Author: paddycardwell

REVIEW: The Spectacular

Published on by paddycardwellLeave a comment

Rating: 3 out of 5.

 An energetic and often funny play with a vital subject at its core, yet one which struggles to balance satire and seriousness.

For most schoolchildren in the United Kingdom, the history of armed conflict on the island of Ireland was not on their curriculum. This absence of education on Irish matters – dating back to the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169, all the way through to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 – is exactly what Séan Butler’s The Spectacular seeks to correct. Whilst this intention is certainly a noble one, the play unfortunately fails to give this important subject matter the attention and sincerity it deserves. 

The play consists of two young, dissident Republicans from Dublin named Jake and Naomi who insist they are “not the IRA”. The play follows them as they workshop different methods, or ‘spectaculars’, of Irish Nationalist activism in order to end the ongoing British occupation of the six counties that make up Northern Ireland. These vary wildly from the relatively benign and humorous to the harrowing and terroristic. As the drama progresses, a rift begins to form between the pair and they are forced to interrogate each other’s, as well as their own, motivations for their activism. They soon realise the profound differences in their attitudes towards the cause and end up reckoning with the fact that not all republicanism is made the same. 

The play is written and directed by Butler, whose kinetic lighting, sound and stage design give the drama a frantic, sometimes abrasive feel which fits well with the theme and provides funny and slapstick moments. The actors do a great job balancing the comedic with the serious and the screen behind the performers provides entertaining slideshows depicting both important Irish history and pop culture. 

However, the writing and development of these characters sometimes feels muddled. For example, Naomi is presented to the audience in the first three quarters of the play to be the more measured and intelligent half of the duo. It is even said that she left Dublin to study for a PhD at an English university and evidently serves as the brains to Jake’s brawn. However, her character arc seems to take a jarring 180-degree turn in the final act of the play, as her ‘spectaculars’ are revealed to be more brutish and ill-conceived than anything that the gullible and simpler Jake had thought of. The ensuing final moments of the play felt rushed and out of place with the rest of the piece. 

This unevenness extends to the play’s broader ambition. Butler clearly wants to use humour to expose British ignorance of Irish history, and there are moments where this lands, such as the slideshow sequences and quips about the British Royal Family which create a sharp comic rhythm that the rest of the play struggles to sustain. But too often the satire drifts into caricature. The wilful ignorance of the British population being lampooned is so broad and cartoonish that it never quite implicates the audience in the way it needs to. For audiences who already know the history, the treatment will feel shallow. However, for those who don’t, it may leave them with the impression that they have a better understanding now. 

The Spectacular is by no means without merit. It is energetic, often funny, and its performers are committed throughout. The decision to involve audience members was a welcome one, which provided moments of spontaneity and unpredictability that loosened the tension between the play’s heavier themes.

The play’s run at the Camden People’s Theatre has unfortunately coincided, entirely by chance, with a reminder of just how much weight this subject still carries. In recent weeks, a dissident republican group calling itself the New IRA attempted a proxy bomb attack in Lurgan, forcing a kidnapped delivery driver at gunpoint to a nearby police station with an explosive device in the boot of his car. The timing is unfortunate and certainly nothing that the play’s team could have anticipated. But it serves as a sobering illustration of why the topic of violent republicanism deserves more than a comedic framework can comfortably hold.

REVIEW: You Matched With…

Published on by paddycardwellLeave a comment

Rating: 4 out of 5.

“A sharply written and surprisingly unsettling comedy about what happens when we ask AI how to feel.“

“No one wants to admit they’re holding onto something worthless.”

Artificial intelligence. The two words seem to have become a permanent fixture in
our collective consciousness in the last three years – and for good reason. The
technology has permeated every aspect of our everyday lives from streamlining our
workloads, curating our fitness programmes and now providing us dating advice?
This new and somewhat creepy frontier is explored in Diana Hognogi’s new play
‘You Matched With…’, which is playing at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden. The
romcom features Em, played by Evangeline Beaven, who has found herself in a
spiral of unsuccessful dates which she relays to ChatGPT for its analysis. The large
language model eventually goes rogue and begins to resurrect composites of her
previously ghosted romantic partners as ‘Romantic Accountability Avatars’. The
ensuing play becomes somewhere between ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘2001: A Space
Odyssey’, with Hal turning into the ghost of Christmas past.


