new writing
Jack Barron
The language of poetic technique is perhaps weighted towards rupture, rather than reparation: lines end and break, we count beats and stress, experience caesurae (literally ‘cuttings’), and mark punctuation (literally ‘to prick’). Juxtaposition sets things in contradistinction; sonnets have firm boundaries; conservatively, form protects tradition. Even free-verse was never free: Eliot’s famous formulation included the caveat that a simple meter must always – or cannot help but – haunt the poetic line. Poems, for their formal preservation, depend upon strict border-control.Customs is Iranian- Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Just when you’ve relaxed a little, privilege duly checked and confident that you won’t be guilt-tripped for nipping into that disabled loo a few years ago at the National (c’mon, the interval was nearly over and needs must), FlawBored drop a bomb into the narrative. The temperature in the room plummets, a real coup de théâtre is effected and I'm still processing it. Yep, they went there. After garnering awards at the Vaults Festival (that’s not research, they tell you and they tell you why too), Aarian Mehrabani, Chloe Palmer and Samuel Brewer (pictured below) bring their meta- Read more ...
India Lewis
Lydia Sandgren’s debut novel, Collected Works, a bestseller in her native Sweden, has now been translated by Agnes Broomé into English, in all its 733-page glory. An epic family saga, it has flavours of the realism of her countryman, Karl Ove Knaussgard, more than a hint of emotional American big hitters like Jeffrey Eugenides or Jonathan Franzen, and something of the twists and turns of a chronicle like War and Peace.The novel begins with Martin Berg, a Gothenburg publisher, enigmatic and adrift in a sea of papers. We then cut to his daily life at an unknown point in time, from which the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Eugene O’Hare’s The Dry House is the kind of spare but oddly lyrical three-hander that would have made a good Wednesday Play back in the day. For Conor McPherson fans, it will seem like familiar terrain, with all the ingredients for an unusual domestic drama. Think, one interior, probably a humble home or a pub, where a small cast sit and drink, talk, confess, drink some more. Some of them are dead. Here there are two earthbound characters, Chrissy (Mairead McKinley) and her sister Claire (Kathy Kiera Clarke of Derry Girls fame). Also popping in regularly is Chrissy’s late daughter Read more ...
Joe White
Before I knew – or realised – I wanted to write about alcoholism in my play Blackout Songs (premiered last autumn at the Hampstead Downstairs and moving this weekend to the mainstage), I wanted to write about love and memory. I'd had three very close friends lose their dads to Alzheimer's in the space of about six years – all very young – and I'd seen how the deterioration of the mind and memory was in many ways as devastating as the physical.I saw how difficult it was for loved ones to process where they belonged in that person's mind – the joy Read more ...
Tom Teodorczuk
It never hurts the trajectory of a promising young playwright if they have a good eye for the zeitgeist, and the writer Joseph Charlton can certainly be said to possess that. His last play Anna X, inspired by high society scammer Anna Delvey and starring Emma Corrin, was a briefly-seen West End success post-pandemic and was staged several months before Netflix aired its phenomenally successful Inventing Anna series.Now Southwark Playhouse is reviving Brilliant Jerks, Charlton’s play chronicling the colourful history of a disruptive ride-sharing app (heavily based on Uber) five years to the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Can a play ever be a bit too much like real life? The thought came to me while watching Matilda Feyisayo Ibini’s entertaining new play Sleepova at the Bush. This latest opening is almost a bookend to the excellent Red Pitch, premiered at the same address last year: another intimate piece about teens in transition to adulthood, but this time featuring a sparky female quartet, not a football-mad trio of young men. It has more lightness of spirit, but less grit.Proceedings start before lights down, with the voices of girls chatting behind the scenes and singing along to tracks playing over the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A man in modern garb reads a tabloid newspaper and makes smarmy wisecracks about the malaise of contemporary Britain – strikes, NHS waiting lists and the rest of it. But hang on a minute: isn’t this meant to be a period drama? Lulu Raczka’s new play at the Almeida, directed by Rupert Goold, declares its fundamental, gleeful tricksiness from the start. The aforementioned chap is the devil, no less, breaking the fourth wall with spoilers, and bemoaning the fact that, whereas once upon a time he was the accepted cause of the world’s ills, today “it’s structural, systemic, never evil Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Michael John O’Neill’s first full-length play, premiering at the Hampstead's studio space downstairs, is a puzzler. There’s the title, to start with, a Hebrew word that means “binding” and is a reference to the story of Abraham preparing his son Isaac, at God’s command, to be sacrificed.Spotting the reworking of this biblical theme in the text can be a challenge, even though O’Neill usefully has one of the characters treasure her toy lamb, Deadsheep, as a clue. The religion that features here, too, isn’t Judaism but a cultish kind of Pentecostalism, including speaking in tongues, led by a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Who better to write a piece about the game-playing of a peace-talks negotiation than a former peace-talk negotiator, Daniel Taub? And who better to sprinkle some comedy oofle dust on the proceedings than the TV producer and writer Dan Patterson, begetter of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Mock the Week and many collaborations with Clive Anderson?And a tail-coated Anderson is our narrator-come-game show host for Winner's Curse, whose ambitions ever so slightly overreach themselves. The premise is that Anderson is Hugo Leitski, a former, yes, peace-talks negotiator for a fictitious Eastern European Read more ...
Andrew Mellor
“Silence,” Andrew Mellor contends, “is more prominent in the northernmost reaches of Europe.” Yet it is more like a texture or an apprehension of vacancy than a state of true soundlessness: sometimes “real and pure”, sometimes it “lingers despite the noise”.Against this muted backdrop, Mellor’s new book The Northern Silence - Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture follows the circuits of musical culture across Scandinavia, Finland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, tracing the attempts to fill the quiet, asking why “the arts, and classical music in particular, occupy a different position in Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
We all have that friend. The person you met on holiday and couldn’t shake off. You added each other on Facebook, but they posted so much you’ve quietly unfollowed them. You can’t quite bring yourself to unfriend them, though. In The Unfriend, a new play at the Criterion Theatre after a Chichester premiere, Sherlock writer Steven Moffat asks: what if that friend was a murderer? And what if you had invited them to stay in your house?This is a true story – so true, in fact, that Moffat didn’t even change the name of the actual friend, Peter, to whom it happened. The play's Peter (Reece Read more ...