REVIEW: Double Bill: Down to Chance/Sorry I Broke Your Arms and Legs


Rating: 4 out of 5.

“What begins as chaos resolves into something precise, controlled, and quietly devastating.”

DOWN TO CHANCE

“A relentless comic performance that sustains its momentum right through to the final beat.”

Sorry (I Broke Your Arms and Legs)

At the Pleasance Theatre, Maybe You Like It arrive in London with a double bill that hinges on contrast. One piece reconstructs a moment of historical crisis with mounting intensity. The other leans into absurdity, charting the emotional logic of adolescence through escalating theatrical form. What connects them is not subject but execution. Both are built on precision, on performance, and on the careful shaping of momentum.

Down to Chance

Written and performed by Ellie Jay Cooper, alongside Robert Merriam, Down to Chance draws on the real story of radio journalist Genie Chance in 1964 Anchorage. Under the direction of Caleb Barron, the production uses multi-rolling, live sound, and rapid transitions to construct a community in crisis.

At first, the multi-rolling is difficult to track. Characters overlap and the pace threatens clarity. But once the rhythm settles, the effect sharpens. What initially feels confusing becomes defined. Each character lands with a distinct physicality, tone, and presence. It becomes impossible to confuse them. From that point on, the production tightens. Transitions feel controlled rather than frantic. The storytelling gains confidence, revealing a careful underlying structure.

The emotional centre arrives toward the end. As Genie Chance delivers a crucial broadcast, the scale contracts and the noise recedes. The moment is held with restraint, and it is difficult not to feel a chill. The ending resists easy resolution. It is beautiful without becoming sentimental, landing at a summit rather than a conclusion.

Sorry (I Broke Your Arms and Legs)

Written and performed by James Akka, Sorry (I Broke Your Arms and Legs) follows twelve-year-old Sam Wilson as he attempts to secure the role of Head Boy through an increasingly elaborate PowerPoint presentation. Directed by Caleb Barron, the production transforms a familiar format into something theatrically inventive.

From the outset, the energy is total. It does not drop. Akka moves between characters with remarkable fluency, shifting voice, posture, and rhythm so completely that his own baseline becomes impossible to locate. Sam’s world unfolds through rivalries and anxieties, from the looming presence of Darius to competition with Chris as play lead. The narrative initially appears to scatter, branching outward. For a moment, it is unclear where the piece is heading. Then the structure reveals itself. Small threads begin to tighten. What seemed like digression becomes purposeful, with earlier details feeding cleanly into later revelations.

Akka uses every available tool. Infographics, impressions, tonal shifts. The PowerPoint is not a gimmick. Each slide adds information, shifts perspective, and steadily builds the case Sam is trying to make. The humour remains constant, but beneath it sits something more precise: a recognition of how large these stakes feel at twelve. The performance honours that scale without undercutting it. The energy carries through to the final word, maintaining clarity and control throughout.

A Double Bill in Contrast

The two productions could not be more different in subject. One looks outward, toward community and crisis. The other turns inward, toward ego and identity. Yet the quality across both is strikingly consistent. Performance and structure are handled with equal care.

Maybe You Like It demonstrate a clear sense of how to shape theatrical form around material. The result is a double bill unified not by theme, but by the precision of its execution.

REVIEW: Kinaesthesia + Q&A with Gerald Fox


Rating: 3 out of 5.

A richly intelligent excavation of early cinema’s dream logic that fascinates throughout, even as its length and restraint hold it back from full sensory immersion


At BFI Southbank, Kinaesthesia arrives as both film and manifesto. Directed by Gerald Fox, the documentary forms the centrepiece of a wider season dedicated to dreams in early cinema, positioning itself as a kind of cinematic archaeology of the unconscious.

Fox is no stranger to essayistic, archive-driven filmmaking. A BAFTA and Grierson award-winning director, his work has consistently engaged with the history of film form and spectatorship, often privileging montage, rhythm, and visual association over conventional narration. That sensibility is deeply felt here. Kinaesthesia draws on a vast archive, tracing how silent cinema visualised dreams across movements as varied as French Impressionism, German Expressionism, Soviet Montage and the American avant-garde.

