Royal Court Theatre

Genre-bending Singaporean playwright Joel Tan throws a lot into the mix to make a play about whether we should return artefacts to China not dull, and quite a lot of the time he succeeds: his Royal Court debut is a playful, disjointed collection of scenes-cum-installations which enjoyably ignore convention, and definitely one of the more ambitious shows there’s been in the Royal Court Upstairs recently.   A mummified figure sits on a plinth at one end of the space, its form turned into twists and distortions by the layers of cloth and rope wrapped around it. This is Guanyin, a (fictional) sacred Chinese statue that was nicked by some Brit at some point and plonked in the British Museum. The Chinese government wants it back. Starting with a protest from some Islington witches, each subsequent scene plays out with new characters, hopping between people and places (doddery art historians, political prisoners, activist students, dodgy billionaires), building up the history of the statue and arguments that now blaze around it; the cultural and political stuff, the institutional context, the history of it, its artistic value, its spiritual significance, but also the personal encounters people have with the object.  The constant drop away of meaning and context between each scene is enjoyably disorienting: it takes a minute to work out if or how one sequence is connected to the last. Under directors emma + pj, some scenes are dance, tableaux, non-literal. Some are earnest, others...

This review is from the New Diorama in 2023. After the Act transfers to the Royal Court in expanded form in 2025. If you search Hansard, the transcript of everything ever said in Parliament, for ‘syphilis, gonorrhea and genital herpes’ there is only one result. It’s a furiously homophobic speech given by the Conservative MP Jill Knight in 1987 as she led the charge for a law that banned ‘the promotion of homosexuality in schools and local authorities’.  The members of Breach Theatre weren’t alive when Section 28 was passed in 1988 but the 15 years it was in force had a wounding legacy on the generations that grew up under its influence. Through verbatim testimony, Parliamentary transcripts, news reports and other materials from the time, these four performers tell the story of one of the most regressive, destructive and cruel pieces of legislation in this country’s recent history. Oh, and it’s a musical.Writer/director Billy Barrett and writer/performer Ellice Stevens have strong form when it comes to big themes and inventive use of verbatim: there was 2016’s ‘Tank’ about the CIA’s experiments with dolphins, and their 2018 masterpiece ‘It’s True, It’s True, It’s True’, which used the transcript of a seventeenth-century rape case to show up the woefully inadequate approach to rape convictions today. The company’s powers are undiminished with ‘After the Act’. It’s a bit messy, a bit imperfect, but its flaws are completely overwhelmed by all that’s good about the show. The...

Sarah Kane’s final play 4.48 Psychosis is one of the most famous productions in Royal Court Theatre history, not least for the circumstances under which it was originally staged: just 18 months after hear death, the bleak piece – which is in many ways closer to a poem than a play, with no discernible characters – was memorably described by the Guardian’s Michael Billington as ‘a 75-minute suicide note’.  This revival comes precisely 25 years on, in the Court’s tiny Upstairs theatre where the play originated, and sees director James Macdonald reunite with his original creative team and the original cast – particularly notable because one of them was RSC co-artistic director Daniel Evans. Despite how faithful it is to the past in many ways, the plan is not to simply restage a quarter century old production, but reinvent the play anew and perhaps banish the spectre of Kane’s death from proceedings. The play is, after all, endlessly malleable and open to interpretation. Inevitably this will sell out incredibly quickly as the decision to stage upstairs means supply will inevitably outstrip demand. As an RSC co-production – perhaps the cost of securing Evans’s services – it will go on to the more spacious Other Space in Stratford, with a final performance taking place, rather extraordinarily, at 4.48 in the morning.

Katie Mitchell’s second play for the David Byrne-era Royal Court threatens makes last year’s non-linear poetry adaptation Bluets look positively commerical. A collaboration between the legendary avant-garde director, playwright Nina Segal and sound artist Melanie Wilson, Cow | Deer – apparently you’re not allowed to say it ‘Cow-slash-deer’ – it’s a wordless work about a dsy in the life of a cow and a deer that aims to further the eco-minded bent of Mitchell’s work by ‘decentring’ humans from a work. Truly, who can say what this will mean or look like, but presumaby it’s about as out-there a thing as you’ll see on a stage this year. Actors will apparently be involved, though it’s unclear precisely what they’ll be doing.

David Byrne’s Royal Court seasons have proven almost aggressively eclectic so far, with surefire commercial smashes rubbing up against stuff that comes across as genuinely quite mad. Coming a year after West End transfer Giant made its debut, Nick Payne’s The Unbelievers certainly looks like another big hit: the great Marianne Elliott (War Horse, Curious Incident) will make her debut at the venerable new writing theatre, in Payne’s first Court play since his huge hit Constellations, with design by the legendary Bunnie Christie. The cherry on the cake is the marvellous Nicola Walker, who will star as a woman whose son disappeared seven years ago and for whom time has now fractured, causing her to experience every minute of every year gone by simultaneously. Okay, that’s a pretty mad concept, but if anyone can pull it off it’s this A-Team of theatrical talent.