Ke Meng

INCONVERSATION WITH: Melanie Bracewell

Published on March 4, 2026February 28, 2026 by Ke MengLeave a comment

With her twenties now wrapped, Melanie takes an inventory of her life so far, as we visit the series of events that led to her getting an ADHD diagnosis. Fittingly given that
diagnosis, the show covers pretty much everything from dining to the dark to car manuals – all of it bound together by Bracewell’s infectious, slyly virtuoso style. It is time for this country to help itself to A Little Treat.

Your last show turned a stolen pair of AirPods into an epic tale of obsession and revenge. This time you are taking stock of your twenties and your ADHD diagnosis. How has your relationship with storytelling evolved between those two shows

I think this show weirdly took more work than the previous one. The airpods saga was something of a ‘comedy gift’. An insane hilarious thing happened to me and I got to get on stage every night and present it like it was a murder mystery. This new show I got to go back to my storytelling roots. I didn’t want to do a typical “ADHD” show as us comedians have been blathering on about it a bit lately. I wanted ADHD to be the structure, more than the content. So yes there’s a little bit in there about ADHD, but mainly the show is me desperately trying to get to the end of a story about leaving my car in a precarious place at the netball awards and getting distracted along the way. I want the show to feel like a night out with friends, where you start talking about something and have no idea how you got there.

It’s been amazing to hear the feedback from people after this show, saying they loved it for a whole lot of different reasons to the previous one. I love that people can walk away from my shows satisfied but in a completely different way.

A Little Treat jumps from dining in the dark to car manuals and everything in between. How do you structure a show that embraces that kind of gloriously chaotic range while still keeping the audience hooked

I love making a show feel natural. When we talk to people about our lives we don’t go “well that brings me naturally into my next topic, let me seamlessly elaborate”. We dart around chaotically! Your friend might start talking about their birthday party plans and deviate quickly into what’s happening on “Love Is Blind” before she gets to telling you what the venue is.

I think this show is about putting yourself in jeopardy and just having faith things will work out. I think audiences like sitting there thinking “well I’d love to see how she gets out of this pickle”.

You have built a huge following across New Zealand and Australia and now you are back touring the UK. Do British audiences laugh at different moments or in different ways compared to crowds back home

Oh for sure! I always try to change local references so that the audience can understand. Unfortunately I think I sometimes choose the wrong one. I had a joke about buying a muffin from a supermarket and so I just slipped in “M&S” and the crowd BOOED. They were like “Oh you get fancy muffins do you? POSH”.

ADHD plays a part in the new show. Has understanding your diagnosis changed the way you write comedy or the way you see your own brain at work on stage

For sure! The dexamphetamine has a huge part to play. I think writing this show I was able to understand why I write the way I do. I think it was always the fine tuning that I would slip up on. I would go “well obviously this is a placeholder joke and I’ll fix it later”. Then 3 months into the tour when I was still doing the placeholder, I was like well it’s too late now. I’m much better at being ruthless with my shows now.

Reviews often describe you as a master of callbacks and wordplay. Are those intricately crafted from the start, or do they emerge organically during festival runs and previews

I think sometimes I write my shows backwards in a way. I think people see ‘callback’ and think “okay well she just does the same joke twice”. But that’s the lazy way. I think a great callback is presenting the audience with a sort of Chekhov’s gun. Oh you had no idea that part I mentioned earlier is INTEGRAL TO THE ENTIRE PLOT. GOTCHA. That’s always super satisfying. Basically… It’s manipulative. But boy is it fun. Wordplay is the thing that emerges more organically. I love cryptic crosswords, so my brain is always unpacking words and playing with them in my head. Often I’ll stumble into them halfway through a run.

For ticketing and info, please find here.

IN CONVERSATION WITH: Ben Hall

Published on February 19, 2026February 18, 2026 by Ke MengLeave a comment

Oxford Playhouse brings its new production of Edward Albee’s masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to the stage this week. Ahead of opening night, we spoke to Ben Hall who plays Nick in this searing drama. For tickets and listing, please visit here.

Nick enters the play as an observer—when did he begin to realise he was becoming complicit in the night’s games?

