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One Flea Spare

This event has now finished Until Apr 16 2011 Old Red Lion Theatre, 418 St John St, EC1V 4NJ Full details & map

Theatre: Fringe

Also on at Old Red Lion Theatre

Happy New, Until Sat Mar 24

All events on at Old Red Lion Theatre

Shows on tonight

The Three Billy Goats Gruff, Little Angel Theatre
Macbeth, Millfield Theatre
Next Swan Down the RIver Might Be Black, Watermans
Thirsty, New Wimbledon Studio
Lysistrata, Fairfield Halls
Romeo and Juliet, Broadway Theatre

All shows on tonight

Time Out says Rate it

By Lucy Powell Posted: Tue Apr 5 2011

The Great Plague, which tore through London in 1665, is revisited with bubo-popping gusto in this zestful revival of Naomi Wallace's 1995 play.

Wallace sets her stage superbly. 'The watch' lock up a rich couple with two passing vagabonds for a 28-day quarantine. Within their plague-haunted prison, love blooms and withers, long-buried animosities rise to the surface and are painfully lanced, and every last exchange is a strategic sally in a class or gender power war.

Sue Colverd's gutsy, sexy production veritably whiffs of seventeenth-century London, enhanced by the alluringly raggedy, circular design of Corinne Hockley and Davy McGuire's elegant video art. Ian Gain also delivers a stunningly nuanced, salty, enigmatic performance as Bunce, a runaway sailor, and Kate Abraham's pursed-lipped, alienated Mrs Snelgrave throbs with secret sadness.

Occasionally, all the dirt and cockney blarney tips over into 'Blackadder'parody, not helped by a couple of garish performances, and the lurid extremes of Wallace's script. But London's scarred, ribald and fetid past has rarely seemed so infectiously alive.

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