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IED, Theatre N16
This story of gender expectation in the masculine and distant setting of an army regiment is rich in character and ideas. Martin McNamara’s follow up to Your Ever Loving is a very different tale. The focus is on Agnes (Safron Beck) who gives Joan “the Freak” Ferguson from Prisoner Cell Block H vibes. She is…
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Olympilads , Theatre N16
‘I ran as fast as I could. I ran and I ran and I ran until I couldn’t run anymore…’ Lonesome Schoolboy return to Theatre N16, after He(art), with Olympilads. A tale about far more than sporting aspiration. Set around Summer 2012 in Wembley, in the shadow of one of London’s biggest sporting venues, Simeon…
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The God of Hell, Theatre N16
This post was edited on 19 July to correct some rookie errors It seems utterly unfathomable that Sam Shepard’s play, The God of Hell, was written in 2005 and not yesterday. Written as a response to George W Bush’s Republican Party’s war on terror following the attacks in September 2001 only 12 years after this play’s…
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Suckers, Theatre N16
Thick and Thin’s debut Brains showed a lot of promise as a satire of privatised healthcare and their new effort, Suckers is very similar except instead of zombies and privatisation we get vampires and politics. There were issues I was willing to forgive in Brains that I can’t in their second show. The idea once again…
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Details of Scott Ellis’ Theatre N16 debut season released
In his first season as artistic director of Theatre N16, Scott Ellis presents a slew of new writing. Olympilads by Andrew Maddock, produced by Lonesome Schoolboy and directed by Niall Phillips, reunites the team that presented He(art) at Theatre N16 earlier this year. Theatre N16 executive director (and former artistic director) Jamie Eastlake will present…
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WHIMSY, Theatre N16
It is a real shame that Scram Collective’s Whimsy, written by Alex Newport, is such a poor, over the top and nonsensical display. There is much potential, ranging from the anti-Faust storyline of Aoife (Beth Smith) who finds herself a beneficiary of a pact she never chose to make to David’s (Neil Gardner) male domestic…
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Swifties, Theatre N16
Swifties is a tale of two young women who deal with their boring and unfulfilled lives by pretending to be Taylor Swift and her fan/member of her Squad. Isabella Niloufar (soon to be seen in the National Theatre’s production Salome) is the violent Nina who plays the obsessive to Yasmin’s (Tanya Cubric) Taylor. The productions adapts The…
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Will Power, Theatre N16
Toby Boutall’s story of repressed male emotion is ironically stifled by its inability to speak truth to its audience.
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Brains, Theatre N16
Thick and Thin’s comedy about a zombie outbreak and the pharma industry feels like an extended comedy sketch but it has a lot of potential to be a funny and clever look at healthcare in a capitalist world. MediBite provides expensive medicine to those who are desperate to avoid the ‘contamination’ and Harry (Aaron Parsons)…
View from the Cheap Seat 