In some ways, I think Nick spends quite a lot of the play as an observer, and it’s actually quite late that he really becomes involved in the psychological games of his hosts, Martha and George. He makes a very strong choice in Act 2, and I think that is the turning point where he realises that he is complicit in the problem and ultimately pays for it.

Before then, I think he tries to beat their games, and he doesn’t really want to play. He feels like he’s better than anything they’re playing and tries to distance himself from it – until a point where he just can’t anymore.

How did you approach playing Nick’s ambition without reducing him to a simple villain or opportunist?

For me, the most important thing was how to make him as three-dimensional and human as possible. To do that, I had to take it a step at a time – I couldn’t really look at him as a whole; I had to look at him by his choices.

And so, I’m not entirely sure what I’ve come up with, but I hope the audience will be able to decide whether he’s absolutely awful or somewhat human… My hope is that he’s seen as a three-dimensional person who makes very, very bad decisions and pays for them.

How do the power dynamics that Nick navigates shift throughout the play?

In terms of the power dynamics, it’s not that he’s lost for most of the play, but he is trying really hard to figure out what the hell is going on and not quite being able to manage it. Perhaps because his brain doesn’t quite work the same as Martha and George’s do.

Martha and George tend to use metaphor, simile, imagery, and this beautiful language. Nick is a very precise and specific person; he doesn’t really exist in their world. I think he navigates that throughout the whole play, and he’s constantly floored by them. His whole thing is that he’s incessantly trying to pretend it doesn’t affect him, and to try and be better than them, and to take his power back, which Martha and George just do not let him have.

How does performing opposite such psychologically exposed characters change the way you pace and hold back a performance?

For me, it’s sort of a gut instinct. You sense the rhythm and the pace of the play, and marry what you, as the actor and the character needs, and where they need to get to. You then have to match that with the energy of the play and the rhythmic nature of the language. Ultimately, you just have to trust that it’s correct, really.

Nick presents control and confidence on the surface—what fractures underneath were most important for you to reveal?

I think there were two, really. There’s Nick’s personal mask that fractures, and then there’s the public mask of the ideal marriage that fractures.  

So, in terms of Nick personally – I think this veneer of arrogance and being sure of himself is a mask. Slowly throughout the play, he becomes unsettled enough that he starts revealing that actually he doesn’t know everything, and he’s quick to anger and frustration.

That then leads into the public mask of his marriage and this idea of white picket fence America, and cracks start to show along with that. Through that, I’ve tried to make him as human as possible, even though he makes two terrible mistakes: one which is intellectual, where he believes that George is someone that he’s not and wouldn’t be capable of being, and then secondly, physically, he makes a choice that betrays his marriage.

Cracks are definitely revealed in terms of him as a human being and as the mask of the perfect American gentleman.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opens at Oxford Playhouse this Friday and will run until Saturday 7 March. For tickets, visit oxfordplayhouse.com

REVIEW: I’m Sorry, Prime Minister

Published on February 14, 2026February 14, 2026 by Ke Meng4 Comments

Jonathan Lynn struggles to keep up with the ‘woke’ times without Antony Jay

As a product of Thatcher Britain, Yes Minister / Yes Prime Minister, although set at No. 10 Downing Street, remains relatively apolitical in its aesthetics and taste: intellectually refined, subtle, restrained and slightly cynical. It is deeply contextualised in the culture of the British bureaucratic system, where power circulates through protocol and language. You don’t need to really figure out Sir Humphrey’s endless clauses and rhetorical jargons; but you know it is simply, deadly funny.

Even favoured by Thatcher herself, the television series was widely popular and successful in an era far less polarised than our own. Now, in this ‘woke’ era, Jonathan Lynn is desperate to engage with those contemporary debates. Retired from No. 10, Jim Hacker (Griff Rhys Jones) has moved to Oxford as a college master, which is of course, set up by Sir Humphrey (Clive Francis). Sophie (Stephanie Levi-John), a Black lesbian with a degree in English Literature from Oxford, is his care-worker (not “carer”), cooking, cleaning and, washing his underpants.

Hacker’s idle Oxford life doesn’t last long. Sir David (William Chubb), the legal head of the college, bringing the students’ collective will: they want Hacker to resign for his comments on Britain’s colonisation over India. When Sir David asks him does he really believe colonisation was civil and progressive, Hacker admits that “It depends who I’m talking to”. Hacker turns Humphrey for help, while Humphrey, equally entrapped in his past privileges and entitlements, also needs help from Hacker to avoid being jobless.

