by an anonymous guest critic
Witty, laugh-out-loud, Irish brilliance: Erica Murray’s London debut of The Cat’s Mother demonstrates how a female-centric production can truly be a hit.
Boys, VAULT Festival
by guest critic Ava Davies
Boys, the inaugural piece by physical theatre group The PappyShow, is about exactly that. It’s an exploration of manhood, of masculinity, of what it means to be a man of colour in the UK today. It’s about mess and silliness and play and pain. It’s about the complexity of selfhood – because how can one man possibly contain all these multitudes?
Blackout, VAULT Festival
by guest critic Lara Alier
Uber, happy hour, Tinder, late night cheesy chips are all part of the vocabulary of a Londoner’s life. So are two complete strangers waking up next to each other. Usually one of them will remember, and even find a blurred picture of you both at 4 am surrounded by empty glasses. Yet neither has any memories of the night before.
Madonna or Whore?, VAULT Festival
by guest reviewer Daphne Penn
Holly Morgan and Tom Moores create an upbeat, haphazardous cabaret sketch show that is loosely based on the daytime TV show Ready Steady Cook’s audience participation in order to judge important controversial women from history. Well, not all the women, not Madonna because ‘She’s too perfect to judge’ – in much the same way the TV show audience judges food.
Sacha Guitry, My Daughter and I, Drayton Arms Theatre
by guest critic Kudzanayi Chiwawa
Director Marianne Badrichani brings us this adaptation inspired by Sacha Guitry, a 20th Century playwright, actor and director. It includes short plays and extracts of his works, performed by an ensemble of three – Edith Vernes, Sean Rees and Anais Bachet.
Mary Stuart, Duke of York’s Theatre
by guest critic Kudzanayi Chiwawa
Heads or tails – with the flip of a coin, on this evening, Juliet Stevenson is Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart is portrayed by Lia Williams.
The play opens with urgency, the stakes are high and the rhythm throughout doesn’t let up. It’s exhilarating. Williams commands the stage like a beautiful beast, burdened by captivity. We know how history reads for these two women, but the battle waged on stage, makes you wonder how will it end.
WHITE, VAULT Festival
by guest critic Ava Davies
On the first page of WHITE’s playtext, Koko Brown writes, “This play is for anyone who has ever felt like the other”.
“You have the best of both worlds/ But you still have to pick a world/ You have to pick a side”
The Breaks in You and I, VAULT Festival
by guest critic Lara Alier
Two women get married. Eight months later, two women separate. The relationship is not measured by its length, but by its electric, high intensity. We see snapshots of their lives, flying in and out their present and their past.
Lamplighters, VAULT Festival
by guest critic Joanna Trainor
There’s a mole in the secret service.
Neil Connolly is spymaster James Sneezy, and he’s gathered us all to find out who the double agent is. It won’t be easy for the audience though; there are high levels of security to get through, cryptic communications to decipher and definitely no running.
Ladyface, VAULT Festival
by guest critic Amy Toledano
Highly inventive, energetic and hilarious, Ladyface has every element that a good comedy show should. This one-woman sketch show introduces us to a range of characters, from a rich bratty child who hates poor people, to a quirky girl and her pet prawn, to a poet who performs poetry about her various ailments. Ladyface (aka Lucy Farrett) brings them all along for the ride.
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