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Tim is an award-winning arts journalist and audio producer. He writes regularly for publications including the Independent, Evening Standard and Financial Times, and produces radio programmes and podcasts for the BBC.
What happens if you give kids in conflict zones guns? That’s the thrust of this new play by Josh Azouz, whose work has often blended horror and humour, using strange and sometimes surreal settings to tune into the politics of race, religion and human relationships.His last play, Once Upon A Time In Nazi Occupied Tunisia, explored Jewish-Arab relations via a knitting Nazi. This latest – a self-aware comedy first about keeping secrets as a teenager, then about keeping secrets as a soldier – has the same impulse, essentially an anti-war message through off-kilter comedy, but it’s less specific in its target.Gigi (Tanvi Virmani) and Dar (Lola Shalam) are two young soldiers guarding a roadblock, somewhere. The lighting suggests it’s hot and sandy. Current events make comparisons to the Middle East inevitable, though the lack of place names means you can map any conflict zone onto the bare stage. In this strange, non-specific landscape they talk – often directly to the audience, seemingly aware they’re in a play – about how they’re a few days from the end of compulsory service. They eat Nutella and chat about boyfriends, secrets (who’s sleeping with who), their different backgrounds (Gigi is rich, Dar is left-wing). They fiddle with their massive machine guns. Virmani and Shalam bring the goofy dialogue to life brilliantly, Shalam’s Dar the more garrulous and mercurial, while Virmani is quiet and intense.Despite the occasional mention of ‘enemies’, ‘extremists’, ‘your people’, thes
Waleed Akhtar’s last play ‘The P Word’ was a love story: two gay men from different worlds, exploring attitudes to sexuality, racism, asylum seekers. It was a huge hit and won an Olivier Award. His new play is a love story, too, but of a very different kind. Starting as a period piece in 2006, we hurtle through almost two decades of friendship between Zaid and Neelam. Zaid is gay, Neelam has ‘a reputation’ after sleeping with a classmate. Both come from fairly strict Pakistani Muslim families. They start off in sync: uni, clubbing, first loves. Then they start to weave in and out of each other’s paths. And then they diverge.
Akhtar writes their (initially) uncomplicated platonic love as brilliantly as he does their crackling arguments. it’s hard not to fall for Zaid, a sweet and optimistic Nathaniel Curtis, who adds a bitter note of self-interest as the play goes on, and Mariam Haque’s Neelam - a superb performance - who starts cynical and sarcastic, with flashes of beautiful sincerity, before modulating her accent and muting her brashness as she gets older and settles into a good job, starts a family.
Director Anthony Simpson-Pike has the duo flitter through the staccato scenes in a sunken circle, the many locations summoned with Christopher Nairne’s brilliantly busy lighting.
With Zaid and Neelam wannabe playwrights, Akhtar chucks in plenty of in-jokes about the theatre world, its approach to programming Asian writers, and its demands on the content of their plays. But he
Of that persistent strand of plays about putting on plays, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s ‘Our Country’s Good’ is among the best known, and among the best. Adapted in 1988 from Thomas Keneally’s novel ‘The Playmaker’, it follows the first British colonists landing in 1780s Australia. Some are convicts who’ve been transported, some are marines sent to supervise and civilise. One soldier has the bright idea of putting on a play; so they debate, they rehearse, they put on Farquhar’s Restoration satire ‘The Recruiting Officer’.
That sets up loads of opportunities for jokes about theatre, and smart lines about plays, and it’s that self-awareness that director Rachel O’Riordan leans into in her chunky, slightly exaggerated production. All the acting is overacting, the cast pushing towards a shouty, almost absurd register, with some scenes turning into broad comedy as they all entertainingly take on multiple roles. They seem to want to constantly remind us they are actors putting on a production of ‘Our Country’s Good’.
Gary McCann’s set brings it out too: an undulating dune with stripped trees – ‘a brittle burnt out country’, as one character says – natural looking until you hear the plastic thump of the actors’ feet on it, and see the spotlights come slowly down from the sky.