Sadly, Lynn offers a disastrous example of how a television sitcom can falter when transformed to stage. Shifting away from the unsettling criticism against the UK’s civil servant system and nuanced power balance between politicians and civil servants, this production centres on current issues like LGBTQ rights, immigration, racism and gender equality, packed with dated comments that are neither offering any refreshing sights, nor pleasing either side. For the progressive, Sophie’s portrayal is reductive and stereotypically “ticking all the boxes”, despite Levi-John’s efforts to bring nuance and depth, which ultimately fails in Lynn’s predictable dramatic trajectory. For the conservative, both Hacker and Humphrey are reduced to clowning caricatures, seemingly offensive in their words but utterly incapable of offending anyone.

Comedy should be the art of offence – at progressive, at conservative, at everyone, at oneself. What makes me feel really sad is that Lynn seems dare not to offend anyone. His tone is cautious and pandering. Lynn’s carefulness kills comedy, kills the laughter at Apollo theatre, and ultimately kills a canon made by himself some four decades ago.

IN CONVERSATION WITH: Sam Butler

Published on February 12, 2026February 10, 2026 by Ke MengLeave a comment

Experimental cross-arts company Fevered Sleep will make its Barbican debut with public art intervention This Grief Thing. Entering a uniquely themed pop-up shop, visitors in the foyers will discover a space to connect, share loss and find hope while normalising conversations around grief. This event is part of Scene Change, a series of transformative performances and gatherings in unexpected places programmed by the Barbican. Runs Sun 15—Sat 21 Feb 2026 – for more info, please visit here.

How has the project evolved since 2018 in response to hundreds of meaningful encounters in different cities, and what can visitors in London expect from their experience?

Even before the project officially opened, its shape was formed by the many conversations we had with hundreds of participants who either gathered with us to talk about their experiences of grief and grieving, or encountered us in everyday spaces – market stalls, buses, the underground – and responded to the simple invitation to talk about grief. I’d say the project hasn’t changed as such, it retains its original form. We as the artist/shop keepers, however, can’t fail to evolve through the very personal interactions we have with each person who steps over the threshold.

This Grief Thing replaces performance with presence and conversation through gatherings and a pop-up shop. What did stepping into the role of shopkeepers reveal about how people want to encounter art around grief?

We started this project with the question, how can we encourage people to talk about, and normalise conversations around grief? Creating a dance piece or an installation, of course makes grief more visible to those happy or used to more formal spaces dedicated to art. A shop, on the other hand, is a space most people are comfortable to enter; a shopkeeper, and a ‘transaction’ in a shared public space is an everyday occurrence. We’re intentionally demystifying the notion of the artist, who is very often invisible or at a distance to audiences or spectators and placing ourselves right in the midst of it. Most visitors don’t know that we’re the artists, and we’re pretty certain that a visitor in a shopping centre in Middlesbrough for instance, really doesn’t care!

Grief can often be private or even stigmatsied in Western culture. What responsibility do artists and institutions have in creating shared rituals and spaces for something so universal?

Western culture has done a pretty poor job at helping people to process and understand death and grief. Churches and other religious spaces are the main gatekeepers of grief, and for those who don’t relate to those kinds of practices, once a funeral is over, they are often cast adrift. As a company making lots of work with and for children, we feel strongly that including death and grief in educational settings would go a long way to tackling this stigma. Artists will of course always make work around such a significant subject, but if we as a society can’t even talk to our children about it, how can we expect artists to even scratch the surface?

How do you hold ethical boundaries when working with such intimate and often raw experiences, while still keeping the space open and porous to the public?

This question comes up often, and I think it partly relates to the previous question. The stigma around grief, talking about death, revealing deep personal emotions holds lots of fear for us as a society. There’s a concern that giving permission for open conversation might lead to participants experiencing feelings that are somehow unmanageable, that harm may be caused to them or us or others. So, whilst pushing back at the question, we of course acknowledge our duty of care; we have distress protocols in place, and we have at hand organisations we can signpost people to if we feel they need further support. We’re also clear that in conversations, we can choose to talk from our very personal experiences of grief, or more in the abstract.

