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Feature | Building (Hi)stories: Ladyfriends in Rehearsals

by Diana Miranda

Period dramas have become the ultimate weekend watch according to trending British media. And while Ladyfriends, written and directed by Clodagh Chapman, is pretty much suffragettes Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney’s story, this isn’t one of those dramas. Ladyfriends starts from the premise that Annie and Christabel are dating. Though historians dispute this based on ‘lack of scholastic rigour’, Chapman’s take doesn’t engage in these controversies and sees Chris and Annies’ dating as a fact. To her, a more exciting endeavour is to explore how people relate to history, and what lays behind re-visiting it and pursuing new readings.

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Queens of Sheba, Soho Theatre

Queens of Sheba, Soho Theatre review – energy, entertainment and rage

by Romy Iris Conroy

This is a triumphant return of Queens of Sheba after a successful run at Soho Theatre in 2021 and Edinburgh Fringe in 2018. Expertly directed, these ladies burst onto the stage with such energy and so many vibes it it’s infectious and everyone in the audience feels it.

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The Glow, The Royal Court

The Glow, Royal Court review – bizarre, beautiful and breathtaking

by Laura Kressly

Though a master of testing the theatrical limits of space and time, the first half of Alistair McDowall’s latest play unfolds like a straightforward Gothic thriller. In a largely recognisable style and form, an unnamed young woman is rescued from a Victorian asylum by a medium needing a new assistant, but her unanticipated power has frightening consequences for the household. Though an interesting enough consideration of spiritualism and class, the second half of the show is far more expansive and unpredictable. Like McDowall’s previous plays X and Pomona, dramaturgical conventions are so distended that the world in Act I seems alien. The real world we live in does, too.

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Tokyo Rose, Curve Leicester

Curve Theatre / Tokyo Rose

by Olivia Rose Deane

Burnt Lemon have taken their acclaimed 2019 Edinburgh Fringe hit Tokyo Rose on the road with a retooled cast, score and book and a good deal of anticipation. The bones of this new version of the show remain the same, telling the story of Iva Toguri, a Japanese-American radio journalist wrongly convicted of treason in 1945. As in the original, themes include xenophobia, cultural identity, and scapegoating, all with a six-strong female cast. The show opens with the high-energy and undeniably catchy “Hello America” – attention well and truly grabbed. Unfortunately, the number also represents the pinnacle of what is otherwise a flat, one-note production. The book (by Baldwin and Yoon) is generally good, retaining some of the smart, self-referential moxie that made the show charming in 2019, but is let down by the weakness of the score.

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A Place for We, Park Theatre

Review: A Place for We at Park Theatre, London – 'Absorbing, nuanced performances'

by Romy Foster

Let ‘spirit tek yuh’ through a cycle of life and death in this time-warp through Brixton from the 1970’s to present day.
Through the decades, three families try to navigate their way through an ever-changing environment. With gentrification and protests on the rise, trying to maintain dying family businesses proves difficult when they are all resistant to change.

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Screen 9, Pleasance Theatre

Edinburgh Review: Screen 9 at Pleasance @ EICC - Theatre Weekly

by Zahid Fayyaz

This was a big hit at the (limited) Edinburgh Fringe this year, and comes down to north London’s Pleasance Theatre for only two performances. It tells the story of the Aurora, Colorado cinema shooting during the Dark Knight Returns movie premiere, when a shooter killed 13 people during a midnight screening. This is a serious subject for a show, and Piccolo Theatre Company put forward the story using the method of verbatim theatre, with the script constructed from interviews with four survivors of the shooting, some of whom lost someone during the attack.

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Feature | Re-framing Narratives with Maybe You Like It Productions

Pleading Stupidity | Camden Fringe | Maybe You Like It Productions

By Diana Miranda

Maybe You Like It Productions has just finished a run at the Camden Fringe premiering their comedy Pleading Stupidity, a show written and directed by Caleb Barron and inspired by the real case of the ‘Dumb and Dumber bandits’, as the media called them. The show tells the story of two Aussies who robbed a local bank during their gap year in a Colorado ski town, whilst wearing name tags from their jobs and making no attempt to hide their accents. The crime was solved in eight minutes.

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Hjem, Greenhouse Theatre

Review: Hjem at The Greenhouse Theatre - Theatre Weekly

by Diana Miranda

At the heart of Canary Wharf’s Jubilee Park, The Greenhouse lets go of theatre productions’ bells and whistles to become a zero-waste venue that works only with recycled materials. The little wooden cottage and its in-the-round staging give the audience a feeling of gathering around a fire for a storytelling session, and the tales it offers are set in natural environments that frame, or even shape, the characters’ fortunes.

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Feature | Henry VI Part One: open rehearsal project

Cast revealed for RSC's Henry VI Part One: Open Rehearsal Project | WhatsOnStage

By Diana Miranda

The Royal Shakespeare Company flung open their locked playhouse doors with a new project that engaged audiences in a socially distanced but immersive manner: they put the making process of a play online for anyone to watch. From 1- 13 June, audiences (or rather Vimeo viewers) could join the cast and creatives of Henry VI Part One every weekday for live streams of the company’s morning physical and voice warm-ups, lunchtime rehearsals, and evening green rooms that answered audience questions and allowed the team to expand on their crafts, normally kept behind the scenes. All the live streams were available to watch until 25 June. If uncovering a rehearsal process doesn’t sound unconventional enough, the show did not hit the stage boards. Instead, the final performance consisted of a live-streamed, rehearsal room run-through from the RSC’s Ashcroft Room on 23 June.

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Shedding a Skin, Soho Theatre

photo by Helen Murray

by Laura Kressly

Whilst feeling uncertain and lost may well be something everyone goes through at least at one point in their life, thats no consolation in the moment. Everyone else seems to have purpose, direction and a place, and the sense of not having that can be debilitating. That’s certainly the case for Myah.

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