Blog
Featured Theatre of Realism
London Stories
Battersea Arts Centre's London Stories: A 1-on-1-on-1 Festival is uniquely positioned to become a most powerful form of participatory theatre. The idea is simple: begin with a sprawling building, like old municipal offices; invite in local people who feel they have life-changing experiences to tell about living their messy, complicated lives (that's pretty much all of us), and organise ushers and staff to direct the moving traffic of paying audience members from story to story around the building.
Musical Theatre
Little Women
SPECIAL REPORT – UK’s Premiere Musical Production of Little Women Many achievements surround the staging of Little Women as a ...
Musical Theatre
Little Women
SPECIAL REPORT – UK’s Premiere Musical Production of Little Women Many achievements surround the staging of Little Women as a ...
Theatre of Realism
Land of Our Fathers
Engaging from the outset, the play hits the audience with a mining disaster only seconds after an explosion that traps six miners. The fact that it is 1979 adds even greater tension.
Into Shakespeare
King Lear
Magnificent from the outset: I was gripped viscerally and imaginatively from the moment the thunderous music catapulted Lear’s savage kingdom onto the stage.
Into Shakespeare
King John
Invariably, the choice of whether a play is rarely or often staged both make the claim that the play is relevant for ‘our times’. Of course, that’s the point. As the audience lives in the here and now, Phil Willmott’s realisation of Shakespeare’sKing John clearly how Shakespeare remains our contemporary. I saw this particularly in way that the production engaged the audience in its psychological depiction of warfare and its exposition of how spiritual and temporal claims live in the figure of the king.
Theatre Festival
J’ai Deux Amours: The Josephine Baker Story
Cush Jumbo received a standing ovation from many members of the audience at the Etcetera Theatre on the opening night of her one-woman show J’ai Deux Amours: The Josephine Baker Story. There were many good reasons I could see for this: her great singing voice, her versatility in taking on different characters while telling Josephine Baker’s biography and, above all, her engaging energy.
Children's Theatre
Horrible Histories: Barmy Britain II
How Henry laughed! Horrible Histories: Barmy Britain II at the Garrick Theatre Eight-year-old Henry takes our reviewer on a truth-seeking historical adventure. ...
Black Lives
Gutted
The story around the Prospect boys shows the everyday happenings in their lives: it begins with Matthew, a professional footballer, in a rehab clinic. As the family assemble in the hospital reception area to pick him up and bring him home, where they’ve organised a ‘welcome home’ party, the story moves between the present and the past to reveal to the audience the events which lead to this point.
Musical Theatre
Gotta Sing Gotta Dance
The title of a theatre production is designed to provoke a reaction; Gotta Sing Gotta Dance had a decided effect on me, leading me to expect the usual fare of song and dance energetically contrived. What a surprise I was in for as I viewed the unfolding of a wonderfully coherent and original production that turned out to be a stunning exposé of the last sixty years of musical theatre.