This year marks Fevered Sleep’s 30th anniversary. Looking back, what feels most essential about the way your broader practice has evolved, and how does This Grief Thing sit within that journey? Has listening to strangers talk about loss reshaped your understanding of care as an artist?

30 years of running a company has given us the confidence to say we feel happiest sitting in uncertainty! Some time ago we began to invite participants and collaborators in at the very inception of an idea, at that moment we’re stumbling around without an endpoint, at our most vulnerable. Our work is heavily reliant on the generosity of strangers willing to talk and think with us. This Grief Thing is a product of all the people who came to tell us how grief revealed itself to them, of their vulnerability over cups of tea, sat on chairs in circles, not asking our endpoint. Years back we placed care at the forefront of our practice, and we continue to be guided by the people who we encounter across our work.

Chiten Theatre: The Gambler at Coronet Theatre

Published on February 11, 2026February 11, 2026 by Ke MengLeave a comment

“immense spoken words”

Directed by Motoi Miura, Kyoto based theatre company Chiten Theatre translates Dostoevsky’s The Gamblerinto a 90-minute, verbally intense and physically demanding theatrical experience.

To partially reflect his own debt situation, Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler under intense financial pressure. The novella turns gambling into an existential debate about passion, obsession and their relations to money: however fleeting and unreliable money could be, people always tend to recognise their dignity and value through it.

In that sense, Muira’s adaptation works well. Instead of faithfully recounting Alexei Ivanovich’s journey in the General’s household and his entangled relationship with Polina, both passionately and financially, Muira exposes Alexei’s (and his fellow gamblers’) inner collapsing worlds through an ensemble cast (Takahide Akimoto, Midori Aioi, Yohei Kobayashi, Satoko Abe, Dai Ishida, Masaya Kishimoto, Shie Kubota) through immense spoken words and intense physicality. Here, everybody exposes their annihilation unreservedly. The General’s authority is gradually hollowed out by debt, Polina leans towards self-negation and the grandmother’s appetite towards money become humongous. Muira also flags out varied gambling cultures between different countries with an intent to inject humour.

Such reconstruction to carve out Dostoevsky’s eternal interrogation of the human psyche carries massive potential, leaving huge room for stronger theatrical execution. Visually, the spinning roulette design (Itaru Sugiyama) and revolving lights (Yasuhiro Fujiwara) establish immediate symbolisation, in line with the show’s overall, deliberate anti-naturalistic style. However, paired with an over-dramatised acting style, the performance sometimes feels too self-conscious. The repeated excessive amounts of direct address are although not didactic or preachy, do present as cartoonish or manga-like, especially when each line of Alexei starts with “It is me” (“僕です”). Rather than sophisticating the character’s psyche, it more leans towards to a simplified characterisation.

The ensemble’s physicality is dominated by rhythmic, swing-like dances, relentless roulette check-knocks, and tightly choreographed mis-en-scènes. While I admire the ensemble’s stamina, the overall physicality does not sufficiently compensate the spoken words, and some of the directorial choices, such as the grandmothers’ final scattering coins all over the stage, are too predictable. Similarly, the use of a mic stand and an amplified speaker remains perplexing and unclear. The only sonorous exception is the band performance by kukangendai(空間現代), an indie-rock band formed in early 2000. Their intense live soundscape does add onto the production’s visceral charges and theatrical onslaughts, revealing the gamblers’ emotive up-side-downs that are always exciting, excruciating and ultimately self-destructive.

The show runs until 15th Feb. Tickets can be found here.

REVIEW: ASMF & Steven Isserlis

Published on February 8, 2026February 8, 2026 by Ke MengLeave a comment

Steven Isserlis leads the Academy of St Martin in the Fields through a night of elegance

Returning to the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields for their first collaboration since 2016, the ASMF reunited with Steven Isserlis in an evening shaped by the ethos of chamber music at scale. Traversing Enlightenment restraint, operatic lyricism, Classical poise and late-Romantic gravity, the evening traced a journey through variated sound worlds From Charles Avison’s reimagining of Scarlatti, Haydn’s youthful cello concerto to Arensky’s symphonically expanded chamber writing, the programme asked how private musical rhetoric transforms into larger, more public spaces.

