Typical off-West End, though you’d expect Soho Theatre to programme something more enticing (and I’m definitely enticed by Burning Doors). Writer Owen McCafferty and Director Adam Penford’s Unfaithful is of the barely-enough variety, the kind of play that chucks rough sex and swears around to raise the room temperature (in the dramatic sense, not in […]
A mere 100 pages of source material. A gay narrator whose literary obsession with the heroine prompts a wariness in the reader. An elegant, peripatetic subject: Holly Golightly, characterised as much by secondhand as firsthand accounts; a restless waif whose eternal discomfort sees her cycling through a bevy of failed suitors. How to adapt this? […]
It needs a dramatization. Caryl Churchill’s ten-minute piece seems a prelude to something bigger. FIsayo Akinade, Sharon D Clarke, Alex Hassell are directed by Dominic Cooke. They are big names in the West End, but even they struggle to surmount the dryness of Pigs and Dogs. Uganda has draconian legislation against gays. Established in 2014, […]
Empathy is what defines Medea, a play that in its nervy, Hellenic way justifies filicide. Any adaptation will carry this legacy, from expressionism to the kitchen sink. Fury, by Soho’s resident writer Phoebe Eclair-Powell, goes working-class in a South London council estate through an inspired but patchy retelling. Sam (Sarah Ridgeway) is a single mother […]
Self-assured though with no emotional investment, Phillip Ridley’s Karagula is messy, tame sci-fi. Despite deft touches on the production side (read: design), the work never clinches the operatic status it desires. On another planet, a milkshake-drinking society that habitually sacrifices its Prom King and Queen is in crisis; intercut with this we see (unclear where […]
What we learn of the Romani is limited but what is limited in the LIFT Festival’s Open For Everything is probed deeply in dance rather than storytelling, a bracing experience when done well. Constanza Macras’ dance company has made a piece that celebrates and explains the ‘last nomadic tribe in Europe’, the Romani. While light […]
Like the sycophantic hotel clerk who opens the play, Off The King’s Road is too eager to please. Neil Koenigsberg’s new work wavers between the sincere and mawkish, never quite landing its desired emotional beats in spite of a capable cast. American widower Matt Browne (Michael Brandon) takes a cultural trip to London to get […]
For a play so intimately connected with Greek tragedy it is daring to have its protagonists’…