On Friday night, I was fortunate enough to once again witness a piece of new, live theatre. Yes, you heard that right! New! Live! Gutter Street Theatre Company’s latest offering, Feathers is being performed in The Calder Theatre Bookshop, and it truly set the mark for what the future of socially-distanced theatre should look like; […]Read More
Wise Children, a company created and led by Emma Rice, present Romantics Anonymous, streamed from Bristol Old Vic to living rooms everywhere. Based on the 2010 French-Belgian film Les Émotifs Anonymes, this production is an all-singing, all-dancing delight. It follows the complex relationship of talented chocolatier Angélique (Carly Bawden) and chocolate factory owner Jean-René (Marc Antolin), […]Read More
Ever since Staged proved that high-quality drama could exist when consisting entirely over Zoom calls, theatre teams and creatives have had no excuse for not creating sublime online performances during the Coronavirus pandemic. Well… Apart from financial and mental stresses, the difficulty of good WiFi, and the fear of the descent into the Maelström which […]Read More
Created by director Sing J. Lee and bionic artist Viktoria Modesta, A Midsummer Night’s Dream re-imagines the fairy trickery of Shakespeare’s comedy as a virtual reality experiment. Under Oberon’s watchful eye, Titania, played by Modesta, is transported into a computer-generated fantasy, where she is drawn into a courtship dance with an unknown figure. The dream-like world is […]Read More
Albion: a place from Arthurian legend that still continues to exist today, only we don’t call it that. We call it England. The word Albion takes on a whole new meaning as the title of Mike Bartlett’s 2017 tragicomedy, revised in January 2020 at the Almeida Theatre and broadcasted on BBC4. It’s a play that […]Read More
Evan Placey’s “urgent and explosive” play, Girls Like That, won the title of Best Play for Young Audiences in 2015. Even though I might fall into this one-act piece of collective narration and didactic direct mode of address‘ typical age demographic, I have never cared for this play, nor have I cared for Esther Baker’s […]Read More
There have been plenty of parodies, spoofs, and rip-offs of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet since its first performance in the late-sixteenth century. In the past decade alone, we’ve had such highs as last year’s excellent & Juliet, and such lows as two separate instalments of the Gnomeo & Juliet film franchise. It seems odd, then, […]Read More
The modern setting of the newly built Boulevard Theatre in Soho is host to this rather wonderful, folk-inspired, improvised musical by The Yes Queens. Performed in January 2020, and recently uploaded to YouTube, These Folk is perfect if you’re missing live performance. The newness of the Boulevard is epitomised in modern blue lit light panels […]Read More
How does the truth affect us? Missing People is a collaborative production between the Leeds Playhouse and the Kani Public Arts Center, a Japanese theatre venue. Written by Brad Birch, the show was due to be performed this Summer, before being cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Luckily for us, a recorded production has been […]Read More
David Bintley’s Cinderella, staged in 2010, has made it’s way out of the archives to add a little bit of magic to our current circumstances. With breath-taking staging, bold characterisation and flawless choreography, Birmingham Royal Ballet’s production of Cinderella is enchanting from beginning to end. Whether through the Brother’s Grimm, Disney or Pantomime, most people […]Read More
Adapted by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Carl Hunter, The Winter’s Tale is a modern retelling of the story of King Leontes falsely accusing his wife Hermione of infidelity with his best friend. Except, in this adaptation, there’s a twist: the roles are reversed, and it is Dad who is turned to stone and left on […]Read More
Watching Rosie was created by actress and playwright, Louise Coulthard. Her new work centres around the heartbreak caused by COVID-19, specifically focusing on family members who could not see each other during isolation. Her main characters are a young girl and her grandmother, who is living with dementia. The show was written to raise awareness […]Read More
Content warning: sexual harassment and violence. “We felt safe here,” says Lauren, one of the girls whose story is retold in The Group Chat, in the play’s opening scene. “Well, we thought we did.” The 2018 Warwick University group chat scandal, which saw eleven male students temporarily suspended after making rape threats to female students […]Read More
From acclaimed actor and writer Arinzé Kene comes good dog, a short, filmed adaptation of Kene’s original full-length play. This twenty-minute digital piece gives us a fresh look into the life and struggles of a Black schoolboy (simply dubbed ‘Boy’) living in a multicultural, inner-city London community. This adaptation, supported by The Space, BBC and […]Read More
An empty row of seats stares more intently at the stage than any audience ever could. The stage itself is empty, save for a single light bulb in the centre. The light is there to be maintained, burning until the space that once it illuminated is occupied, so that the stage is never truly empty. […]Read More
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