That smart concept and boisterous comedy too often come at the expense of the play’s seriousness of purpose. The more harrowing scenes have to work harder to earn their power. There’s an important strand in her
There’s an irony that ‘Fiddler On the Roof’ is being revived in the only theatre in London that doesn’t have one. But Jordan Fein’s joyous, then suddenly very sad production is all about uprooting traditions. So for the opening image – one of the most famous in musical theatre – where the fiddler would normally fiddle on a shtetl rooftop, here instead in Tom Scutt’s superb design he stands among wheat sheafs on a strip of land uprooted and peeled back like skin to hang threateningly above the stage.It’s a remarkable image in a production full of them; a production about reinventing a classic musical through small gestures and symbols, rather than radical high concepts. Famously, ‘Fiddler’ was criticised when it premiered in 1964 as ‘shtetl kitsch’. We’ve got Tevye, the old wisecracker, and the increasingly untraditional marriages of his daughters; we’ve got the small Jewish community with the matchmaker and the slightly hapless Rabbi.But Fein, who co-directed ‘sexy Oklahoma!’ when it came to London last year and helped strip it of any hokey old associations, eradicates the kitsch here, too. Yes it’s funny – Adam Dannheisser’s Tevye still cracks jokes and talks to the audience, though he’s more dad-funny than the kind of showman-comedian that Tevye often becomes – and yes it’s faithful, but this is a serious production.Part of that is circumstance. There’s something particularly charged right now about a piece of theatre set on Russian land about a Jewish community. Even more
A new play by Rob Drummond is pretty much a guarantee of a good evening. In his best shows, which often feature himself, big concepts are presented in fun formats. There was The Majority at the National Theatre that asked the audience to vote on everything from whether latecomers should be admitted to whether a person’s deeply private love letter should be read out on stage. There was Bullet Catch, in which an audience member pointed a gun at his head. And In Fidelity which tried to make two audience members fall in love.Pins and Needles is about vaccines. Yikes. And how do you do a play about something that has pushed many people to extreme views? Make it verbatim of course. Using the real words of real people is a surefire way to add authority and solemnity. But this is a Drummond play, and the tricksiness starts right from the beginning. The guy on stage says he’s Rob Drummond. Says he’s doing a verbatim play about vaccines. Except that’s not Rob Drummond. That’s actor Gavi Singh Chera.Writing his own play as he performs it, not-Rob shifts between an interview he did in 2012 with a woman who decided not to give her baby son the MMR vaccine, an interview he did last year with a guy whose mum died from the Covid vaccine, and an interview with Edward Jenner himself, the (apparent) inventor of vaccines.While the characters talk about the impossibility of knowing what to believe – lies from big pharma, lies by Andrew Wakefield, lies from the government – we too grapple with whe
Ah the Seventies. Already bored of perfectly polished Golden Age musicals, the mad geniuses of the decade decided that they’d invent the ‘concept musical’, based around a particular theme rather than a nice story.Cue ‘A Chorus Line’. Based on interviews with a bunch of Broadway chorines, their fretful experiences of being ensemble members – the vexed question of wanting to be an individual but having to be identical to the next chorus member along – as well as their stories of growing up (abuse, rejection, escape through dance etc) were turned into this: a strange, bitty piece set on a bare Broadway stage, showing a group of 24 dancers audition for a part in the chorus of a new show.There’s not really any story, and songs flit in and out, interwoven with dialogue and dance. Each of the dancers tells us a bit about themselves. Essentially, a strange product of its age, the original anti-musical.Nikolai Foster’s production, which started life at Leicester’s Curve Theatre in 2021, is a long way from all that. The original production was surprising for its lack of set, costumes and its frankness around sex and sexuality. But the show’s been made glitzy and glossy over the years, and especially so here. There’s a colossal amount of set and lighting gone in to make it look like there’s none at all. Seriously, the lighting by Howard Hudson is phenomenal. It flashes between harsh house lights and beautiful sculpted stage lighting, with huge rigs that rise and fall above the stage.Fos
Stefan’s got a problem. He doesn’t remember the woman he slept with ten years earlier and now she’s basically his stalker. That’s the thrust of this strange, slight play by Christopher Hampton, adapted from the novella by Stefan Zweig. But despite its themes of obsession and mental illness, this is not ‘Baby Reindeer’. It’s far too arch, too stiff for that.