In the opening Scarlatti/Avison Concerto Grosso No. 5 in D minor, the ensemble resisted overt Baroque exuberance, but instead showcased Avison’s cultivated aesthetic. The string sound was modern: clean, light and delicate. Without heavy baroque rhetoric, the ASMF orchestra produced a refined and galant texture. This style also matched Steven Isserlis’s cello which shaped phrases from inside the orchestration: expressive but not too heroic, carrying elegant conversational ease. At some certain moments, I even felt a little bit of Classical restraint of clarity and formal balance, translating Scarlatti’s Mediterranean fashion into Avison’s Enlightenment language of a cooler and more measured taste.

Such approach towards Baroque and Classical repertoire, favouring poise over pungency, defined the night with the exception of Handel’s Two Arias for Winds (HWV 410 and 411). The two arias were merry, buoyant, and at times lightly heroic with open-hearted gestures, though the brightness of the wind writing occasionally tipped towards a slightly over-bright sound world with excessive cheerfulness.

Following Handel’s merry lyricism is Joseph Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in C major (Hob. VIIb:1), in which Isserlis approached the solo line with striking self-restraint. In the Moderato, his bowing produced a chesty, textured sound, deliberately unbright. This framed the music as dialectical, intellectual in its shaping and expressive without tipping into overt emotion or virtuoso display. The Adagio unfolded with serene poise, its lyricism carefully contained, while the Allegro molto favoured elegance and ease. To demonstrate this measured solo presence, the orchestra sounded comparatively energetic that gave credits to Haydn’s youthful, floral virtuosity. For me, Haydn can feel like a rose-scented diffuser: lush, immediately appealing, and perhaps too comfortably familiar in its floral ease. Isserlis subtly recalibrated that balance, grounding the concerto with a woodier sonority beneath, adding profound and reserved depth.

As a piece so saturated with inherited sentiment that it often collapses under its own melancholy, Isserlis offered a reading of Tchaikovsky’s Andante cantabile with striking composure. The tone was serene and contemplative, marked by self-restraint rather than fragility and luxuriating grief. Instead of private lament, the music unfolded with a broad, almost cinematic sweep, sounding like mid-twentieth-century film score. The tempo, elastic and firmly held maintained structural steadiness. Refusing sentimentalisation, Isserlis made this over-familiar movement feel unexpectedly fresh.

The programme closed with Anton Arensky’s Chamber Symphony in A minor, which unfolded as a Russian Orthodox funeral chant, solemn and processional. Even as the orchestral writing expanded into a cinematic, almost symphonic grandeur, Isserlis remained expressively cool and restrained. The music’s shifting textures occasionally evoked other East European folk idioms, but the arrangement decisively transforms private mourning into something more monumental and ceremonially expansive.

The concert was at the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields on 5th Feb, 2026. It is now concluded.

REVIEW: The Debate: Baldwin vs Buckley

Published on February 6, 2026February 6, 2026 by Ke MengLeave a comment

Re-staging the enduring epistemological violence

“The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro”. Claimed by James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union Society in 1965. Coming less than a year after the Civil Rights Act and disputes around desegregation, the Baldwin-Buckley debate brought into confrontation two sharply different understandings of American liberalism: Baldwin’s historically grounded account of racial inequality and Buckley’s defence of constitutional ideals and gradual reform. To a great extent, this debate is still piercingly relevant within today’s political and ethnical climate.

It doesn’t really matter who you side with – which can be easily told from the applause of the audience at Wilton’s Music Hall, a predominantly white community performance venue. By re-staging and re-visiting this debate, director Christopher McElroen invites us

for more provocative and radical thoughts. This debate is not only about racism, inequality and American liberalism in the mid-twentieth century, but also about how centuries-long epistemological and systematic violence that frames inequality as even “debatable”, which tragically still continues today.

Had the motion been framed as “The United States has never treated Black Americans as equal citizens”, then there would be little room for a moral or a philosophical equivocation. However, framed instead as a question of whether equality exists “at the expense of” Black Americans, then it becomes intellectually, economically and philosophically muddied. Marxists might argue that all proletariats are subject to exploration, and French thinkers may critique both sides for relying on zero-sum assumption, so both positions misfire. Just as Buckley repeatedly insists, matters are complicated so there is no instance cure. But why? Because addressing inequality is clear and direct, thus demanding direct and clear change. However, wrapping injustice in layers of sophistication can win conservatives a grey zone for non-responsibility. In other words, such debate, itself, is a luxury and privilege that not only turns structural violence into a topic, but also treats inequality as something need to be weighed.

