Going 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 year’s hottest Shakespearian ticket may not be found in Southwark or Stratford but in York. The battle of the great Elizabethan theatres is back, with a “pop-up” Rose Theatre (the first of its kind in Europe) being launched in York for ten weeks from June 25th.
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 MoreIn the bleak mid-80s, life was tough for young people in general, and in particular for those of a more sensitive disposition. Sensitivity wasn't cool. Cool was brash, buccaneering, blokey.
So when The Smiths came along, they spoke to a generation of (mostly white) dispossessed young people of a sensitive and mostly left wing bent. Their anthems to loneliness, quirkiness and being different struck a chord in many in a such a profound way that it is still ringing in their ears decades later. Their music was wonderfully refreshing (and Johnny Marr remains an untroubling hero) but it was the lyrics of Stephen Patrick Morrissey that made a lot of lonely vulnerable people going through a difficult time feel less alone.
Read MoreI’m not a pacifist. I believe that there are times and places where intervention is right and necessary. I have little but contempt for those like Stop the War who seem to believe that a war doesn’t happen until the West is involved. Wars are happening all over the globe. Sometimes the way to stop them is precisely for the West to get involved. Sometimes that is not the case.
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 MoreLove and longing accompanies beer and boogie on the boardwalk as Emma Burnell and her sister visit the most American place in New York.
It is against my innate sense of romance to go to the seaside and not fall in love. Not ‘kiss me quick and grope me furtively under the Waltzer’ love. But ‘flirty giggles, flipped hair, batted eyelashes and a deep, soulful longing for someone who, in an hour, will be just another stranger again’ love. That’s what the seaside is for – you can’t have all the fun of the fair without the emotional rollercoaster.
Read MoreThe battle to replace Iain McNicol as the Labour party general secretary is getting heated. There have been some pretty furious exchanges between supporters of Momentum chair Jon Lansman and Unite's Jennie Formby.
Those on the inside of each organisation will tell you that this is about deep, important divisions over how democracy within the party should be played out. Lansman's supporters say this is about party democracy versus union-backed central control, while those backing Formby say it’s about defending Labour’s historic link with the unions.
The 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 MorePoor Rosie Duffield has had to put up with me drunkenly explaining how much her win in Canterbury meant to me more than once over the months she’s been their MP. It was where I voted for the first time in 1997. While Labour won big that night, we didn’t quite sweep Canterbury along with the nation. She’s always listened and responded with perfect charm and I don’t think I’m the only person so have articulated how important her victory felt last June.
Read MoreHow we run local communities, what services are provided and by whom, are deeply political questions. The philosophical traditions of the two main parties in Britain differ greatly on state involvement at every level: national, local and international.
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 MoreThe message that “something must be done” is one of the most prevalent of modern politics. Although designed to reflect the resolve of politicians and those who influence them (from constituents to campaigners) on the issues that face them, the need to show urgency often leads politicians to take action without fully examining the consequences, or to reach for easy solutions to tough problems when actually only a long, hard, and politically unrewarding grind will do.
Read More
