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Love, Loss and Chianti, Riverside Studios, London
Contemporary plays, even verse plays, unlike their period drama rivals, have one important hurdle to cross: Is it relatable? In Love, Loss and Chianti Rebecca Johnson and Robert Bathurst relish performing two of Christopher Reid’s 2009 poems A Scattering and The Song of Lunch. She cuts a fine figure of femininity, placing her expensive red…
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Pigspurt’s Daughter (Downstairs at the Hampstead Theatre)
The problem with writing a review is parking your arse down on a chair and working out how to structure it. Your mind is firing in all directions. I liked this bit of the show, this bit made me laugh, this bit made me feel sad, I can’t believe how good that woman is as…
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A Sockful of Custard, Pleasance Theatre
I’m the type to sit in the front row, there’s the breathing space, the legroom, and nobody annoyingly tall, like me, in front of you. It’s a risk in the fringe – what will they get you doing, will they get you up? – but be damned, humilated or forced into submission, with Jeremy Stockwell…
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Black Mountain and How To Be A Kid, Orange Tree Theatre
Black Mountain For fans of Seventies style Thriller there is much to admire In Brad Birch’s Black Mountains, performed by Paines Plough. Paul (Hasan Dixon) finds himself in a remote farmhouse, trying to save his relationship with Rebecca (Katie Elin-Salt). The idea is to escape from it all to work on their relationship, but it…
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Hansel and Gretel, Museum of Childhood
One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed opera in the past is because of the lavish sets: an atmospheric street with looming shadows in Puccini’s La Boheme, or a never-ending treadmill of stone slabs in Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. Pop-Up opera can’t offer this, but in its place is energy and buckets of emotion. In this staging…
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Thebes Land, Arcola Theatre
Guest review by Suzy Norman Thebes is quite a brutal and unforgiving place, the land where Oedipus’s father was murdered, the land that persecuted Antigone for trying to bury her brother. It’s a warring and unsettling place. So then, an appropriate title for this play by Sergio Blanco, set in a caged basketball court where…
View from the Cheap Seat 