Director Hannah O’Reilly successfully manages to balance comedy with the more
candid moments, steering her cast through tonal shifts that could easily have felt
jarring but instead feel earned.


However, the undeniable star of the show is Evangeline Beaven, who carries the
play with considerable skill. Her Em is neurotic and self-aware in equal measure –
funny enough to generate real laughs but vulnerable enough for the audience to
genuinely root for her. She is matched well by Alex McCaragher’s ChatGPT, whose
deadpan delivery of yes-man platitudes and trite affirmations grows increasingly
unsettling as the play progresses. As the play goes along, his composed robotic
facade begins to crack in what is one of the production’s most effective moments,
transforming what could have been a one-note comic device into something
altogether more nefarious.


The ensemble cast of avatars also shine. Andrew Friedman, Frankie Wade and Jude
Alp deliver Hognogi’s sharp writing with excellent comic timing and candour in equal
measure. Each resurrected ex arrives with his own brand of emotional damage
packaged in the familiar cliched language of modern dating.


You Matched With… arrives at exactly the right cultural moment. As AI inches further
into our emotional lives, Hognogi leaves her audience with an uncomfortable
question about what we actually want from human connection — and whether we
have already unintentionally outsourced it. Based on this tightly written and
thoroughly entertaining hour of theatre, she is a writer well worth watching.

REVIEW: Ukraine Unbroken

Published on by paddycardwellLeave a comment

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

‘“Ukraine is an idea”: A harrowing odyssey through the psyche of a nation that resolutely refuses to die.’

Two days before Ukraine Unbroken debuted at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston, the United States and Israel launched their historic air assault on the Iranian capital, Tehran, codenamed Operation Epic Fury. Within hours, a volley of ballistic missiles had killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and much of his cabinet; Iran had launched indiscriminate retaliatory strikes of its own; global oil prices hit their highest level in three years; and air travel across the Middle East was effectively paralysed. This made the staging of a series of five plays focusing on the war in Ukraine all the more prescient – and chilling.

The production comprises of five independent vignettes directed by Nicolas Kent, each set during Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, which began in 2014. All of the plays are tied together by performances from Mariia Petrovska, a Ukrainian singer and bandura player who appears during the set changes. As Petrovska reveals as the evening unfolds, she fled to the UK following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, lending her already ethereal vocals and bandura solos an even more haunting quality.

The first play, Always by Jonathan Myerson, depicts the massacre of protesters during the 2014 Maidan revolution, shown from the confines of a hotel room from which snipers fire upon unarmed demonstrators. The piece provides fascinating context to what may be a lesser-known chapter of modern Ukrainian history and acts as a suitably macabre tone-setter for the rest of the evening.

The second, Five Day War by David Edgar, takes a step back from the visceral peril of Always and instead adopts a more slow-burning, procedural tone. It follows a group of senior Russian politicians summoned to a clandestine meeting in a rural Ukrainian lodge. They soon realise they have been handpicked to become Ukraine’s government-in-waiting; all they need do is wait out the inevitable Russian victory predicted to come in five days. However, as the group begin interviewing one another for cabinet positions, it becomes evident that President Putin’s “special military operation” is not going to plan. What unfolds is an expertly written, Twelve Angry Men-style drama, in which characters are forced to wrestle with their own personal ambition against the most rudimentary tenets of humanity.

The second half of the production begins with Three Mates by Natalka Vorozhbit. Though ostensibly the most sedate of the five plays – essentially the internal monologue of a conscientious objector struggling to fall asleep during an air raid – it ultimately packs the greatest emotional punch. The narrator, inebriated with his own guilt, reflects on the decisions that have led him to his current predicament. He recalls two childhood friends: one of whom managed to escape, and the other who became a grizzled veteran still on the front line, while he remains in a kind of purgatory in Kyiv, paralysed by his own cowardice. The vignette is brilliantly written and heartbreakingly performed by Ian Bonar and Jade Williams, the latter haunting the stage as the memory of the wife who fled to the UK as a refugee. In light of the current state of the world, Three Mates serves as a sobering reminder of the psychological toll warfare takes on those who fight – and those who won’t. 

