The Internet Was Made for Adults, VAULT Festival

by guest critic Joanna Trainor

A cabaret, but also Tinder, and a break up, sending nudes, watching porn for the first time and embracing or fearing female sexuality. The Internet was Made for Adults squashes a few too many storylines into one 70-minute show, some of which have almost nothing to do with the internet at all. Individually they would all make interesting and important subjects for a play, but crammed together it’s too disjointed to really
enjoy.

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Boys, VAULT Festival

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by guest critic Ava Davies

Boys, the inaugural piece by physical theatre group The PappyShow, is about exactly that. It’s an exploration of manhood, of masculinity, of what it means to be a man of colour in the UK today. It’s about mess and silliness and play and pain. It’s about the complexity of selfhood – because how can one man possibly contain all these multitudes?

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Blackout, VAULT Festival

 

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by guest critic Lara Alier

Uber, happy hour, Tinder, late night cheesy chips are all part of the vocabulary of a Londoner’s life. So are two complete strangers waking up next to each other. Usually one of them will remember, and even find a blurred picture of you both at 4 am surrounded by empty glasses. Yet neither has any memories of the night before.

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Madonna or Whore?, VAULT Festival

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by guest reviewer Daphne Penn

Holly Morgan and Tom Moores create an upbeat, haphazardous cabaret sketch show that is loosely based on the daytime TV show Ready Steady Cook’s audience participation in order to judge important controversial women from history. Well, not all the women, not Madonna because ‘She’s too perfect to judge’ – in much the same way the TV show audience judges food.

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Sacha Guitry, My Daughter and I, Drayton Arms Theatre

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by guest critic Kudzanayi Chiwawa

Director Marianne Badrichani brings us this adaptation inspired by Sacha Guitry, a 20th Century playwright, actor and director. It includes short plays and extracts of his works, performed by an ensemble of three – Edith Vernes, Sean Rees and Anais Bachet.

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Mary Stuart, Duke of York’s Theatre

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by guest critic Kudzanayi Chiwawa

Heads or tails – with the flip of a coin, on this evening, Juliet Stevenson is Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart is portrayed by Lia Williams.

The play opens with urgency, the stakes are high and the rhythm throughout doesn’t let up. It’s exhilarating. Williams commands the stage like a beautiful beast, burdened by captivity. We know how history reads for these two women, but the battle waged on stage, makes you wonder how will it end.

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