by Laura Kressly
Lula Mebrahtu inhabits multiple worlds: the UK, Eritrea, the present and her ancestors’ past. To construct this show she draws on traditional dance, contemporary British club culture, and Afro-futurism to create a unique dramaturgy that seeks to capture the experience of living across multiple cultures.
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by Laura Kressly
Scotland has one of the highest drug-related death rates in the world. This suggests that addiction is woven into the country’s fabric and should be understood, but recorded testimony in this production tells us that society broadly holds the view that addiction is down to personal weakness or moral failing. Tortoise in a Nutshell impressively combine puppetry, animation, and installation with data and verbatim accounts to challenge this belief and other stereotypes about addiction.
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by Laura Kressly
The Spanish arrived in the Philippines in 1521. This was the start of centuries of violent colonial rule that still resonates today. Max Percy, a gay, mixed race Filipino man, carries this legacy in his body. It seems that no matter what he does, from visiting his Filipino grandfather, to flirting and fucking his way through London’s gay clubs, he is fetishised and othered. Percy’s complex solo show samples the racism and homophobia he encounters, shares Filipino creation stories, and uses movement to capture the tension between the different cultures he inhabits.
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by Laura Kressly
In 1992, Nasa’s shuttle launch Endeavour STS-47 had two firsts in its crew: an African American woman, and a married couple. Though the first is a major achievement in terms of racial equality and representation, the media was far more interested in whether or not the married couple had sex in space. A cast of five women use this remarkable, real-life history to consider racism and misogyny at NASA and more widely in this highly visual show.
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by Laura Kressly
Zara is a fiercely intelligent sex worker who runs an Edinburgh brothel as part of a non-hierarchical cooperative. The canny business woman doesn’t seem like she’s rattled by much, until a new client turns out to be one of her former teachers. On top if this, her colleague that he requested is running late due to childcare issues. The dark comedy by Kieran Hurley examines a tangled web of contemporary issues, particularly capitalism, parenting and familial relationships, work, and aging.
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by Laura Kressly
Lucy McCormick, performance artist extraordinaire and queen of the grotesque, starts off this show dressed in a felted tree costume. It calls to mind an out-of-place, awkward child in a school play unsure about what to do, but still enthusiastic. This is an appropriate start to the show’s premise: McCormick wants to put on a cabaret but doesn’t have any friends who could work on her show, so she drafts the audience in to help.
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by Diana Miranda
The London-based theatre company that goes by the fitting name Ensemble Not Found is a group of East Asian artists that bend storytelling boundaries and explore unconventional ways to connect with audiences. The company first caught my eye at VAULT Festival 2023 with their debut show Project Atom Boi. The piece is a multi-media insight on existential dread through the perspective of a self-indulgent filmmaker attempting to capture the memories of a young Londoner who grew up in a Chinese nuclear town. It involves audiences through live video and drawing boards, inviting volunteers to doodle words that trigger the protagonist’s memories.
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By Luisa De la Concha Montes
My Uncle is Not Pablo Escobar is a dynamic and exuberant play that explores and celebrates what it means to be a Latinx in London. It is a detective story peppered with telenovela-style drama.
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by Laura Kressly
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is one of this country’s great classical composers and conductors. His cantata trilogy The Song of Hiawatha is considered the best adaptation of Longfellow’s epic poem, and he had a celebrated career in the UK and abroad. Despite this, he died in 1912 at the age of 37, exhausted and in poverty. This was the end result of a lifetime spent resisting white supremacy that oppressed him for his Blackness.
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by Luisa De la Concha Montes
Mustafa Algiyadi’s stand-up comedy show is a breath of fresh air. He knows better than to try to convince his audience that the stereotypes they hold about Arabs are wrong. So instead, he does the unexpected, turning the show around, making his listeners the victims of his jokes.
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The Play's The Thing UK 