Furthermore, such framing also positions the Black Americans (and their allies) in a role that they always need to self-defend and self-explain, to render their existence legible to the White audience. Baldwin must have his reality of inequality justified and translated again and again, while Buckley has the ultimate freedom to dismiss Baldwin’s claim as “irrelevant”. Baldwin must speak while Buckley enjoys his intellectual supremacy to theorise. The debate, to a great extent, thus becomes a perfect meta-instance of the ever-lasting inequality.

Despite the tragic nature of the debate, the four actors are brilliant at reconstructing that night. Arnell Powell’s Baldwin is historically faithful, marked by a crystal-clear charisma, embodying his Black leadership as both empathetic and powerful. Eric T. Miller presents Buckley as an obviously knowledgeable intellectual, unconscious of his own privilege, apologetic toward Black history in manner but not in substance. Miller also delivers great audience engagement, frequently gazing and talking back to the audience members. As David Haycock, Christopher Wareham brings a compassionate, heartfelt presence with a subtle irony against Buckley when introducing his God and Man at Yale. Wareham’s character may best reflect the young voices in the 1960s – protesting and rebelling against the establishment. Meanwhile, Tom Kiteley’s Jeremy Burford is rendered as scholarly and faintly nerdy, delivered in a posh British accent with deadpan humour.

IN CONVERSATION WITH: Sam Amidon

Published on February 6, 2026February 3, 2026 by Ke MengLeave a comment

Sam is performing at Kings Place with Pekka Kuusisto and members of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra on 24 February as part of the ‘Platoon Presents’ series to launch their new album Willows – more information here: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/classical/pekka-kuusisto-sam-amidon-and-the-musicians-of-the-norwegian-chamber-orchestra/

What has been the most rewarding and most challenging aspect of bringing your music into dialogue with a chamber orchestra setting, particularly working with Pekka Kuusisto and Nico Muhly’s arrangements for this concert?

It’s always an incredible feeling to sing in this context, amidst the orchestral musicians and Nico’s arrangements. I have a little more concentrating to do than normal, because my songs are full of varying phrase lengths and gaps between verses which change from performance to performance, but when connected to a scored arrangement have to be consistent. So I have to know all these correct timings and spacings which are taken from my initial recorded rendition of the songs. But that concentration is helps with my overall focus as a performer and mainly my goal is just to sing the songs well in the midst of all the beautiful music going on around me.

Your recent album Salt River reflects a synthesis of folk roots and experimental textures — how have your motivations and inspirations shifted since your early reinterpretations of traditional songs?

It’s always the same… I’m interested in creativity, I’m interested in inspiration, I’m interesting in collaborating with musicians I love and who bring me joy. All of my albums have been about creating a space of joy and play amongst friends together, in different forms each time. Salt River was the form of spending those days with Sam Gendel, Philippe Melanson, and Sam’s partner Marcella Cytrynowicz, playing music, working on a crossword puzzle, and eating together. The album is what emerged out of those days together.

Your music is known for its emotional depth and narrative quality — how do you see storytelling operating in instrumental and vocal music alike, and what role does silence or subtlety play in that storytelling?

There is a quote from the ballad singer Almeda Riddle. She is talking about her approach to singing long narrative ballads, and she says, “you have to get behind the song.” I feel the same way as a singer… you can be expressive but still stay ‘out of the way’ of the narrative the song is telling. I love the storytelling aspect of ballads and I spend a lot of time thinking about how to give them a musical setting that will tease out different sides of the emotion in the story than have maybe been done before with those songs.

Having grown up in Vermont, lived in the United States and Europe, and now based in London, has your sense of place changed the way you approach your music, and if so, how does that transatlantic identity inform your work on projects like the Willows programme?