The intellectual backbone of the project lies in the influence of Vlada Petrić, whose scholarship on film form and perception helped shape modern understandings of cinematic language. Crucially, Petrić did not simply influence Fox at a distance, he taught him. That pedagogical relationship is palpable throughout the film. Kinaesthesia feels, in many ways, like a continuation of Petrić’s teaching: a visual extension of his ideas, attempting to restore early cinema to its original sensory and perceptual intensity rather than reducing it to narrative history.

There is a lot to admire. The material itself is endlessly rich. Early cinema’s fascination with dreams lends itself naturally to experimentation, and Fox’s curatorial instinct is sharp. The film moves fluidly between canonical works and lesser-known fragments, creating a kind of visual essay on how cinema learned to mimic the logic of dreaming. It is, at its best, a genuine reawakening of the strangeness and invention of silent film.

Yet the film’s greatest strength is also where it begins to falter. At 97 minutes, Kinaesthesia feels just slightly too long for its mode. The structure, built on accumulation and association, occasionally slips into repetition. Ideas are reiterated rather than developed, and sequences that initially feel revelatory begin to lose their impact through overextension. This is where the film’s formal approach could have been pushed further. Given its subject, a more adventurous relationship between image, editing, and sound would have been beneficial. While the montage is elegant, it is rarely surprising. The editing tends toward reverence rather than intervention, and the soundscape, though effective, seldom disrupts or reframes the archival material in a way that might generate new meaning. For a film about dreams, there are moments where it feels tethered to waking logic.

The Q&A that followed, with Fox himself, helped illuminate some of these choices. His emphasis on fidelity to the archive and on allowing the material to “speak” explains the film’s restraint, even if it doesn’t entirely justify it. There is a clear tension between scholarship and sensation here: between presenting a history and embodying one.

Still, Kinaesthesia remains a compelling and beautiful work. It situates early cinema not as a precursor to modern filmmaking, but as a space of radical possibility, where form was fluid and the boundaries between reality and imagination were still being invented.

Ultimately, the film succeeds as an act of curation and devotion, even if it stops short of fully embodying the dream logic it seeks to explore. Fascinating, rich, and undeniably intelligent, Kinaesthesia is also, at times, a touch too long and a little too cautious in its formal ambitions.

Kinaesthesia had its world premiere at BFI Southbank and opened in UK and Irish cinemas on 17 April 2026.

REVIEW: Iphigenia


Rating: 4 out of 5.

Iphigenia exposes how power disguises brutality until a father’s choice makes the cost of war devastatingly, and irreversibly, personal.


At Arcola, Iphigenia starts from a simple premise: the most frightening men are often the most convincing. Simon Kunz holds the opening in comedy with control. The timing lands, the tone stays easy, and the audience settles with him. That is what makes the turn into Agamemnon work. He does not mark the change. The same control hardens, and by the time he commits to sacrificing his daughter, it feels entirely believable. The brutality is not introduced. It is revealed.

That performance sits inside a strong company. Mithra Malek gives Iphigenia weight. She is not treated as a symbol or a device, but as a daughter, which is what gives the decision its force. Indra Ové meets Agamemnon directly as Clytemnestra, without softening or excess, and the conflict between them is allowed to hold its full shape. Serdar Biliş keeps the production grounded in the present without flattening it into a single reading.

The fight between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra is the point at which everything comes into focus. When she tells him, “the only god you believe in is power and money,” there is nothing left to qualify. He knows what the sacrifice is, and he proceeds anyway. That is what places the play in the present. As Jill Lepore argues in The New Yorker, constitutional limits on presidential war-making have steadily eroded, allowing a single figure to determine when violence is justified. Under Donald Trump, missile strikes in Syria were authorised without Congressional approval, and the killing of Qasem Soleimani was justified as immediate necessity. The structure is the same. One person makes the decision, and those without power absorb it.

The production does not approach war abstractly. It keeps returning to the relationship between parent and child. The filmed interviews, replacing the chorus, make that unavoidable. They do not expand the scale of the play. They reduce it. The cost of war is placed inside a family, where it cannot be reframed.

For those who come to this story through The Song of Achilles, where Iphigenia appears only briefly, the difference here is clear. She is not left at the edges. The production builds around her. The loss is not a moment that allows something else to begin. It is the centre of the play.

