Review: VIOLA'S ROOM, One Cartridge PlaceJune 3, 2024In a sudden lurch away from their epic 2022 creation The Burnt City, immersive specialists Punchdrunk’s next effort is a far more cosy affair. Small barefoot groups walk their way through the Nineties fairytale world of Viola’s Room with the story relayed over headphones by Helena Bonham Carte
Review: STRATEGIC LOVE PLAY, Soho TheatreMay 30, 2024Miriam Battye’s hilariously brutal and dark dissection of modern relationships - from tentative beginnings over a pint to their varied ends - returns to Soho Theatre for its second run in less than a year.
Review: BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY, Hampstead TheatreMay 14, 2024Walter Washington is stuck. Stuck in his recently deceased wife’s wheelchair. Stuck in “a rent-controlled palace ruled by a grieving despot king” that he can ill afford. Stuck waiting for City Hall to pay him what he considers his due after a thirty year-long cop career ended in a shooting incident. That’s a whole lot of stuck.
Review: DOCTOR BROWN: BETURNS, Soho TheatreApril 26, 2024Coming on like some kind of sadistic Mr Bean, the scarier-than-Pennywise Doctor Brown has been terrorising audiences with his silent comedy since 2009 and returns to Soho Theatre with his first new show in over a decade.
Review: A SPECTACLE OF HERSELF, Battersea Arts CentreApril 26, 2024In her PhD on “Deconstructing the Spectacle: Aerial Performance as Critical Practice”, Dr Laura Murphy had a singular mission: “to challenge normative ideas attached to and embedded in aerial work”. In A Spectacle Of Herself, she delivers on this challenge with style and conviction.
Review: YOU ARE GOING TO DIE, Southwark PlayhouseApril 23, 2024A show dripping in pretension performed by a naked man? An impenetrable work obsessed with having a sex toy deep inside one’s backside? A meditation on “existential anxiety” that does little of note with an hour of precious life? There’s enough irony in You Are Going To Die to power an Alanis Morissette comeback, and then some.
Review: 1884, Shoreditch Town HallApril 22, 2024What is the difference between a house and a home? And who gets to write history? Interactive experience 1884 provokes challenging answers to these questions in the context of an almost-forgotten historical event that had significant consequences for two continents.
Review: THE BALLAD OF HATTIE AND JAMES, Kiln TheatreApril 19, 2024Somewhere in King’s Cross, a middle-aged woman sits at a piano and plays an original piece with surprising fluency. There begins Samuel Adamson’s tumultuous tale of two teenage musical prodigies whose lives become thoroughly entangled.
Review: MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, Wilton's Music HallApril 11, 2024Serving as a kind of Barber of Seville of theatre, Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the most accessible of Shakespeare’s plays. Its blend of mystic romance, daffy dramatists and fairy-powered shenanigans is not short on rambunctious comedy turns but, in the hands of Flabbergast Theatre, that aspect is turned up to eleven.
Review: PHANTOM PEAK: FESTIVAL OF INNOVATION, LondonApril 10, 2024When Phantom Peak, one of London's most innovative and ridiculously fun theatrical experiences, holds a Festival Of Innovation, how can one say no? It is not the only impressive immersive show in town but its near-peerless execution and boundless imagination puts it up there with the more well known Punchdrunk.