by Luisa De la Concha Montes
Mustafa Algiyadi’s stand-up comedy show is a breath of fresh air. He knows better than to try to convince his audience that the stereotypes they hold about Arabs are wrong. So instead, he does the unexpected, turning the show around, making his listeners the victims of his jokes.
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by an anonymous guest critic
It is a fool’s errand to try to review Trajal Harrell’s epic trilogy Porca Misera. It is a 3.5 hour-long monster of a show in three parts, which tests the limits of audience endurance and patience.
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by Luisa De la Concha Montes
This stand-up comedy double-act features Jamie Lerner and Mariah Girouard, two Americans living in Barcelona. The act starts with Mariah, who tells us about her disastrous dating experiences, her crack-ridden town in the US, and how cats and women have more in common that we may think. Her delivery is confident, balancing dark jokes with silly remarks in natural way.
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by Luisa De la Concha Montes
Homelessness might not seem like a stage-friendly topic. With the announcement of new laws that might further criminalise rough sleeping, it could seem risky to explore such a complex topic on stage. However, The Streets of London, produced and performed by Amy Wakeman, perfectly balances humour, statistics and verbatim theatre to open the audience’s mind to a topic that is too easily ignored.
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by Luisa De la Concha Montes
I Was Kinda the Bad Guy is Jaz Johnson’s debut play. This coming-of-age story explores the relationship between Diane (Jaz Johnson) and Nadine (Noah Fence), two friends that have developed a relationship of extreme closeness, becoming “one soul in two different bodies”. Diane’s mum recently abandoned her and she is dealing with the repercussion of this loss, which has made her distrustful of everyone, with the exception of Nadine.
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by Luisa De la Concha Montes
Written by Louis Cavalier and directed by Noah Mccredie, this a new play that presents the nuances of alcoholism recovery through dialogue. The play starts with Daniel (Louis Cavalier), who reluctantly joins a rehabilitation centre. In the room next door, Alice (Ava Dodsworth) hears his rambles and eventually decides to engage with him, starting a daily interaction that fluctuates between tension and empathy.
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by Euan Vincent
Unseen Unheard, a show seeking to improve the representation of Black women with breast cancer, is a co-production between Black Women Rising and Peckham Theatre. The production emerged from the real stories of black women’s struggles after a cancer diagnosis and the myriad problems that the system affords them, based on their race. From the belief that black women don’t feel pain – “they see us as superhuman and subhuman at the same time” – to the absence of prosthetics of an appropriate skin tone, point to health inequities that the statistics sadly bear out. Black women are 28% more likely to die from a triple-negative breast cancer diagnosis than white women with the same diagnosis.
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by Luisa De la Concha Montes
This is an innovative play that presents the true history of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cancer cells were used to create the first immortalised human cell line. It opens with a rhythmic, spoken-word monologue delivered by Henrietta (Aminita Francis). We soon learn that her DNA, nicknamed by herself as “Did Not Ask”, was non-consensually taken from her body in 1951. It has since served as the key basis for medical research, including the development of HIV vaccines, investigation of cancer cells and more recently, the COVID vaccine.
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by Zahid Fayyaz
The Adelphi Theatre was the site of the UK-wide tour of a talk from ‘the Scottish detective,’ David Swindle. The advertising for the Back to the Future musical in the lobby made for an interesting contrast to the show that the audience was filing in for. It was a basic set for the talk, with just a desk and a bookshelf, and very few bells and whistles. Swindle mainly talks but uses some illustrations from newspaper clippings and video excerpts of murderers giving interviews, and clips of the bodies being discovered.
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by Luisa De la Concha Montes
Directed by Lisa Millar and choreographed by Christopher Tendai, Wonderland in Alice is an original adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s tale that explores its themes and tropes through contemporary dance and music, trippy visuals and dynamic stage design.
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The Play's The Thing UK 