It is a time of high tension between Russia and the West. A flamboyant, morally questionable American with an implausible surname and Daddy issues is running around making things worse. I can’t imagine what prompted this reshowing of the classic 80s musical, Chess.
Read MoreGoing back to For King and Country, I was slightly wary that it wouldn’t work as well a second time. You can never go back they say, and the essential elements of the drama were so strong and surprising the first time around how would I react knowing roughly where we were headed.
Read MoreStrictly Ballroom the musical was everything I hoped it would be and worried it wouldn’t deliver. Bringing this classic that I’ve loved for 26 years to the West End stage is an audacious move, but it works. That’s the key. It would work for someone who’s never seen the film, and it works for those of us whose videos wore out at that moment Scott moved his hips just so….
Read MoreThis piece has so much promise it is worth seeing in its raw form to understand the journey the hopeful end product will go through.
It is the end product of an interesting experiment, weaving ten 10-minute plays into one – more or less – coherent whole. It does this by showing us different aspects of factory life one day in 1988 leading up to the retirement party of factory stalwart Jack.
Read MoreHE NEVER LOVED ME. NOT EVEN FOR A MOMENT.
It’s weird when you see what you think was your own private pain, your own personal grief, felt so long ago, written on stage as an experience universal enough to have every woman in the room nodding and gasping. Meanwhile, the men – the fucking men – laugh inappropriately in all the wrong places. They’re laughing at her. Her desperation, her neediness. By extension, they’re laughing at me.
Read MoreHow do you simulate someone else’s dreams? That’s the struggle at the heart of Somnai – an experience that blends virtual reality and immersive theatre to try to give participants a sense of lucid dreaming. The problem was that at no point did I have unexpected sex with a minor celebrity my waking mind had previously shown no interest in (which happens in a surprising number of my actual dreams).
Read MoreThe team behind Keep Calm and Carry On(look forward to a future run renamed For King and Country) have done it again.
Another WW2 Drama, this once again puts participants through their paces, cracking codes and making life and death decisions as part of the Special Operations Executive – spies, codebreakers and generally surreptitious actors on the side of the British in the war.
Read MoreI really wasn’t expecting much from this play. The fact the press release promoted it as “bitcoin-funded” had me worried it was going to be a buzzword-heavy, all-too-trendy play, heavy on zeitgeist and light on almost anything else. I could not have been more wrong.
This play is a one-hour, one-man tour-de-force.
Read MoreI often struggle with dramatic depictions of salespeople. This is because I was one once. I know the tricks of the trade, had the gift of the gab, knew the art of the deal. And as a result, I know that a lot of what is written when we depict salespeople in dramas they are not realistic. It’s an artistic rendering of the grubbiness of commerce and the self-aggrandisement of the kind of people who would genuinely describe themselves as having the ‘gift of the gab’, often imbued with the kind of snobbery that values the art and the artist above all else.
Read MoreOver the years I’ve done a lot of immersive theatre. As a frustrated actress it fulfils many of those lifelong ambitions to be a part of the drama. I’ve been romanced, shocked, scared and mystified all in the name of theatre.
I’ve never been to an immersive production that brings the audience into the drama quite as much as Keep Calm and Carry On. From the moment I was elected Leader of the Opposition and Deputy Prime Minister in the wartime coalition government, I knew this was going to be the drama for me.
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