When they were kids, Alice promised Sam that when they were grown, they would still hang out and play superheroes. Now they’re uni students home for the summer, and have both changed a lot since that promise. But Alice turns up in Sam’s back garden to make good.
1987. Hull. Two couples in the same hospital each have a child. Leah is born to a working class family, and Chris into a middle class one. As they grow up, their lives are shaped by world events, social class and their parents’ income and ambition.
Neither leads a particularly notable life, but it’s their millenial everyman-ness that Luke Barnes celebrates. Middle Child sets their first thirty years to a rock anthem soundtrack with a David Bowie-esque narrator, elevating the everyday to the extraordinary in a guitar-fuelled, sweaty, cathartic gig of a show.
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After growing up on Disney films, Chris’ aim in life is singular and simple: to live happily ever after. He thinks he achieves it when he meets Ryan as a newly qualified Drama teacher in Cambridge. For five happy years, the pair live a life akin to a fairytale. But as Chris discovers, not all fairytales end happily.
By guest critic Michaela Clement-Hayes
Rule number one: We do not ask questions about Project Mayhem.
Rule number two: We do not ask questions about Project Mayhem.
And of course, we do not talk about Project Mayhem, which makes it fairly tricky to review Secret Theatre Project. I mean I don’t want them to kill me, or my loved ones. And anyway I’m 100% committed to the cause…unlike most of the audience who stood around like gormless children getting embarrassed if anyone spoke to them.
By guest critic Nastazja Somers
Andrew Maddock, the writer behind the hugely successful IN/OUT (a feeling) has a great talent for creating fully developed and multi-layered characters that don’t come from privileged backgrounds. Not often enough do we see stories of working class people explored beyond the mundane on stage. Directed by Niall Phillips, OLYMPILADS, Maddock’s new play is set in Wembley during the 2012 Olympics. It examines the lives of three siblings, all of whom dream about running away from their fears.
We all know the world is fucked. But who can we blame? In Ontroerend Goed’s £¥€$ (LIES), they blame the global banking system.
More of an interactive gaming event than a performance, LIES splits the audience into six groups of seven. Each group sits around a semi-circular wooden gaming table helmed by a performer-cum-games master. Each table is a nation, and each person is a bank in that nation. To grow our nations’ economies, we must grow out banks.
by guest critic Simona Negretto
In 1949, George Orwell lived the final months of his life in University College Hospital due to a severe case of tuberculosis. Torn between an uncertain faith in a recovery and the consciousness of the approaching end, hoping to write again, he decided to marry Sonia Brownell, a young and beautiful magazine editor. The marriage, as the play keeps reminding us, was a sort of pragmatic contra-deal conceived more out of interests than of love.
In Duluth, Minnesota, ships, trains and buses come and go under a sweeping midwestern sky heavy with snow. It’s 1934, the height of the Great Depression. A desperate, drifting populace chase the shadows of their debtors and rumours of work in and out of the port city.
The Play's The Thing UK 