The original novella takes the form of a letter written by a woman to a Viennese writer. She explains her obsession with him, how it’s played out for many years, and some of the dire consequences. Hampton, who first adapted this for the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna where it was very successful, has had to fiddle with the structure and the timeline. Yes he has form with epistolary works turned into plays – ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ is his biggest hit – and he knows that someone reading out a letter on stage probably isn’t that interesting. But nor, especially, is this. First Stefan and the woman have a one night stand. She seems to know a lot about him. Then she comes back in some distress, and talks at him for ages.
The unpeeling of the mystery keeps things interesting for a while, but the dialogue stays too stilted, like it’s translated from another language (which it sort of is) and Chelsea Walker’s production feels all cold and alienating, with a permeating bleakness that stops us from finding any heart, or any way of feeling for the characters.
Rosanna Vize’s set looks cold and ghostly. The flat is grey, ful
Remember that incredibly cool band from Scotland in the ’80s that changed music forever despite only playing a few gigs? No? Well that’s because they didn’t exist. This sort-of one-man play (a hit in Edinburgh in 2022) is adapted from David Keenan’s 2017 hallucinatory novel about an imagined Scottish post-punk band called Memorial Device. There’s a lead singer who can’t form memories and a bassist who likes to cover himself in blood, that kind of thing.Paul Higgins plays Ross Raymond, a fanzine editor-cum-journalist who was there for all of it, enthusiastically bringing the band to life with mannequins, a fancy dress box and a laptop. Higgins is great, one of those middle-aged music obsessives who's never quite let go of their youth, telling the story with a passionate intensity, like he can’t quite believe we don’t know more about Memorial Device. Mimicking the form of the novel, which consists of interviews with other people who were there, a projector screen plays talking heads who flesh out some of the story.The text, adapted and directed by Graham Eatough, brings that place and that era to life in a beautifully joyful, haunted way. There’s the attention to detail first and foremost: the carefully created memorabilia, genealogy maps of the various bands that coalesced and broke up to eventually get to Memorial Device (Occult Theocracy, Slave Demographics), and the snippets of music from Gavin Thomson and Stephen Pastel which suggest a kind of woozy psychedelic vibe.And Ea
In 1884 a group of countries (Britain included) came together to divvy up Africa between them. The Berlin Conference is the inspiration for this very sharp, very clever game-theatre show from the masters of the form, Coney.
Warning: you will have to talk to strangers, and you will have to do stuff. This isn’t a sitting in the dark kind of evening at the theatre. We all go into a big room and split ourselves into groups of seven, our little gangs sitting around a plywood table on which is a blank plywood floor plan. The table is strewn with little plywood props and pens and other things, a beautiful custom made board game designed by Chloe Mashiter and Jacob Wu.
A story starts to unfold with the help of some deliberately over the top acting. Our tables are our new communities. We’re asked to design a house logo, create a house knock, draw items that we’d like to include in our house. We’re encouraged to discuss and chat – and it’s really kind of awkward, coming to collective decisions with complete strangers about a space we’re meant to call our home. One of my group wants to put a shrine in our home, another wants his PlayStation.
As the games continue, we start to settle into it: bonds form, everyone relaxes a bit. And then it all starts to go wrong.
The fun of it, really, is not knowing what’s coming – so that’s about as much as I’ll give away but writer Rhianna Ilube, who was behind the brilliantly, bitingly satirical play ‘Samuel Takes A Break’ recently, has created w
Tyrell Williams’s debut ‘Red Pitch’ – transferring to the West End from the Bush with a million ‘best play’ awards in its wake – is so good that it might make you like football. It’ll certainly make you like the three boys who spend their days kicking ball on their south London estate’s concrete pitch, dreaming of playing for a big team, and gassing about the big things in a 16-year-old’s life (football).