That shift also sits within the longer history of the myth. Iphigenia has often been treated as a function of war, a sacrifice that enables something larger. Here, that structure is reversed. The war exists around her, but the focus remains fixed on what is done to her, and by whom.

The ending does not offer relief. Agamemnon tells Clytemnestra that he saw Iphigenia taken up to heaven. It is an attempt to replace what happened with something else. She says she wishes she could believe him.

Iphigenia is playing at the Arcola Theatre from 10 April to 2 May 2026, with evening performances at 7.00pm and matinees at 3.30pm.

FEATURE: Lynn Seymour- A Trailblazer Remembered


The event established a thoughtful tone for a week of theatre, film, music and discussion.


On International Women’s Day, the Women’s Voices Arts & Culture Festival opened its programme at the Playhouse Theatre with an evening dedicated to the formidable legacy of Lynn Seymour, a dancer whose dramatic intensity helped reshape narrative ballet in the twentieth century. Positioned at the start of a multi-disciplinary festival celebrating women’s artistic voices, the event established a thoughtful tone for a week of theatre, film, music and discussion.

Seymour, who rose to prominence with The Royal Ballet, built her reputation on performances that prioritised emotional truth over classical composure. A key collaborator of Kenneth MacMillan, she helped usher ballet toward a more psychologically searching form of storytelling. Her interpretations in works such as Romeo and Juliet and Mayerling suggested that beneath the elegant architecture of classical technique lies something more volatile: contradiction, vulnerability and desire.

The evening opened with excerpts from the BBC documentary Lynn Seymour: In a Class of Her Own, filmed at a pivotal moment in Seymour’s life. Shot around the time she was confronting the aftermath of a serious injury at forty, the film captures an artist reflecting on the fragility of the body on which her entire craft depends. Rather than presenting a triumphant portrait, the documentary offers something more revealing: a dancer negotiating uncertainty, resilience and the realities of longevity in an art form that often equates youth with permanence.

Providing context for the programme was Naomi Sorkin, who introduced the evening and situated Seymour’s career within the wider themes of the festival. Her remarks drew attention not only to Seymour’s artistic achievements but also to the broader history of women whose contributions have shaped performance culture, often beyond the spotlight.

Interwoven with the archival material was a live performance by Ellie Young. Young’s interpretation functioned as a bridge between past and present, translating Seymour’s expressive legacy into contemporary movement. The choreography unfolded alongside a beautifully restrained live piano accompaniment, whose delicate phrasing created an intimate dialogue between music and movement.

Across the wider Women’s Voices Arts & Culture Festival, the programme moves fluidly between forms. Theatre sits alongside musical and literary evenings, while conversations with writers and filmmakers examine the craft and politics of storytelling. The festival places women’s creative voices at its centre, allowing different disciplines to speak to one another across the week. Against this broader context, the tribute to Seymour carried particular resonance. The programme quietly demonstrated that her legacy is not preserved in archives alone, but in the way dancers continue to approach character, risk and emotional precision.

The Women’s Voices Arts and Culture Festival runs until the 14th March at the Playground Theatre, London. Tickets here.

REVIEW: Why I am and why I am not


Rating: 4 out of 5.

In the civic imagination, a balcony suggests authority: a ruler greeting the crowd, a politician delivering promises, a monarch acknowledging applause. In Why I am and why I am not, the balcony of the old town hall becomes something else entirely. It becomes a place for ordinary declaration.


The performance, created by the Manchester-based theatre collective Quarantine, unfolds as a two-part public encounter. The first half, The Balcony, begins outdoors. From the façade of Battersea Arts Centre, which was once Battersea Town Hall, twelve individuals step forward to address the gathered crowd. Each begins with the same simple phrase: “Why I Am” or “Why I Am Not.”  

The format draws deliberate inspiration from a moment in the building’s history: the philosopher Bertrand Russell delivered his controversial lecture Why I Am Not a Christian here in 1927. The echo is less historical reenactment than provocation. Russell’s polemic becomes a structural prompt for a contemporary chorus of voices.  

The speakers themselves are intentionally varied: a child, a professional speechmaker, a newcomer to the area and others from different walks of life. Each approaches the formula differently. Some statements feel philosophical, others personal, occasionally playful. What emerges is not a debate but a small civic ritual; an improvised parliament of identity, belief and refusal.  

