by guest critic Hailey Bachrach
Ignace Cornelissen’s Henry the Fifth, which was at the Unicorn Theatre in 2015, remains one of my favourite versions of that play ever. Setting King Henry’s French wars in a sandbox, Cornelissen simplified without dumbing-down the central themes of Shakespeare’s play.
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?
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”
by Laura Kressly
Saeed is a Bedouin Palestinian refugee, currently in prison. With no one to speak to, his imagination conjures all sorts of beings and memories. He tells the walls his family history and remembers an old man, a donkey, and and a faceless alien. But this disjointed piece takes too long to come together, and the chosen style confuses and disorientates rather than fully rallies the audience to his side.
by guest critic Ava Davies
Nicole is tired of not seeing herself onstage. Nicole is tired of people telling her that racism and sexism don’t exist. Nicole is angry and she is ready to do something about that.
by Laura Kressly
The sickly, yellow lights of a featureless meeting room are making Serge thirsty. He just wants some water, to tell his story and get back home to Streatham. An unnamed woman and man try and fail to listen to him, but they’re more concerned with whether his story is the kind that would enable their Western, colonial notion of helping.
Let’s get this out of the way first – does Hamilton live up to the hype? Yes. It’s very good. Though the revolution in the plot doesn’t influence the dramaturgy, that doesn’t mean it’s not a fantastic show that musically updates the genre and skillfully triggers a spectrum of emotions. It’s simultaneously epic and intimate, staged surprisingly simply with striking, sculptural choreography and utterly engaging throughout.
But this pro-immigration, hip-hop reinvention of the all-American musical about a country gaining independence from a distant, tyrannical overlord resonates rather differently in Brexit Britain than it does in America. Forget the NHS bus – could Hamilton be the new symbol of the Leave campaign?
It can be tough to get kids to engage with Shakespeare. Many of them see the foreign-sounding language and old-fashioned stories as irrelevant to the issues they battle as growing up today. Fortunately, Intermission Youth Theatre artistic director Darren Raymond focuses on exploring contemporary themes in Shakespeare’s work with the 16-25s that make up the theatre company and convinces them to love the Bard.
by Paulina Brahm
A letter to Music Theatre Wales:
I’d also like to engage The British Council and additionally Birmingham Repertory and
Hackney Empire in my letter, as both Birmingham Repertory and Hackney Empire are Arts Council-funded.
I’m Paulina Brahm; an Asian-American actress, singer, and voiceover artist. I trained in
voice and acting in New York City; acting under much-missed Broadway director Gene
Frankel and voice under leading spinto soprano Dolores Mari of the New York City Opera. I am a full lyric soprano with coloratura flexibility and I now live, work and sing in the UK.
by guest critic Maeve Ryan
In her small Wiltshire village, Jaz says she’s ‘as black as it goes’. This is a beautifully made one woman show in which Natasha Marshall plays all the characters, but chiefly Jaz, a 17-year-young woman of mixed African and British parentage. Half Breed concerns self-identity and how self-acceptance can be the root to accepting others. It also concerns the deep intensity of young female friendship, for it is also a love story between Jaz and her best friend Brogan.
The Play's The Thing UK 