Cognitive Strategies for Analysing & Evaluating Theatre Performances
Josey De Rossi 
The popularity of Lee Hall’s The Pitman Painters is evident from its sell-out seasons at the National Theatre, on Broadway and in the West End. Arguably, such success must make Hall’s play one of the past decade’s most significant English dramas to engage contemporary audiences in re-looking at “class warfare” in post-WW2 British culture.
ourneying was very much on my mind as I made my way to Enfield to view Perilous Escapade in the Mimetic Festival at the Dugdale Centre. The challenge of the quest structure is hard to resist dramatically, and the writers of Flabbergast Theatre’s puppet play spectacularly squeezed every metaphor and physical allusion out of the form as they move their two leathery characters, Boris and Sergey, from “Dynamic Duo” type entrance to their sad final parting.
Where the White Stops by Antler Theatre was a wonder to behold. To say the performance was heroic is literally true as the troupe of four – Daniela Pasquini, Nasi Voutsas and Jasmine Woodcock-Stewart and Daniel Ainsworth – enacted a beautifully imaginative and energetic piece of physical theatre in costumes fit for the North Pole in sauna-like heat conditions! At Battersea Arts Centre.
Anh Chu’s Something There That’s Missing was previewed for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival at Theatre503, staged by We Flew Big Theatre Company. Conceptually strong, it examines the world of “hopes and dreams” intertwined with the practical, often mundane, world of doing the actual work of realising personal ambition.
Why World War I poets are revered in English Literature while World War II poet Keith Douglas is largely forgotten poses an interesting question about our cultural values. A promising idea, however, is left unrealised in Shane Burke’s Forget Me Not. At the Tea House Theatre.
“Did you know that Our Town is the most performed play in the world after Shakespeare, with a performance of the play running every night in the United States since its premiere in 1938? Over 300,000 performances!” Artistic Director Adam Spreadbury-Maher, at the opening of King’s Head Theatre’s 75th Anniversary Production of Wilder’s Our Town.
Joe Evan’s music & lyrics and Linnie Reedman’s adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby’s nostalgic view of America between the wars glistens and sparkles with a destructive glory. The tragic love story of rich girl and poor hero works around powerful themes: loyalty and love, faithfulness and betrayal combines with the individual’s pursuit of the American dream for happiness and economic success. The music is dynamic and story is coherently presented beginning from the moment when the pretty socialite, Daisy, and heroic soldier, Jay Gatsby, are separated by war and circumstances.
The most important thing I want to communicate is that I wasn’t any more clearer at the end of the show why you had chosen such an iconic work as Don Quixote other than to use the work to say ‘the Spanish are a passionate people’. The problem for me was that as an audience member who has experienced Cervantes’s masterpiece in so many different forms – novel, film, original play [Rocinante, Rocinante] – it was impossible for me to accept the novel could be reduced on the simple pantomime plot which was presented in your play.
Magnificent from the outset: I was gripped viscerally and imaginatively from the moment the thunderous music catapulted Lear’s savage kingdom onto the stage.
There’s something quite brilliant about the way Ricky Duke deals with the realisation of poetic language in Dido Queen of Carthage. For me, he seems to work with the metaphors that characterise mythical places and peoples with a boldness of approach that is quite breathtaking.