By Laura Kressly
There’s little that’s exciting about watching a petulant, man-child of a king taking 90-odd minutes to die whilst his two wives, a housekeeper, a guard and a ‘doctor’ debate his legacy and the reported collapse of his kingdom. But the design, that climactically progresses along with the king’s death, in this new version by Patrick Marber is a fine reward for enduring the tedium of snarky melodrama that makes up most of the performance.
by guest critic Amy Toledano
The Laundry is a lovely collaboration of writing by 15 Degrees Theatre that explores womanhood across many generations and across many cultures. Travelling across Europe from Russia, the play begins with two sisters and ends in three stories that will have you wanting to ring your mum the minute it ends.
by guest critic Gregory Forrest
A new Alan Bennett play is an event. And hospitals – the epicentres of birth and death – are eventful places. Allelujah! is a match made in heaven then.
by an anonymous guest critic
Pigspurt’s Daughter is a kalaediscopic, one-woman show in which Daisy Campbell takes the audience on a journey through the life of her father, the theatre legend Ken Campbell. Campbell, for those too young to know of his work, was an eccentric and brilliant theatre impresario, actor, writer, director and producer.
By Laura Kressly
In 1930s Key West, German x-ray technician Carl Tanzler harbours an obsession for a local woman dying of Tuberculosis. Claiming to have nine degrees and access to technology that will cure her, he lavishes her with gifts and dubious treatments though the married woman never returns his affections. When she inevitably dies, he pays for the construction a mausoleum for her. Not content with this tribute, two years after her death he steals her remains and lives with them as his wife for seven years before being discovered.
By guest critic Gregory Forrest
I swear to God the Theatre Upstairs is gonna give me an aneurism. An explosion. Pitch black. Shouts and screams and gunfire. The immediate sense of panic is all consuming, and I don’t blame one lady for having to bow out of Cordelia Lynn’s startling new play One For Sorrow.
By Laura Kressly
Mud covers the Olivier stage. It’s dark, nearly black, thick and peaty. The ‘emerald’ part of the Emerald Isle is pointedly absent. The muck’s heavy and pervasive, working its way into every crevice of the rural hedge school where students of all ages learn Latin and Greek. They don’t mind the mud. But the British soldiers that come with their imposing colonisation, also working its way into nook and cranny? That’s where the villagers take issue.
By Laura Kressly
Like many before and after him, Ignatius Sancho was born on a slave ship in 1729. Unlike other slaves, the orphan received an education, married, owned property, published letters and compositions, and was the first black person to vote in a British election.
by guest critic Steven Strauss
On its surface, the title Long Day’s Journey into Night describes the looooong four acts it takes Eugene O’Neill’s play to chronicle the story of one day-into-night in the life of the Tyrone family. Metaphorically, it suggests how the play utilizes this micro-slice of life to depict how this autobiographical family descends from the daylight of sanity to the darkness of madness in a macro sense, and how their projected reality in the sunlight of day masks the true darkness of night lingering underneath.
by an anonymous guest critic
We open on a stereotypical, modern American kitchen where wife Barb (Gala Gordon) is busying herself. When her husband Walt (Gareth David-Lloyd) comes down for breakfast, she attempts to make him something extra special: blueberry toast. Walt refuses the dish, insisting that he never asked for it and that what he really wanted was blueberry pancakes.
The Play's The Thing UK 