The final two plays round out the production with aplomb. Wretched Things by David Greig concerns three Ukrainian soldiers who, while under heavy siege from incoming Russian artillery, stumble across a gravely wounded North Korean soldier who had been fighting on the Russian side. The moral dilemma of what to do with him drives the remainder of the play, as Russian forces close in on their position. Certainly the most high-octane of the five, Wretched Things is enthralling throughout, with Alexa Moore’s costumes and the waft of real cigarette smoke lending a vivid physicality to the set. Unfortunately, its engaging plot is occasionally blunted by slightly over-explicit dialogue, such as the line: “The Ukrainian eastern front is the world’s seminar room right now.”

Taken by Cat Goscovitch is the final drama of the evening, and it lands with a devastating hammer blow. It tells the story of a mother (Williams) who vows to return her 12-year-old daughter (Clara Read) to her native Mariupol after she is abducted by Russian forces. Once the moving drama concludes, the tragedy is compounded by a projection above the stage revealing the staggering statistic that 20,000 Ukrainian children have been kidnapped by Russian forces since the war began.

All five plays are performed by an ensemble cast of Daniel Betts, Ian Bonar, Sally Giles, David Michaels, Clara Read and Jade Williams. The cast rotate seamlessly between roles, imbuing each character with complexity and humanity they deserve. Although the situation, not just in Ukraine but across the world, feels as bleak in 2026 as at any point in recent memory, Ukraine Unbroken offers a vital reminder that resilience itself can be an act of defiance. As the title suggests, despite the brutality inflicted by four years of war, Ukraine endures, not merely as a territory under siege, but as an idea, a culture and a people who refuse to be erased.

Ukraine Unbroken plays at the Arcola Theatre until 28th March. Tickets are available here.

REVIEW: Monstering the Rocketman

Published on by paddycardwellLeave a comment

Rating: 5 out of 5.

An exceptional retelling of the cautionary tale of journalistic hubris

The story of Elton John’s defamation case against The Sun newspaper is well established among journalists, both aspiring and established. The infamous “sordid rent-boy orgy” stories published by Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, and the subsequent lawsuits they prompted, are now a staple of UK media law teaching and a stark reminder of the excesses of tabloid journalism at its most reckless.

Henry Naylor’s Monstering the Rocketman, which he also performs, dramatises the affair with precision and urgency. The play skilfully navigates the tension between ambition and truth, exposing the moral compromises demanded by an industry that often prioritises career progression over basic journalistic integrity.

At the centre of the play is a doe-eyed junior reporter, affectionately nicknamed Lynx after his penchant for the deodorant of the same name, who also serves as the narrator. Eager to make his name in the prime of Fleet Street, Lynx secures work experience at The Sun, the nation’s most-read newspaper. There, he is placed under the tutelage of the grizzled tabloid veteran Jane and the maniacal editor Kelvin MacKenzie. He is quickly thrown in at the deep end, tasked with covering the nation’s favourite performer’s alleged depraved sex parties and claims that purportedly included underage boys.

As is common in the tabloid press, Lynx soon discovers that editors grant themselves a generous degree of creative licence when it comes to the truth. This tendency is heightened by the bitter rivalry between the two most-read papers of the time, The Sun and the Mirror. Some of the stories produced during this period, such as the one about Elton John, were not merely exaggerated but entirely fabricated. Lynx is forced to grapple with his desire to climb the career ladder, no matter how undignified, against his commitment to truth and basic human decency.

Writer and performer Henry Naylor and director Darren Lee Cole make particularly effective use of the play’s set, periodically pasting real tabloid front pages from the era onto the stage. These moments are shocking reminders of just how malicious and invasive the tactics of the red tops were. One especially haunting example is the 4 May 1982 headline that The Sun ran following the sinking of the ARA General Belgrano during the Falklands War — an act that some historians argue meets the legal threshold to be considered a war crime. The headline reads simply: GOTCHA. This is without even mentioning the overwhelming stench of homophobia that marinated much of the copy directed at Elton John.

Naylor’s writing addresses this dark period of journalism through an effective metaphor in which the ink on the page rubs off on, and permeates, the populace that consumes it, shaping the nation’s collective psyche both literally and figuratively.

The play also feels timely. Nearly four decades after The Sun published the ‘rent-boy’ story at the centre of Monstering the Rocketman, Elton John has once again found himself in court, arguing that his privacy has been breached by tabloid journalists. In a recent today, he said “I have found the Mail’s deliberate invasion into my medical health and medical details surrounding the birth of our son Zachary abhorrent and outside even the most basic standards of human decency,” — words that resonate all the more powerfully after watching Monstering the Rocketman.

