by Zahid Fayyaz
As the audience enters the venue, a band is onstage waiting. The five-piece, all-woman band stays there the whole time, playing punk rock in between performing the play’s scenes. They tell the story of eight years from a girl’s life spent growing up, falling in love, making a mistake, and her life falling apart due to horrific things happening to her. She then attempts the long road to recovery, with the help of her mother and therapist.
By Zahid Fayaz
This is the first preview performance of a one-man show following Jacob, a young man trying to turn over a new leaf away from his previous life as a hard-living and loving party animal. He’s doing this through Jesus and focusing on his education. He is, however, finding this difficult due to constant interruptions from his friends and ex-girlfriends whilst he is trying to finish an assignment.
by Grace Bouchard
(CW: rape)
If you ever went to a house party when you were 16, you should probably go and see Superman by Rose Eye Productions.
by Euan Vincent
Accompanying the first performance of Thibault Delferiere’s trilogy (directed by Jack McNamara), is a side of A4 paper containing three quotes from Nietzsche. They depict a journey through three transmutations: the spirit as camel, the spirit as lion, the spirit as baby. Like the camel, the spirit desires to burden itself and takes on heavy loads. Once laden it transforms into a lion – where it’s power and destructiveness can create the space for the new. And in that space, the baby emerges – wide-eyed and forgetful, the spirit can now create unencumbered. That is the journey that the trilogy promises to traverse.
by Zahid Fayyaz
The group’s sophomore run at the festival, this is the a-cappella company’s homage to
‘guilty pleasures’ – cheesy songs you shouldn’t love, but (judging from the singalongs at this afternoon performance) most people do. An all-male, eleven-strong group greet the audience at this show, with a backdrop of album covers of by the cheesy artists they would be performing.
by Cara Lee
In Coming Out of My Cage (And I’ve Been Doing Just Fine), Shepard Tone’s Tim and Hannah explore the legacy of one of the most popular songs of all time through a pitch-perfect combination of fun audience interactions and a great use of video in particular.
by Matthew McGregor-Morales
Memes, mysteries and musical showboating – the indie karaoke anthem gets a very British tribute.
Tim and Hannah really want it all, so they pack nostalgic pleasure points, one after the other, into their tribute to the Killers’ breakthrough 00’s anthem. “Mr Brightside” hit the UK charts 16 years ago and it hasn’t left since, setting sweaty dancefloors, muddy fields and plush, well-lit living rooms into a comparable frenzy. And those are just my memories.
by Isabel Becker
We get it. We do. Angst about our mothers – their infuriating quirks, the emotional and psychological damage passed down to us as though encased in our very DNA – it’s an oasis of material. The complexities of the mother-child relationship hold such potential for theatrical exploration, as we have seen from classical tragic melodramas like Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to modern commercial musicals like Hairspray.
by Verity Sharpe
This is a spectacularly brilliant show which fuses conventions of both horror and comedy, effortlessly guiding the audience on the protagonist’s journey of revenge. It follows a young woman who has been stepped on her whole life by those she should have been able to trust.
By Becky Lennon
‘’Everything is Big at the big top! Its Big, it’s whopping, the fun’s never stopping!’’
Nora, a clumsy girl with no gang of friends, discovers that she is the long lost great-great-great-granddaughter of Big Bones, the owner of the Big Bones Big Top Circus! We follow her journey to the big top where she meets various characters, such as Jim Membership the strong man. Nora is also met with the news that the Big Top has a curse, which prevents audiences seeing the show. Will Nora be able to reverse the curse and reconnect audiences with the circus?
The Play's The Thing UK 