by guest critic Lara Alier
Even though I grew up in Catalonia, my reference of weddings come from watching American romcoms and attending two weddings in England. Despite the fact that I am a hopeless romantic, I feel this tradition is closer to resembling a funfair than a spiritual ceremony and frankly, makes me cringe. Maybe this play was trying to raise this issue. Maybe not.
by guest critic Lara Alier
Forgiveness, guilt and punishment: these words are part of our nature and yet they’re still hard to talk about. The death penalty has always granted me hours of heated arguments. I’ve found our morals are malleable depending on each situation and can stretch or shrink like copper.
by Meredith Jones Russell
Testosterone is an explosive, energetic, riotous exploration of all things male, asking what exactly it means to be a man.
Rhum and Clay Theatre Company has teamed up with Kit Redstone, who wrote the play based on his own experiences as a trans man, and stars as himself. We meet him as he prepares to walk in to that bastion of machismo – the men’s locker room at the gym – for the first time.
by Meredith Jones Russell
Carol and Sue are lifeguards sat out on an appropriately chilly-looking British beach. They make conversation, eat biscuits, and wait for something, anything, to happen. Meanwhile a dog walker scans the sand with his metal detector, pausing occasionally to ponder such issues as the nature of buried things, or which sea creature would have the nicest garden (spoiler alert: Ringo Starr-like, he reckons it’s the octopus). Will these three come together, and how? And what, if any, will the consequences be?
by Laura Kressly
A couple who have been together for either 14 years or 3 weeks argues as the world around them threatens to collapse. Or maybe it’s collapsed already. An Uber driver writes a book about the fall of civilisation. A lonely woman in a hotel room surveys her destructive work in the financial sector.
Time passes and bends and flips. Personal and global crises unfold in an endless cycle of pain and rage.
by guest critic Joanna Trainor
Charles Mallory Hatfield made it rain – and rain and rain and rain.
This is the little-known story* of a man who went from selling sewing machines to controlling the heavens, told through the eyes of a little boy in Manchester. Hatfield would travel to drought-ridden cities with his secret mixture of chemicals and, most of the time, the weather turned.
by guest critic Maeve Campbell
Hal Asby’s 1971 film Harold and Maude is a masterpiece. Harold is nineteen and
obsessed with death. He meets Maude, a week off eighty, who lives her life to its fullest
and is constantly seeking new experiences. Opposites attract, and what plays out is one
of the most charming, unusual and sincere romances in celluloid history. Thom
Southerland’s Charing Cross Theatre revival is lovely but misses out on the sincerity
that helped garner the film’s cult classic status.
by guest critic Amy Toledano
by Laura Kressly
1603. Queen Elizabeth is dead, and James I is in power. Sir Walter Raleigh is imprisoned in the Tower for conspiring against the new king. His lover Mary pines for him in her stately home in Wiltshire, so she and her handmaid plot to secure the king’s favour by putting on a new play just for him, by Shakespeare’s company of players.
by guest critic Amy Toledano
It feels a little strange writing a review of this wonderfully absurd piece because I don’t think any two people could have the same opinion of it. In my case, I fell in love with this movement-driven show. The nine stages of the ego is the centre point of the entire play but we never know what direction we are going to be taken in next.
The Play's The Thing UK 