The Internet Was Made for Adults, VAULT Festival

by guest critic Joanna Trainor

A cabaret, but also Tinder, and a break up, sending nudes, watching porn for the first time and embracing or fearing female sexuality. The Internet was Made for Adults squashes a few too many storylines into one 70-minute show, some of which have almost nothing to do with the internet at all. Individually they would all make interesting and important subjects for a play, but crammed together it’s too disjointed to really
enjoy.

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Sacha Guitry, My Daughter and I, Drayton Arms Theatre

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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.

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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.

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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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Providence, VAULT Festival

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by guest critic Tom Brocklehurst

We discover H P Lovecraft, cult horror writer from Providence, Rhode Island, standing on the banks of the Providence River in 1910 threatening to drown himself. In an It’s A Wonderful Life-style intervention, the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe (Dominic Allen) arrives to try to talk him around. We then flash forwards through the rest of Lovecraft’s life in this biographical comedy, with Poe helping him along the way.

It sounds like a strange idea for a play, but it’s a suitably bonkers device for a show about a weird man who wrote very weird tales.

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Police Cops in Space, VAULT Festival

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by guest critic Tom Brocklehurst

The Pretend Men return with a ridiculous sequel to their action-packed police parody. Don’t worry if you missed the first one – you should still get a ticket to this! Done with parodying cop shows, we now get references to The Terminator, Blade Runner and Star Wars – to name but a few of the references.

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Mat Ewins Presents: Adventureman 7 – Return of Adventure Man, VAULT Festival

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by guest critic Zahid Fayyaz

From a successful run at Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Mat Ewins bring his well-received show to London’s VAULT festival. This is a series of daft but funny jokes, using faked videos and audience participation supported by a spine of an Indiana Jones-style adventure. The quest is to obtain a magical amulet to prevent the closure of his museum.

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The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, VAULT Festival

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by guest critic Lauren Gauge

At it’s best The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha is a one of the most ridiculously fun, liberating examples of interactive, ensemble storytelling. Though the narrative is intrinsic and the episodic adventures of Don Quixote are told with great clarity and comedy, the novel the production is based on is not the main attraction, nor is it important that one knows the original material.

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