REVIEW: This Shining Night
Reading Time: 3 minutes'Singing a lot of African American choral music with an almost-exclusively white choir probably warrants mentioning the word “slavery” at least once.'
Category ★½☆☆☆
REVIEW: Allegra
Reading Time: 3 minutesIn theatre, any show has to find a way to stand out. We’re fortunate to live in a world with an abundance of different kinds of theatre and performance, and while taste is subjective, standing out is unquestionably important and, for smaller productions, vital.
REVIEW: My Time of Life at Camden Fringe
Reading Time: 2 minutesBland and unexciting with a few moving moments. My Time of Life is a disappointment. What could have been a sweet reflection on life and aging was degraded by the almost apathetic reading given at Camden Fringe.…
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: Feel Me
Reading Time: 3 minutesFeel Me integrates physical theatre, projection and music to explore empathy through the lens of discussions and depictions of forced displacement.
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: Exhibitionists
Reading Time: 3 minutesThe play itself appears to be a modern queer reimagining of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, albeit set in an art gallery in San Francisco, and with the addition of a fifth character.
REVIEW: 1979
Reading Time: 2 minutesMichael Healey’s play 1979 previously ran back in 2019 at the Berkeley Street Theatre (also known as the Canadian Stage) in Toronto. Now, the political piece makes its European debut at the Finborough Theatre.
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.