If the balcony offers proclamation, the second part—The Rooms, offers intimacy. Inside the labyrinthine interior of the building, audiences wander through spaces where the speakers can be encountered again. Away from the elevated platform, the rhetoric softens. The formal speech gives way to conversation. Public identity, so confidently projected from above, becomes something more tentative and complicated in private rooms.  

The piece forms part of A Public Address, a wider programme in which Quarantine take over the former town hall to explore a deceptively simple question: who gets heard in a place like this today? The architecture carries its own memory of authority. The performance quietly reassigns that authority to the people standing on the balcony.  

The creative team reflects the project’s clarity of concept. The work is conceived and created by Richard Gregory, with design by Simon Banham, produced by Kevin Jamieson and supported in speech writing by Sonia Hughes. British Sign Language interpretation is provided by Katie Fenwick, extending the event’s commitment to accessibility.  

Taken together, the weekend becomes less a performance than a portrait: a meditation on the distance between the self we declare in public and the self that emerges in conversation. The balcony promises certainty; the rooms reveal its edges.

Why I am and why I am not ran from 6th-8th March at Battersea Arts Centre.

REVIEW: Lambslaughter


Rating: 4 out of 5.

“The play honestly takes you back to high school, not through cliché but through detail.”


There is a moment in Lambslaughter at Playhouse East when you realise you are not simply watching a play about adolescence but reliving it. Set in a Catholic girls’ school in Merseyside in 2013, the piece written and directed by Olivia Revans captures the strange intensity of teenage consciousness with an honesty that feels almost documentary. It does not sentimentalise girlhood. It remembers it.

The recognition begins early. The instant one of the girls is seen reading Twilight, the atmosphere locks into place. The references to tweets, not X, the breathless digital exchanges, the way online drama bleeds into real life, all land with unnerving accuracy. This is not nostalgia filtered through adulthood. It feels observed from within.

At its centre are Jade and Chloe, played with remarkable precision by Freya Jones and Erin Riley. Their friendship is volatile, tender, competitive, devoted. They do not perform teenage girls; they inhabit them. The rhythms of their speech overlap and collide. The insecurity is palpable. The sudden cruelty feels authentic rather than theatrical. You are taken back to classrooms, corridors, and constant drama.

One of the production’s most intelligent devices is its parallel with The Crucible which the girls study in school. The resonance between Miller’s hysteria and the social tribunal of teenage life is deftly handled. The academic text becomes a mirror for their own emotional trials. It is a sharp structural choice and one of the evening’s strongest elements.

Not everything carries equal weight. The inclusion of a doll: puppet, which appears intermittently, feels ornamental rather than revelatory. It never quite earns its place in the narrative. A subplot involving Chloe’s dalliance with an older man is introduced with promise but not sufficiently explored. It slips from view long enough that when it resurfaces, it feels faint. The play also tackles an ambitious number of issues within a compact running time. Some threads would have benefited from greater depth and breathing room, even if it’s at the risk of removing others. 

Still, the performances anchor everything. Louie Threlfall, as Mr Barrett, avoids caricature in portraying the uneasy teacher dynamic. The ensemble maintains a tone of startling realism throughout. The acting is extraordinary in its restraint and credibility. Nothing feels forced. The emotional stakes feel lived rather than performed.

What lingers is the sincerity. The play honestly takes you back to high school, not through cliché but through detail. Through books half hidden in backpacks. Through social media anxiety. Through the intellectual texts that quietly shape how young people understand themselves. It is messy, ambitious, occasionally uneven, but ultimately deeply affecting.

Lambslaughter is showing at Playhouse East in London as part of the February Fringe, with performances running 24 to 26 February 2026. Tickets are available here.

REVIEW: What I’d Be


Rating: 3 out of 5.

 A showcase for two finely tuned performances and a thoughtful exploration of sisterhood under strain


In the intimate upstairs room of the Jack Studio Theatre in Brockley, What I’d Be sets itself a deceptively simple task. Written by Tanieth Kerr and directed by Katy Livsey, the two-hander follows estranged sisters Makayla and Ally as they meet on a park bench after their mother’s funeral. Over the course of a tightly contained hour, the play asks whether shared history is enough to repair a fractured bond.

