by Zahid Fayyaz
Fresh from a sold-out month at the Edinburgh Fringe, Ben Target, former Perrier comedy award nominee, comes to London with a run of his highly acclaimed solo show. A return to the stage after spending the last few years collaborating with other artists, this is a brave and startling work.
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by Laura Kressly
Safaris evoke the dynamic of the self and the other, the watcher and the watched. As an activity, it has a colonial legacy where the ‘civilised’ travel to faraway lands to observe ‘exotic’ people and wildlife in their native habitat. More widely, considering safari’s aspect of watching, it links to the gendered phenomenon of the male gaze. In this short performance piece-cum-installation, these differing, contemporary conceptualisations of the safari converge, prompting the audience to consider how women’s bodies – especially those from the Global Majority – are exoticised, othered and preyed on in a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal society.
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by Laura Kressly
Adam Mickiewicz is widely considered Poland’s equivalent to Shakespeare. His play Dziady is split into four parts, the second of which inspires this ritualistic, highly visual performance. Created by Song of the Goat Theatre founder Grzegorz Bral and performed in Polish, excellent design and heightened emotion communicate universal feelings around death and grief despite the language barrier.
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by Laura Kressly
After several hard years, Paines Plough’s popup theatre’s programme seems to know that our fractured, individualistic society needs some love and care. Six of this year’s shows reflect this: characters feeling lost, adrift or unfulfilled are desperately searching for someone or something to cling onto and give them purpose, or to help them feel less alone.
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by Laura Kressly
Immensely intelligent Jerome has always struggled to find his place in the world. He was too poor to go to private school like his best friend Henry, but at secondary school he got bullied for sounding white and talking posh. This coming-of-age monologue navigates growing up when you don’t quite fit in on the estate in Harlesden, at the shop where you work, or at the competitive uni out of town.
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by Laura Kressly
The South African companies Handspring Puppet Company and the Baxter Theatre have a world-renown reputation for puppetry and theatre, respectively. In this adaptation of the JM Coetzee novel, the puppetry is as good as anticipated, but the two hour-long, rambling story pushes the limits of audience patience and dulls the effect of the show’s message.
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by Laura Kressly
Theatre Ad Infinitum has developed a reputation for excellent storytelling about a vast range of subjects, all performed with a distinctive physical language. Their latest touring show is no different. The solo performance platforms some of the women in Greek mythology who are villianised, minimised and/or ignored by the canon. As well as giving them a chance to tell their stories, the show prompts reflection on women’s depiction in legend and literature.
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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
Section 28, the British law that prohibited the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local authorities, was passed in 1998 by Margaret Thatcher’s government. Though repealed in 2000 in Scotland and 2003 in England and Wales, Ellice Stevens (she/her) & Billy Barrett’s (he/him) verbatim musical demonstrates the harm this legislation caused on millions of queer people, and serves as a warning against today’s rampant transphobia.
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by Laura Kressly
In the Wes Anderson-esque, Scomodo Hotel looking out over the Edinburgh skyline, Aaron arrives for his first day of work. The row of identical, pastel doors foreshadows the farce that is about to commence, but this new play by Isobel McArthur uses the genre as a vehicle for a more complex story. Unfortunately this ambitious play tries to do way too much.
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The Play's The Thing UK 