Cognitive Strategies for Analysing & Evaluating Theatre Performances
Lazarus Theatre productions never fail to grab you from the moment you enter the theatre. You step through into a world of mayhem as if stepping through an invisible membrane that divides you from where you’ve come. At the Blue Elephant Theatre.
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.
Director Aaron Paterson’s decision to keep to the integrity of Peake’s story, rather than coat it with the spectacle-making stage technologies of flashy lights, projections and other paraphernalia which the digital age makes accessible testifies to a highly disciplined approach.
The choice to stage Oedipus seems obvious… it’s a great play. Ricky Duke’s carefully choreographed and nuanced realisation of the play enlivens a sense of the heroic. He does this by setting Oedipus on his calamitous path in a political maelstrom.
Genre: Physical Theatre Venue: Blue Elephant Theatre 59a Bethwin Rd, Camberwell, London, SE5 0XT Low Down Blue Elephant Theatre does it again in its theatrical quest to bring provocatively interesting work before its audience. Its latest production by writer/ director Justen Bennett of Fantastical Adventures of [Not] Being With You presents a very imaginative piece about finding … Read more
The ground is seen as a surface from where all things originate.
Movements sprout from the soil as a force of resistance in the face of disappearance.
The work reconsiders the shoe beyond its practical function where the object can adopt different
meanings.