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Sh!t Happens, Camden Fringe
I go to a lot of theatre but rarely do I see a scenario on stage that I can relate to; there are the odd exceptions Nine Night about Jamaican family in mourning for example but never has a show spoke to me as much as Patrycja Dynowska‘s Sh!t Happens, a multi-disciplinary work on her…
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Villain, Interrupted – Etcetera Theatre
Ever since I was a young child I’d been a huge fan superheroes, and supervillains too, so that’s been almost forty years of reading and watching them. I’ve enjoyed the majority of the Marvel movies and even some of the DC ones too, well, you know, Wonder Woman and Shazam anyhow, but just last night…
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Boris Rex, Camden Fringe
Charlie Dupré’s Boris Rex (following on from 2017’s MacBlair) is a Shakespearean-esque look at the rise, the fall and inevitable rise of Britain’s new Prime Minister. Luke Theobald plays Boris Johnson with all bluster and entitlement you’d expect. Johnson isn’t so much a powerful king, popular with his people but a pawn in Jacob Rees-Mogg…
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Coelacanth, The Cockpit
Coelacanth, a dark one-act comedy which is part of this year’s Camden Fringe, is set in a world where assisted suicide has been legalised.
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Pluto, The Cockpit Theatre
Guest Review by Oliver Wake Pluto’s premise is ingenious. It dramatises the planet Pluto’s reaction to learning that he has been re-categorised – demoted, effectively – from planet to dwarf planet. Pluto throws a party to celebrate incoming news from NASA. Nobody comes, bar his moon/best friend Charon and, later, a stripper she has ordered.…
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The Amount of Us, The London Improv Theatre
Guest review by Oliver Wake The Amount of Us from the A Bunch of Chemicals Theatre Company was seen for three days only at the London Improv Theatre as part of the Camden Fringe Festival. The production calls itself “an adapted theatrical collage about the beginning and end of love”, though it’s not clear from…
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Pageant, London Irish Centre
Pageant is a revival of a musical first performed off-Broadway in 1991, and it’s telling that this drag satire on the culture of women as decoration still feels biting 26 years later. The professional nature of this production (it was revived off-Broadway in 2014 initially) is obvious by the calibre of the performers, who are…
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The Dark Side of Mime, Etcetera Theatre
Guest Review by Oliver Wake The Dark Side of Mime is an alarming prospect. I’ve always thought there was something slightly sinister about the traditional white-faced mime act, looking like some kind of anachronistic vaudevillian newly escaped from a silent film. Promising to mix “clownery with classic pantomime, porn, splatter, and violence”, it sounded like…
View from the Cheap Seat 