mon 14/10/2024

Southwark Playhouse

Here, Southwark Playhouse review - award-winning kitchen sink drama goes down the drain

The kitchen sink drama has been a standby of English theatre for 70 years or more, but not always with an actual sink on stage. But there it is, in an everyday home that harbours a secret or two in Clive Judd’s debut play, the winner of the 2022...

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Tasting Notes, Southwark Playhouse review - whining in the wine bar

LJ's dream has come true - she has her very own wine bar. Unfortunately for us, it turns into a bit of a nightmare.This new musical open on a nostalgic 70s vibe. Tables and chairs fill almost all of Southwark Playhouse's smaller space, a set that...

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The Woods, Southwark Playhouse review - early Mamet not fully elevated

"Get into the scene late and get out early." So wrote David Mamet in his 1992 book On Directing Film, and Southwark Playhouse, among London's most charmingly eclectic theatres, has delved very early into Mamet's canon, reviving his...

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Straight White Men, Southwark Playhouse review - an exciting Korean-American playwright arrives in the UK

The Korean-American writer Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, currently enjoying its UK debut at Southwark Playhouse, is presented within a frame that cleverly and radically alters what’s inside it. That would be a sparkly prologue...

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The Last Five Years, Garrick Theatre review - bittersweet musical treat gets West End upgrade

Much has happened in the five years since your reviewer braved the steep rake at The Other Palace and saw The Last Five Years (not least my now getting its “Nobody needs to know” nod in Hamilton – worth a fistful of Tonys in prestige, I guess) so it...

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Money, Southwark Playhouse online review - ethical dilemmas for the Zoom generation

To accept or not accept a donation: that’s certainly the burning political question of the moment. So Isla van Tricht’s play Money – specially designed for Zoom – has proven more timely than even perhaps she suspected, though the question is made...

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Tarantula, Southwark Playhouse online review – spine-tingling love and trauma

I think I can safely say that polymath playwright Philip Ridley has had a good lockdown. In March last year, when The Beast of Blue Yonder, his new show for Southwark Playhouse, was closed due to the pandemic, he came up with an idea called The...

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Shook, Papatango online review - strongly acted, but depressingly predictable

Film is the new theatre – this we know, but does the distance imposed by the change of medium increase or decrease the impact of the story? The latest example of this problematic switch from stage to screen is the strongly acted Shook, Samuel...

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Gators, Tramp Productions online review - the glittering dark

She’s an ordinary young woman, and she really doesn’t know what to think. After all, things are way out of control. She knows that the natural world is pretty fucked, and that nothing grows in the earth any more — well, at least not on her patch....

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The Last Five Years, Southwark Playhouse review - an inspired actor-musician take on a cult classic

There’s concept on top of concept in this revival of Jason Robert Brown’s beloved 2001 musical, which charts the ebb and flow of a relationship by juggling timelines: aspiring actress Cathy’s story is told in reverse chronological order, while...

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Preludes, Southwark Playhouse review - journeying into the mind of Rachmaninoff

Where does music come from? That’s the vital question posed to Sergei Rachmaninoff in Dave Malloy’s extraordinary 2015 chamber work, as the great late-Romantic Russian composer – stuck in his third year of harrowing writer’s block – tries to...

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Once on This Island, Southwark Playhouse review - folkloric Caribbean musical charms

As British summer really kicks in (umbrellas at the ready), our thoughts might turn fondly to the sunny Caribbean. Good timing, then, for the return of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 1990 musical set in the French Antilles. Based on Rosa Guy’s...

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