by Amy Toledano
In anyone fifteen years old, emotions are running high. Everything feels bigger and more extreme than it actually is, so it’s easy to be swallowed up by all the feelings. Add on top of that being queer in the North of the UK, and the teen years are bound to be an absolute rollercoaster. Drip is a lovely reminder of what it feels like to be young, and how important friendship is.
by Laura Kressly
A story of two men who murder people in order to sell their corpses to doctors in 1820s Edinburgh shouldn’t work as a dark character comedy with music. But largely work it does and this three-hander, though somewhat structurally clumsy, is a good alternative to more typical Christmas theatre.
by Laura Kressly
A wholesome guy group from the 1950s with dreams of superstardom died in a bus crash before they could make it big. But for some inexplicable reasoning, a little-discussed deity gives them one more shot at fame. Plopped in front of an expectant audience seeking Christmas cheer, the Plaids muddle through their posthumous encore. Though the story is utterly baffling, the four performers have heaps of holiday charm.
by Maeve Campbell
It’s difficult to work out who the musical Seussical is for and why its been revived. Trying to imagine how a ten-year-old might watch this show doesn’t help answer these questions. In fact, it clouds the answer even more. I think if I was ten and watching this show, I’d feel utterly patronised by it.
by Nastazja Somers
Born in 1913 in Koscice, Slovakia, Ján Ladislav Kalina was a man of theatre and art. He
lived the bohemian life that young people in Eastern Europe romanticise when they get lost in the works of Milan Kundera. Jan is Miriam’s grandfather, and in many ways his story, is that of my grandfather too. Miriam is a theatre-maker. Rendezvous in Bratislava is her ode to what’s lost and what’s remembered.
By Laura Kressly
How can we radically reinvent myths and classic literature? I mean, really radically – not in a box ticking way, or a modernisation the production wears like a piece of costume that doesn’t really change the thematic core of the story. I mean thoroughly, totally, completely. So all traces of horrible ‘isms’ and ‘ists’ are either reframed or criticised.
By Laura Kressly
I’m a sucker for inventive adaptations of Shakespeare plays, so Paper Cinema’s Macbeth, a live-action, silent movie version, is hugely appealing. For 90 minutes a team of five use handheld cameras, desk lamps and hand-drawn illustrations to broadcast the story in visual form onto a large screen. Accompanied by a Celtic-inspired, cinematic score, this graphic novel/stop motion/object manipulation telling is enchanting – until I ask my companion, a Dutch woman who doesn’t know Macbeth, what she thought.
by Jack Solloway
Elephant and Castle is a strange and precariously funny gig-theatre show about the lives of Lillian Henley, a musician and silent film pianist, and her teeth-grinding somnambulist husband, Tom Adams. Whilst this may sound a little far-fetched, the play is very much rooted in the performers’ own experiences. Acting out their relationship, using live music and verbatim sleep recordings, Elephant and Castle dramatizes the bizarre reality of Tom’s slow-wave sleep parasomnia and his relationship with Lillian.
by Maeve Campbell
The basement space in Shoreditch Town Hall is the perfect fit for Danusia Samal’s one-woman show about the ten years she spent busking on London underground platforms.
by Joanna Trainor
“Colm (Wilkinson) sucks the soul out of you when he sings”. Ramin Karimloo told host Seth Rudetsky on Friday night. Well, there’s also something about Karimloo’s voice that leaves you a bit awe-struck. Opening the show with the song he is perhaps best known for, “Til I Hear You Sing” from Love Never Dies makes everyone in the room holds their breath at the same time.
The Play's The Thing UK 