The Jack Studio, perched above the Brockley Jack pub, is not a space that tolerates half measures. The stage is compact, the audience close enough to catch the smallest flicker of doubt. It is here that the production finds its greatest strength. Both actors are utterly present, inhabiting the space with a concentration that never slips. In such proximity, any false note would clang. Instead, their performances feel precise and lived-in.

The constriction of the stage sharpens the drama. The actors use that to their advantage. Their exchanges crackle not because the dialogue is showy, but because the listening is active. Each line appears to land and register before the next is fired back. The sense of shared history is palpable, not just in what is said but in how quickly the temperature changes.

The play tackles raw material: grief, estrangement, and the long shadow cast by a formative rupture in the sisters’ past. There is a temptation in such narratives to overstate, to heighten every confrontation into a crescendo. Instead, the production opts for restraint. The tone is tender without becoming sentimental. Even at its most painful, the writing maintains a degree of composure, allowing the actors to carry the emotional weight rather than forcing it.

The sisters’ dynamic is sharply observed. Their humour is edged, their affection reluctant. They slip easily into old patterns of provocation and defensiveness. What makes it compelling is that neither woman is positioned as entirely right or wrong. The play understands that estrangement rarely rests on a single grievance; it accumulates, layer by layer, until the distance feels irreversible. Watching them attempt to unpick that accumulation is the evening’s quiet triumph.

Where the production falters slightly is in its structure. The most significant twist, the revelation that reframes much of their history, takes place offstage and is relayed through dialogue. As a result, the play leans heavily on exposition. Characters recount events, clarify misunderstandings and piece together timelines. While this deepens our understanding, it also slows the momentum. The audience is told about the rupture rather than experiencing its shock alongside the characters.

That decision limits the dramatic impact of what should be the play’s most seismic moment. Because we encounter it second-hand, its emotional reverberations feel somewhat contained. The script gestures towards the enormity of the event but stops short of fully interrogating it in the present tense. There is a sense that the material could withstand greater risk, that a more sustained confrontation might have unearthed further complexity.

And yet, even in its more explanatory passages, the production retains its grip thanks to the actors’ discipline. They find subtext in lines that might otherwise feel functional. A simple correction of a memory carries accusation; a moment of hesitation suggests doubt about one’s own narrative. In this way, the play becomes less about the factual details of the twist and more about the competing stories we tell ourselves to survive.

Importantly, What I’d Be resists tidy resolution. The sisters do not arrive at catharsis in the conventional sense. Their reconciliation, if it can be called that, is tentative and partial. The damage remains visible. This refusal to overpromise feels honest. The play acknowledges that some wounds alter the shape of a relationship permanently, even if contact is restored.

In a larger venue, the piece might struggle to command attention. At the Jack Studio, its intimacy works in its favour. The audience is drawn into the sisters’ orbit, made privy to a conversation that feels almost private. When the lights fall, the prevailing mood is not one of spectacle but of recognition.

What I’d Be may rely too heavily on exposition to deliver its central revelation, but as a showcase for two finely tuned performances and a thoughtful exploration of sisterhood under strain, it makes a persuasive case for the power of small-scale theatre. In a room where every breath counts, it holds its nerve.

What I’d Be ran at the Jack Studio Theatre, Brockley, from 17–21 February 2026.

More information: https://brockleyjack.co.uk/jackstudio-entry/what-id-be/

REVIEW: ENO’s Cosi fan tutte


Rating: 4 out of 5.

Mozart’s most glittering social experiment arrives at the London Coliseum 


ENO’s production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte returns to the London Coliseum. ENO (English National Opera ) performs all its operas in English so audiences can understand the drama directly without linguistic barriers. ENO has had more new productions of Così fan tutte than any other Mozart opera, with good reason. There is something faintly disreputable about Così fan tutte, and ENO has the good sense not to disinfect it. Mozart’s most glittering social experiment arrives at the London Coliseum dressed as a mid-century pleasure park, all Coney Island lights and whirring amusements, as though fidelity itself were a sideshow attraction that might be won with sufficient nerve.