Growing up in Vermont, my first instrument was the fiddle. The New England fiddle tradition is very connected to traditional Irish music (as well as French Canadian music), so I already had a deep connection to Ireland and the music there. Then when I moved to London it was to be with my wife Beth Orton. Through Beth I learned more about the great UK tradition of acoustic guitarists including Bert Jansch and Nick Drake. My writing on the guitar was very influenced by these artists, as well as Beth herself. The music we will be performing in Willows connects both to these British Isles traditions, and to the Appalachian folksongs that I am singing in the programme.

FEATURE: Re-reading The Handmaiden’s Love, Performance, and the Politics of Adaptation

Published on February 2, 2026February 3, 2026 by Ke MengLeave a comment

Selected by Emerald Fennell as part of her Love Stories programme at BFI IMAX, Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden arrives already framed as an exemplary but disruptive romance. It is a positioning that feels both apt and slightly provocative. Adapted from Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, Park’s film is lush and attentive to female desire, with its priorities diverge tellingly from the source: less a thriller of reversals than a meditation on love, and the performance of love.

Park relocates the story to Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s. There, Japanese culture is presented as formalised, ceremonial, and performative, while Korean identity is coded as earthy, grassroot, and somewhat rebellious. While on Waters’s novel, illiteracy primarily articulates the power-dynamic between classes, The Handmaiden refracts it as colonial hierarchies. Gender politics, too, are sharpened through adaptation. The destruction of the library in The Handmaiden stands as the film’s most explicit feminist intervention.

This comes at a cost. Park’s film is less invested in mystery than Waters’s novel, whose pleasures lie in narrative misdirection, delayed revelations, and the destabilising act of retelling itself. In The Handmaiden, the reversals still arrive, but they no longer feel like epistemic shocks in structural suspense. but simply serve as steps toward romantic alignment.

This emphasis on romance also shapes the film’s erotic register. The sex scenes are meticulously composed, often striking, with some traits of the self-conscious, slightly self-orientalised elegance between Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri that overplays their chemistry. In the meantime, the figure of the Count (Ha Jung-woo) further illustrates Park’s reading of (unrequited) desire. Unlike Waters’s Gentleman, whose interest is sheerly wealth-driven, the Count openly craves Hideko. This adaptation aligns with the film’s investment in overt passion.

The Handmaiden is a film of remarkable craft, one that reimagines Fingersmith, a masterpiece of narrative trickery, through the lenses of colonial history and cinematic performativity, into a sensual romance. If Waters’s novel asks who gets to write the story, Park’s adaptation is more interested in who gets to perform it, and how. As part of a programme interrogating love under pressure, The Handmaiden makes sense: it is a love story forged through constraint, artifice, and resistance. In the meantime, its smooth surfaces and emphatic gestures also invite scrutiny: what it reveals, what it hides, what has been appropriated for the sake of performance and what ultimately is missing.

Emerald Fennell curates “Love Stories” is at BFI IMAX throughout February. For tickets and listing, please visit here. “Wuthering Heights” opens at BFI IMAX from 13 February. For tickets and listing, please visit here.

IN CONVERSATION WITH: Zoe Hunter Gordon

Published on February 1, 2026February 8, 2026 by Ke MengLeave a comment

First developed with support from HighTide, 1.17am… now receives its world premiere at Finborough Theatre following three critically acclaimed sold-out previews at Theatre503. We sat down to discuss this play with its writer Zoe.

1. 1.17am, or until the words run out traps two former friends in a room with nothing left to hide. What first drew you to this “pressure-cooker” setup, and what did you discover about friendship once everything polite had been stripped away?

Pressure-cooker plays are fun – and hard – to write. The constraints of the form mean that as a writer you have to keep digging, really digging, into your characters and the setting that you’ve trapped them in. From the very beginning of the idea I knew I wanted to write a two-hander, and I was interested in what it would feel like to put young women into a more traditional theatrical form.

The piece is also an exploration of grief. I think it’s Pinter who speaks about how in all pressure cooker plays the setting itself plays a similar role to a third character, the setting acts on the characters. And in 1.17am the characters are trapped in the room of someone who has died – which gave me a lot of drama to play with as a writer.

The way you phrase the question is interesting – I think for the characters, theirs is not a friendship where they expect politeness. They’ve grown up together, perhaps they have a bond that is similar to a family bond: they expect that they’ll know and love each other forever. I think I learnt, and they learnt, that this bond is not as unshakeable as they hoped it might be.