REVIEW: Ghost Grandma

Published on by paddycardwellLeave a comment

Rating: 2 out of 5.

A promising and ambitious premise is unable to compensate for uneven writing and heavy-handed punchlines

As the audience is ushered upstairs into the theatre at the Hen and Chickens pub in Islington, we are handed a copy of the programme as staff say, “sorry for your loss.” Whilst still finding our seats, we can see the cast silently pacing back and forth at what appears to be a funeral wake, thus setting the scene for Arista Abbabatulla’s new play Ghost Grandma, co-written by Anamika Srivastava and Pallavi Kumar.

The play begins with Dee, played by Srivastava, attending this wake, only to find out that her formerly estranged grandmother has left her a large house in her will. Dee is then forced to reckon with the typically tedious legal processes that come with inheritance, but with the added complication of being haunted by the ghost of her late grandma. The pair attempt to fend off eccentric tenants, covetous neighbours, and conniving council members, all the while attempting to resuscitate any semblance of a relationship they may be able to have with one another.

It is an engaging and thoughtful premise, however all of the interweaving plot points unfold in such a sudden and slapstick manner that they leave little room for emotional depth or exploration. For example, the character of Dee is not given the development she deserves and is instead reduced to near-caricature, with an insistence on melodramatic and unrealistic gags and what feels like a dated obsession with selfies and social media. The supporting cast suffer a similar fate; most of their stage time is taken up by exaggerated punchlines or clichéd misdeeds, allowing them neither the space to come across as a genuine villainous presence nor to provide effective comic relief.

And therein lies the main issue with Ghost Grandma. Marketed as a comedy, it struggles to maintain any consistent comedic impact. Despite the cast’s evident commitment, the script and direction leave many jokes falling flat, and the actors’ often overstated delivery of punchlines makes the tonal shifts that come later in the play all the more jarring and uneven.

Despite this, Selina Patankar, who plays Grandma, stands out as the most engaging and consistently funny character, with much of her humour stemming from quick quips and retorts in her conversations with Dee. These quieter interactions provide the show’s most effective moments of laughter and pathos, and the play would have benefited from more of them, as opposed to the loud physical comedy relied upon by the supporting characters.In her conversation with A Youngish Perspective, the play’s directors and writers stated that “in the UK, South Asian culture is often known for its food and places, but the way people actually live is frequently misunderstood. We wanted to bring these authentic experiences to the stage.” This commitment to telling a distinctly South Asian story is a welcome one, and it is refreshing to see a play that endeavours to portray the lived experiences of British Asians without relying on stereotypes, while still retaining cultural specificity. Unfortunately, over the course of its hour-long runtime, the play is not quite able to make its characters feel fully fleshed out or to grant them the humanity and tenderness it valiantly aims for.

REVIEW: It Happened to Me

Published on by paddycardwellLeave a comment

Rating: 3 out of 5.

“It Happened to Me is a new witty one-man show that shines a light on one man’s extraordinary rise and ultimate demise.”

By all accounts, Peter Lawford lived a pretty remarkable life. Acting as a conduit between the Rat Pack, the Beatles, and the Kennedys, he experienced all the highs of being an integral part of the elite social circles of the 1950s and 60s. The problem with riding the peaks that come with such a profession is that one must also contend with the inevitable troughs. This is the exact predicament that Peter Briffa explores in his first play at the Old Red Lion Theatre in 14 years, It Happened to Me.

The play is an odyssey through the life and work of actor Peter Lawford. It is set on Christmas Eve 1983 at the Betty Ford Centre, where Lawford is receiving rehabilitation treatment for the drug and alcohol addictions that have plagued him for most of his adult life. His neighbouring patients include country music star Johnny Cash, as well as former on-screen partner Elizabeth Taylor. The play is structured around Lawford’s ruminations on the events that have led up to his current predicament. 

Born into an officious military family in London, a chance encounter with a talent scout in Los Angeles launched a screen career that would culminate in him becoming one of the most sought-after actors in Hollywood. He was invited to join the Rat Pack in 1959, where he spent his time rubbing shoulders with the biggest stars of the day, such as Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, and was notably the last person to speak to Marilyn Monroe before her untimely death in 1962. A prolific womaniser in his time, Lawford’s reputed charm was so strong that he married into the dynastic Kennedy family after wedding Patricia Kennedy, making him brother-in-law to the eventual U.S. President, John F. Kennedy.