Phelim McDermott’s production, first seen more than a decade ago, remains durable. The production starts strong with a comedic tone. The performers hold up cards to set up the audience’s expectations. Its fairground frame does not so much update the opera as expose it. Così is all about spectacle: men in disguise, women performing virtue, a philosopher pulling strings. By relocating the action to a world of rollercoasters and carnival barkers, McDermott literalises the emotional vertigo. Love becomes something ridden for thrills, tested for endurance, abandoned when the ticket runs out.

ENO’s insistence on performing in English clarifies the cruelty. Da Ponte’s libretto, when understood in real time, is less a romp than a controlled demolition of romantic certainty. The recitatives crackle with calculation; the ensembles bloom with doubt. What emerges is not a comedy of manners but a study in mutual surveillance. Everyone watches everyone else. The audience, implicated, watches too. The Irish soprano Ailish Tynan stole the show as the hilarious maid Despina. Despina is pragmatic and holds cynical views on men, advising the sisters that soldiers are fickle and that they should “enjoy life” and Tynan captured her perfectly. 

Musically, the evening moves with a tensile brightness. The orchestra leans into Mozart’s mercurial shifts from silk to steel. Fiordiligi’s great aria does not simply scale its impossible intervals; it climbs them like a woman scaling the walls of her own conviction. Dorabella, warmer and quicker to yield, feels less frivolous than pragmatic. The men, so confident in their wager, shrink in proportion to their experiment. Don Alfonso, smiling, presides like a maître d’ of disillusion.

What lingers is not the carnival colour but the aftertaste. When the disguises fall away and the couples reassemble, the fairground lights glow with a slightly harsher wattage. One senses that nothing has been restored, only rearranged. The rollercoaster returns to its starting point, but the riders have learned the drop.

ENO’s Così does not argue that “all women are like that.” It suggests, more bleakly and more truthfully, that all of us are susceptible to performance when love becomes a test. In a house as large as the Coliseum, the opera’s final ensembles can feel almost symphonic. Here they feel intimate, as if the carnival has closed and the mirrors remain.

For dates and tickets, see here: Così fan tutte tickets and schedule at ENO’s official site (London Coliseum, 6–21 Feb 2026)

REVIEW: Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards Act 1


Rating: 3 out of 5.

Whatever else, it promises to be an interesting night out.


Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards Act 1 is part of the Resolution Festival, the UK’s biggest festival of new choreography. Showing at The Place, it showcases an incredible 60 companies across 20 exhilarating nights.

Kirstin Halliday (they/them) is a dance artist and performer based in Glasgow who has choreographed, facilitated and performed in several diverse contexts. Their work is grounded by their research background in Geography, more evident than ever in this dance piece about lizards in the New Mexico desert.

For those who don’t know, Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards are an all-female species that live in the deserts of New Mexico. They reproduce without fertilisation, but still stimulate each other to bring on ovulation- something you can go experience live on stage. Dance Artist Kirstin Halliday’s Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards: Act 1 is a dance-drama that reimagines this species as an all-lesbian fantasy world. It’s co-choreographed with Aniela Piasecka and costumed by Sgàire Wood. . The lights rise on two dancers in full lizard costume, tails and all, lying prone upstage. A single clawed hand twitches and the audience is immediately hooked. The tension is gently punctured by playful, explanatory captioning that meticulously tracks every musical cue and bodily shift. When the lizards’ tongues begin to move, audible laughter ripples through the theatre, a testament to both the performers’ commitment and the sheer precision of their reptilian “body language.”

It’s a unique premise thats execution does it justice.The beginning drags on a few beats too long considering how little movement there is, and the fact that the entire piece is currently thirty minutes; but the commitment is admirable nonetheless. It begins simply with a New Mexican landscape and two performers in lizard costume, occasionally sticking their tongue out. The performers go all in on costume and embodiment, truly giving the sense that you’re watching the lizards undertake what constitutes as their mating ritual. It’s helped by the fact that the choreography takes places entirely on all fours.

The sound design was excellent and included both music and voiceover. The mockumentary style storytelling complimented the absurdist choreography perfectly as well as providing some tongue in cheek humour to an audience that was already laughing to themselves. This is the first segment of a body of work thaat will culminate in a triptych exploring the fetishization of lesbians; and beneath the farce lies a widening of perspective, as the work invites the audience to think differently about gender, performance, and the fetishization of lesbian bodies.

This show is part of Resolution 26, The Place – see all details here.