There’s lots to say about how the dialogue is like the game itself, lines set up and built on and passed to the next player, and how director Daniel Bailey brings a manager’s eye to the production, turning the actors into a tight, three-strong team, who move around each other like players on a pitch, all support and trust. But the point really is that it’s a brilliant bit of writing about gentrification, friendship, masculinity and aspiration, without ever being heavy-handed.As Omz, Bilal and Joey meet up on Red Pitch, holding onto the certainty of playground rules – last to touch the ball goes to get it etc – they charge towards a future that seems very uncertain. In the background is the regeneration of the estate: some families are moving but, some are staying with the hope that it’ll make ends better.For Francis Lovehall’s Omz the regeneration might mean the lift starts working again so his 81-year-old grandad doesn’t have to climb five flights of stairs. For Bilal (Kedar Williams-Stirling) and goalie Joey (Emeka Sesay) it’s a new start somewhere nicer, maybe with a gard
Anyone up for a hilarious comedy about slavery? Rhianna Ilube’s play is as outrageous as it sounds, set in Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle, where enslaved Ghanaians were held before being loaded onto ships and sent across the Atlantic. It’s now a tourist destination, with a gift shop of course, where Samuel hosts hourly tours for diasporic visitors making a pilgrimage to the site for the Year of Return.
Ilube takes the premise and turns it into a see-sawing satire about atrocity tourism, where broad comedy – ‘We don’t like the word “slave” here,’ Samuel says cheerily, ‘We have received feedback that it’s not a word people like’ – lurches suddenly into deep meditations on the reality and the destructive legacy of colonialism.
At first it’s all short, clipped scenes, snapshots from the hourly tours as Fode Simbo’s uptight, history-obsessed Samuel deals with endlessly crass tourists, all played by the brilliantly multi-roleing Tori Allen-Martin and Stefan Asante-Boateng. Some of these visitors are desperate for a connection with their ancestors: Allen-Martin’s turn as an old British-Jamaican woman talking to her ancestors is particularly moving. ‘Thank you for getting through it,’ she says, ‘sorry I’m here’. Some have just come along for the Insta opportunities - there’s another excellent bit from Allen-Martin as a hideous influencer.
All these people are starting to drive Samuel a bit mad. Simbo gives a great performance, all starched and upright, cheerful to begin with but increa
We’re here to see the world’s oldest comedy: that’s what Aitor Basauri and Toby Park, the two remaining members of the physical comedy company Spymonkey, tell us in this adaptation of Aristophanes’s ‘The Frogs’ which is very clever, very silly, very self-aware but not always as funny as it promises to be.
Aristophanes’s 2,500-year-old comedy follows the pompous god of theatre Dionysus and his fall-guy slave Xanthias as they go down into the underworld to bring back Euripides, the greatest playwright of all time. It was full of nods to Greek theatre of the time, in-jokes and fart gags, and adaptor Carl Grose’s update captures that really well.
We’ve got straight-man Park as Dionysus and deadpan clown Basauri as Xanthias, but they’re also playing themselves as they talk us through the reasons for staging ‘The Frogs’. It’s a complicated conceit, but essentially we get a show which, at any one moment, is a version of ‘The Frogs’ that’s faithful to the original in spirit and plot, as well as a play about Spymonkey staging ‘The Frogs”, as well as a play about Spymonkey the company itself.
Once a troupe of four core members, Petra Massey ‘went off to Las Vegas’ and Stephan Kreiss died in 2021, leaving just Park and Basauri to figure out what the company is in its current form. The third cast member, Jacoba Williams, playing all the other parts, encourages them to embrace being a duo by turning to the world’s first double act, Dionysus and Xanthias.
In a lot of places it’s very f