2. This play mixes claustrophobia with humour — often in the same breath. Was balancing those tones instinctive for you, or did you have to wrestle your way into finding the right emotional rhythm?

This is a play about secrets, lies, and difficult truths that we find hard to talk about. I do find that in my own life, often the hardest subjects to discuss are the funniest. It’s simply impossible in reality to sit with pain for too long – we need to break out of it, to find lightness. I write naturalistically, following the thread of dialogue and psychologically plausible character action and my characters need to crack jokes, to giggle when things get too much. That’s where the tone comes from, I think: from what I feel the characters need for themselves in the honesty of that moment.

3. The story unfolds in a single bedroom, over a single night. What craft challenges did that create for you as a writer, and how did you keep the structure alive within such a contained space?

It’s all about finding the right setting. Not all settings are dramatic – but someone’s dead brother’s room which hasn’t been touched by his death, certainly is. You have to hunt around as a writer until you find the right place to put your characters. Pinter also talks about status: the setting cannot mean the same thing to each character. For one of the characters, Katie, this bedroom is a place that she wants to uncover, look through, pack away, discover. For Roni, her friend, it’s not. There is a party happening outside of the room in my play: Katie was invited, Roni wasn’t. I didn’t stumble across this setting in the first or second or even fifth draft – it took until the seventh to really understand that if I wanted to write in this form, I needed to put these two women in this particular space. As a writer you need to keep hunting and trying things – and working with great people (thank you to Tamar Saphra and Fay Lomas) to get the drama working.

4. Katie and Roni promise to tell each other “the truth” — whatever that means. In shaping their dynamic, how did you approach writing characters who love each other fiercely and yet can’t always say the right things?

This is just human – right? Who amongst us always says the right stuff to the people we love? I definitely don’t, in fact sometimes I treat the people closest to me the worst: because I believe I can, because I (mistakenly) believe they’ll always be there. I suppose I’m writing from what I have seen and experienced, that often we lie to attempt to protect each other – but the knots that this instinct ties us in are fascinating and twisty and hard to untangle.

5. You come from both theatre and film, and your work often explores personal histories under pressure. How did your experience in documentary and screenwriting influence the way you approached this play?

Interesting! I think something I’m often struck by in theatre is how alone writers can be. As a writer/director in film you get very close to actors, and as a documentary maker of course you’re nothing without your contributors. Working in these other mediums means that I’m very interested in how actors build and respond to characters I’ve written and in rewriting towards their instincts. My documentary work means that I love working with lived experience (safely!) in the rehearsal room. We cast the wonderful Eileen Duffy with this in mind and she has generously fed into the text. I’ve also learnt from documentaries that your instincts as an artist are not always as surprising as real life can be, but equally that real life requires shaping and building to make it emotionally impactful for an audience.

6. 1.17am… was previously supported by HighTide and Theatre503 before arriving at the Finborough. How has the piece evolved through those stages, and what does this world-premiere production allow you to explore that you couldn’t before?

Honestly, the journey of this play has been a long and hard one. Back in 2019 we had a rehearsed reading of the text at HighTide, after they generously gave us space for an R&D the year before (2018!) We had a slot at Vault Festival – but then the pandemic happened. Meanwhile, I was working and developing screen projects. It was only when Theatre503 picked it up for a short run last summer that I dusted off the script and began to reinterrogate the text.

Sarah Stacey (director and dramaturg) has been invaluable in shaping the piece. We had a reading in April and I then cut about 30 pages from it, which felt like freedom. Once the cast were on board – Catherine Ashdown and Eileen Duffy, who are fantastic – we improvised around questions I had. I kept rewriting in rehearsals and we only locked very shortly before the run. It felt really great to write that way, alive and true – it’s my favourite way to work. Now that we have the brilliant Finborough giving the piece its world premiere, I’m returning to the text again with everything I’ve learnt from how the Theatre503 audience responded and also specific questions I want to push. We will do another improvisation workshop and then I’ll return to the text – it’s still cooking! Writing through Christmas, here I come…

I feel very grateful that the piece has had a chance to meet audiences before it’s truly exposed: the show at the Finborough will be the best version of itself that it can be, despite the long and painful road.

Tickets and listing info:https://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productions/117am-or-until-the-words-run-out