new writing
Matt Wolf
Forget write what you know: writing what you feel would seem to be the impetus driving Ella Hickson's often-startling The Writer, a broadside from the trenches that takes no prisoners, least of all the audience. Demanding and sometimes irritating, the play exerts a brute force across nearly two hours (no interval) thanks to a galvanic performance from Romola Garai and an impassioned production from Blanche McIntyre that powers through remarks like "you are not skewed toward a systemic awareness" (!). If comparable talk of "intersectionality and voicelessness" leaves you numb, The Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There’s a whole universe which British theatre has yet to explore properly – it’s called the sci-fi imagination. Although this place is familiar from countless films and television series, it is more or less a stranger to our stages. With notable exceptions such as Alistair McDowall’s X and Philip Ridley’s Karagula, the imaginary worlds of humanoid robots and space travel and parallel universes are rare delights, so it’s great to welcome Thomas Eccleshare’s new Royal Court play, which in its satire at first offers an intriguing mix of Westworld and Stepford Wives. And stars Jane Horrocks. Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Ros and Ray are old hippies made good. She’s a hard-bitten, hard-working teacher in an inner-city Pennsylvania school where her pupils rob 7-Elevens on Fridays and the staff have a betting pool on how many times she gets called "white bitch". He’s a member of the one percent, a corporate heavyweight who’s always trying to see “the bigger picture” but who drives a Merc and – by his own admission – pulled himself out of poverty to become a wealthy financier.Even on the cusp of retirement they’re still besotted with each other, their love conversely made stronger by the frank Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Hot on the heels of International Women’s Day come three monologues written, directed and produced by women showing at Hoxton Hall. It’s kind of a treat, and kind of not.The current laser focus on gender risks the unwanted side-effect of alienating rather than including, and when an issue becomes so hot it’s hip, surface buzz easily takes over at the expense of meaningful action. Important voices registering dissent, noting difference, flagging up granularity and raising objections are not heard. But the balance between revolution and evolution is perennial and intractable, and the thing Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Good programming is an art, and Paul Miller – artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre – is clearly on a continuous roll with his inspired mixing of the old and the new, forgotten classics and new voices, revivals and premieres. And he loves to take risks. With this revival of Charlotte Jones's Humble Boy he breaks one of the unwritten rules of programming: never revive a play first put on by a major theatre until at least 30 years have passed. Humble Boy was a massive hit when first staged by the National Theatre in 2001. It was then often revived for a decade in theatres outside London Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan. The final third consists of a transcript of Ezra’s Desert Island Discs recorded some years later.The book focusses on how power imbalances inflect relationships. This is quite clear when Alice’s giddy Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Lila had breast implants at the age of eight. Karen, her mother, is required to take psychotherapy sessions on account of the fact that she arranged for the operation. Tessa (played by Monica Dolan, pictured top and below) is a psychotherapist who is treating Karen.In the course of The B*easts, a tight hour-long monologue written and performed by Dolan, Tessa lounges in an easy chair and drinks and puffs, occasionally fielding calls from her mobile. She is frustrated and wired (possibly through fatigue) as she relates Lila and Karen’s case history, which emerges as a prism through which to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
This is Carey Mulligan week. She appears, improbably enough, as a hard-nosed cop in David Hare’s BBC thriller Collateral, as well as onstage at the Royal Court in London’s Sloane Square (she’s much better live than on film). In a 90-minute monologue, written by Dennis Kelly, Mulligan explores a contemporary love story, and she is in good hands. Kelly is the wordsmith behind the edgy GCSE syllabus play DNA and The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas, as well as the infinitely sweeter Matilda the Musical, so you would be forgiven for expecting a rather acerbic view of modern marriage. And you’d Read more ...
aleks.sierz
First the goats, and now the sheep – has this venue become an urban farm? Rural life, which was once so central to our English pastoral culture, is now largely absent from metropolitan stages. And from our culture. Apart from The Archers or the village gothic of shows like The League of Gentlemen, the countryside has become a lost world, a blank space on which any playwright can project their imaginary stories. So Gundog, Simon Longman’s Royal Court debut, comes across not as a real account of farming folk, but as a highly symbolic rural no-space of shepherds and sheep in a forgotten corner Read more ...
Katherine Waters
“Pussy is pussy” and “bitches are bitches” but Jen Silverman’s Collective Rage at Southwark Playhouse smashes tautologies with roguish comedy in a tight five-hander smartly directed by Charlie Parham.The play is set in New York and follows the ad hoc and long-standing relationships that develop between five women (two of whom are queer) called Betty over the course of a series of rehearsals for a skew-whiff rendition of the play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Betty 3 (Beatriz Romilly) decides to put on after going on a date to “The Thea-tah” with a posh Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hype is a dangerous thing. It often raises expectations beyond the reasonable, and disappointment inevitably follows. It also prioritises PR over artistic activity, putting the publicity cart before the creative horse, sucking energy away from plays to feed the marketing machine. Take the example of Paines Plough, a new writing touring company led by James Grieve and George Perrin, which – in a co-production with Theatr Clwyd and Orange Tree Theatre – have brought a trio of new work in repertory to this Richmond venue. Hyped as the product of the “de facto national theatre of new writing”, Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Carry on out of London past the Finborough Theatre and you hit the A4. Follow it east as it becomes the M4, take a southern turn at Bristol for the M5 and you’re in the West Country. Bude and Bodmin, Liskeard, St Austell, Padstow, Mousehole, Newquay and Newlyn. Out here are fishing villages, tin mines, granite churches, wide seas, surfers, pixies, low mental health indicators, and a great deal of unemployment.Henry Darke’s Booby’s Bay takes on the half-twee half-spavined world of the Cornish fishing village in its oddball glory while bringing up the salty issue of regional deprivation. The Read more ...