but nothing has made me feel so alive as becoming a playwright
There’s a question that is increasingly keeping me awake at night: I’m a 46-year-old political consultant and divorcee. So what on earth makes me think I could write, stage and direct a play about love? No, wait. Not just a play – a musical play!
Well, next week, we will find out if I can. No Cure for Love is running at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre as part of the Camden Fringe for three performances from Thursday to Saturday. It runs for an hour and has five songs written jointly between myself and my fabulous musical director Jordon Brown.
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INTERVIEW: Is there a cure for love? In her first play, Emma Burnell tries to find an answer to this eternal question
It’s the debut play by journalist and political consultant Emma Burnell, who also makes her directorial debut with the premiere production, starring Wendy Morgan and Stephen Russell, with musical direction by Jordan Brown.
No Cure for Love is set in a dingy backstage dressing room at the Broadstairs Folk Festival. Fading musicians Scott and Rose share space and history, flirty banter and vicious jabs. Both as lost as each other, neither of them have yet found the truth behind the love they have sung about all their lives.
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Review: Drawing the Line
Drawing the line takes place in a room that looks rather like a school gymnasium. Between that and the fact that the ‘line’ is literally represented by a thick piece of rope suspiciously like those we were made to climb as children and this show started by evoking some bad memories.
Thankfully, despite there being plenty of school style activities to take part in, including chalk drawing, building blocks and an interesting take on dodgeball, this was the last moment I felt that choking fear that anyone was going to make me climb anything.
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Review: Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens
This is such a beautiful and moving piece of work celebrating the lives and commemorating the deaths of those who have been lost to AIDS. The beautiful, diverse and talented cast were a stunning ensemble and I would be hard pushed to single anyone out. Each delivered something a bit different from the others, and each contributed to the whole.
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Review: Crisis, What Crisis?
If you were to sit down and devise a piece of immersive theatre design to exactly coincide with my life and obsessions, you couldn’t do much better than Crisis, What Crisis.
A political drama set around the vote of no confidence in the Callaghan government you are a group of Labour advisors working at a secret location to solve the labour (and Labour) disputes that are bedevilling the government and putting your wafer-thin majority (just the vote of the speaker in it) in danger of collapse.
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Review: The Swell Mob
Flabberghast Theatre have created a stunning world for The Swell Mob. The world of an 1840 den of iniquity, it is dark and colourful, bejewelled and cheap, murky and fascinating.
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Review: Like You Hate Me
Like You Hate Me is a play full of raw honesty and emotion. The relationship between the two characters (the play is a two-hander) jumps dizzyingly between the past, present, and future of a soaring-then-failing love affair, as the highs of desire are steadily replaced with bitterness and regret and then acceptance and even nostalgia.
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Review: Atomic 50: Time Travels in Tin
First of all, I should declare that I am a ‘Legend of the Forest’. This means that at various events throughout the year that Waltham Forest is the London Borough of Culture, I rock up in bright pink gear and help out. When I heard there was going to be an immersive experience as part of the festivities I was delighted, Then I found out it was for parents and children only (no adults allowed without an accompanying child) I was determined to volunteer to find out what Atomic 50 was all about.
What it’s all about is tin. Tin in it’s many forms. Making things with tin, making a case for tin as an environmental alternative to plastic, making children’s imagination run wild when it comes to all things tin.
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Review: Recollection
Meeting in a pub near Guy’s Hospital, this drama takes you through the London Bridge area, where you will meet Sarah (Rebecca Ward) and Josh (Benedict Hudson). With them you will look into your missing past and theirs.
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Review: Dinner is Coming
Immersive Dinner theatre can be hit and miss. Sometimes great fun, sometimes a disaster. Regular readers will remember I had considerable issues with the staging, content and overall design of a previous Vaults production Divine Proportions.
So it was with a little trepidation that I approached Dinner is Coming. I worried that there would not be enough immersive elements surrounding the food and drink to make it a worthy night out. I needn’t have.
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Review: Dismantle This Room
Dismantle This Room is – in essence – an escape room. You solve puzzles and make decisions as you go through to get through a series of rooms built onto the stage at the Royal Court. However, there is a strong element of self-examination and social justice woven into the experience throughout that give this an added edge.
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Review: Rooms
Rooms confronts you with an interesting question: What is theatre? Where does the live experience begin and end? It has been described as theatre without actors but that's not strictly true. It is theatre without live actors?
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Review: XNN Systems Immersive Corporate Career Development Simulator
Ultimately, This is a rather lovely self-actualisation seminar. The group bonds through exercises to improve vocal expression, self representation and physical comfort and expression. You come in shuffling and giggling nervously, you leave having – if consented – hugged and even sniffed total strangers.
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Review: Downstate
Was this timely? Was it necessary? Was it important? These are the questions I’m contemplating after watching this play.
It was moving certainly. Thought-provoking for sure. It opened up a different part of our modern conversation about abuse, victims and consent. About predators and perpetrators. About humans and monsters.
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Review: The Sensemaker and Anchor
This double-bill of dance pieces both star an impressive and athletic Elsa Couvreur – often centre stage without even music.
The Sensemaker is the tale of a woman’s struggle with a Kafka-esque bureaucracy. This play is in part commentary on the arbitrary nature of dealing with faceless machines, telephones and surveillance; part tale on the nature of the hoops we are increasingly forced to jump through as power dynamics in so many areas of our lives widen.
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