Category ★½☆☆☆

REVIEW: If All Else Fails

Reading Time: 2 minutes“Your most horrifying experience of direct address for 85 minutes” Devised and performed by Cathy Naden and Seke Chimutengwende and directed by Tim Etchells, If All Else Fails brings the curtain down on Forced Entertainment’s 40th anniversary celebrations.…

REVIEW: Serenoid

Reading Time: 2 minutesWritten by Robin Fiedler and Wyatt Gaer, with music also by Fiedler, Serenoid is a sci-fi opera telling the steampunk-infused queer romance between Xaven (Victoria Oruwari, soprano), a blind engineer, and Corrie (Taryn Surratt, mezzo-soprano), an android violinist who is unable to stand or walk, spending her days playing gloomy violin pessimistically. Their relationship is hindered by Merton (Philippe Eugusyene, baritone), a jester-like villain. The story sounds promising, as it taps into the trendy academic environment to explores non-human agents and their relationship with human beings.

REVIEW: King Hamlin

Reading Time: 3 minutesKing Hamlin tells the story of a teenage boy with aspirations of doing well in school and going to university to become a software engineer, before life gets in the way and he gets dragged into the world of drug dealing and gangs. There is definitely a good play somewhere within that premise, unfortunately King Hamlin is not that play. 

REVIEW: Berlin

Reading Time: 3 minutesBerlin is billed as a “dark comedy […] that explores grief, toxic masculinity and betrayal.” The story, inspired in part by the suicide of Ian Curtis, is the reuniting of a once-prominent britpop band after the death of their lead singer three years earlier.