However, by the time we meet him at the beginning of the play, Lawford’s influence in both Hollywood and Washington has long since faded. His marriage to Patricia ended acrimoniously in divorce, and his relationship with the Rat Pack lies in tatters after his excommunication from the group for a perceived slight against Sinatra. Major Hollywood studios now view him as a liability due to his drinking problem, combined with dwindling box-office returns. All he has for company this Christmas Eve is a small amount of smuggled cocaine and the occasional phone call from his neighbour, Johnny Cash.

A one-man play, actor Jonathan Hansler portrays Lawford. His task is not an enviable one, as the production is essentially one man’s hour-long soliloquy on the decisions and mistakes that have shaped his life — a challenge he embodies and executes with aplomb. Director Owain Rose makes clever use of lighting to give the sparsely decorated set a sense of grandeur beyond the sum of its parts. Briffa’s writing is rich and witty, while also providing moments of reflective pathos. However, the sheer density of the material propels the play forward at an almost breakneck speed. While this momentum mirrors Lawford’s own restless and self-destructive life, it occasionally leaves little room for either the actor or the audience to fully absorb the emotional weight of what is being revealed. As a result, moments that might otherwise linger and resonate are sometimes swept along too quickly. Even so, It Happened to Me remains a compelling and accomplished piece of writing, offering a fascinating and often poignant portrait of a life lived intensely — and ultimately at great cost. 

REVIEW: I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Too

Published on by paddycardwellLeave a comment

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Both raw and deeply human, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Too lays bare the destructive dance between creativity and madness.

“When I write as me, the words don’t come.” It’s a feeling all too relatable for anyone who’s ever sat down to create — let alone to write a debut novel with agents, publishers, and partners past and present breathing down your neck. It is this feeling of suffocating writer’s block that builds to a fever pitch for protagonist Victoria in I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf, too.

Coline Atterbury’s new play follows Victoria, an aspiring writer living with her boyfriend, Mark, when her creative spark is ignited by a newfound infatuation with Virginia Woolf’s novels — an infatuation that slowly morphs into a feverish obsession threatening to destroy everything in its wake. Victoria’s mania is only heightened by the chance reintroduction of Leon into her life; her ex-boyfriend, a gentle, bookish academic who serves as the counterweight to her reckless, though often tender, relationship with Mark and its frequent, peer-pressure-induced midweek cocaine benders. Whilst tackling topics of extreme seriousness such as bipolar disorder, psychosis, and grief, Atterbury’s masterstroke lies in setting them against the backdrop of the banality of life in London as a thirty-something.

The play’s director, Olamide Candide-Johnson doesn’t rely on extravagant set pieces — with its limited space, three-person cast and restrained use of music and lighting — yet the precision of the writing and the performances make it worth far more than the sum of its parts. As Victoria’s fixation with Virginia Woolf deepens, she begins to imitate more elements of the author’s own life. The most striking of these is her entanglement with the two men, echoing Woolf’s own adulterous relationships within Victorian Bloomsbury’s literary circles, with figures such as Leonard Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

As the tension within the love triangle grows increasingly fraught, the performances of Atterbury and her co-stars, Charlie Coombes-Roberts and Andrew Hawley, rise in intensity — creating moments of piercing pathos amid what can sometimes be frenetic sequences. Despite often tackling darker themes, the excellent chemistry between the actors provides many funny moments as well, providing oft-needed breathing room for the audience.

Despite this exploration of relationships and sexuality, the main theme of the play is undoubtedly mental health and an interrogation of how it is dealt with in our society. Atterbury has said that “the piece is inspired by my own experience with bipolar disorder. There’s this romanticised idea that creatives are chaotic, wild, living on the edge — but I wanted to explore how society perceives madness and creativity.” It is an exploration which has often proved a difficult one to convey in media, with several depictions of a character’s slow descent into madness becoming merely a trope resulting in caricature. However, Victoria’s Bipolar Disorder, as well as Mark and Leon’s reaction to it, is handled in a tasteful and nuanced manner, highlighting the strain that such an illness can create for someone and the people that love them most.

Atterbury and Candide-Johnson have created an incredibly evocative work which carefully explores the often symbiotic relationship between madness and creativity, all the while treating its characters with the empathy and reverence that the subject matter deserves. In its masterful balancing of humour and heartbreak, the piece manages to be a rumination of huge, existential themes whilst still feeling acutely human.