Sunday, June 13, 2021
Although some theatres are tentatively reopening, the creative vigour of other companies like Clean Break is undimmed.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMOnline performance, streamed instead of attended, has given theatre companies an immense amount of flexibility. Suddenly, the digital world offers all kinds of different freedoms. A good exa…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 12:23AMSaturday, June 5, 2021
Amy Berryman’s ambitious debut play Walden about siblings, climate change and space travel is full of ideas, but what happened to the emotions?
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:00AMMonday, May 31, 2021
I think I can safely say that polymath playwright Philip Ridley has had a good lockdown. In March last year, when The Beast of Blue Yonder, his new show for Southwark Playhouse, was closed d…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 10:33PMWednesday, May 26, 2021
Harm, which has already been screened on BBC Four with Leanne Best, is a new monologue by Bruntwood Prize-winning playwright Phoebe Eclair-Powell and now the one-woman show stars Kelly Gough…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMTuesday, May 18, 2021
Uncertainty can sometimes provoke creativity. When the opening of Shereen Roushbaiani’s one-woman show, Saving Britney, at the Old Red Lion theatre was cancelled in January, its creators D…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 01:07PMMonday, April 26, 2021
Over the past year we’ve become used to a variety of home theatre: recordings of live performances, streamed shows, online films. But I haven’t really explored much sonic theatre, those …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 10:57PMSaturday, April 24, 2021
Does a subjective theatre piece encourage a subjective critical response? I think it might, especially when it’s a memory play about dementia, so here goes: First I turn off the lights, th…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 12:11PMThursday, April 22, 2021
The camera can take you to places where the naked eye rarely goes. Like close. Very close. Close up. And then some. This is exemplified by Fraser Watson’s brilliant filming of The Separati…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMSaturday, April 10, 2021
Uncertainty can sometimes provoke creativity. When the opening of Shereen Roushbaiani’s one-woman show, Saving Britney, at the Old Red Lion theatre was cancelled in January, its creators D…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMTuesday, March 30, 2021
Mark Ravenhill’s new play Angela is a fragmentary sonic autobiography, both tender and occasionally fraught.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMWednesday, March 24, 2021
This film version of the Oscar Wilde classic The Picture of Dorian Gray is a brilliant critique of the digital age.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:00AMThursday, March 18, 2021
The Band Played On, the latest show from Chris Bush, is a tuneful celebration of stoicism, resilience and humour.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:00PMWednesday, March 10, 2021
As the events of last year made clear, the police have a problem with race on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, BAME people are more than twice as likely to die in police custody while …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 01:32AMSunday, February 28, 2021
Typical, a film version of a powerfully poetic and painful 2019 monologue about institutional racism, is brilliant.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:00AMMonday, February 22, 2021
Film is the new theatre — this we know, but does the distance imposed by the change of medium increase or decrease the impact of the story? The latest example of this problematic switch fr…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 09:45PMWednesday, February 10, 2021
The latest example of this problematic switch from stage to screen is the strongly acted Shook, Samuel Bailey’s debut play, which won the 2019 Papatango New Writing Prize and had a run at …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMRead all about it! Well, maybe not. Maybe more like: live the news and then watch it streamed. Inspired by the radical theatre of the Federal Theatre Project in 1930s New Deal America, which…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 01:14AMFriday, January 22, 2021
Yesterday I watched Skye Hallam’s excellent one-woman show, Heads or Tails, one of the headline acts at the new Living Record Festival. It’s a gently confessional monologue about the aft…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:45AMThursday, January 14, 2021
Ten prompts for writing about the year 2020: 1) “It started with a slight cough, a rather dry cough.” Explore the sense of a beginning; remember how you felt when the news of the pandemi…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 10:01PMSunday, January 10, 2021
Last week I watched Sarah Grochala’s award-winning short play, S-27, now streaming from the website of the Finborough Theatre, where it had its 2009 premiere. It is inspired by the work o…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 10:33PMThursday, December 31, 2020
I watched the streamed version of December, written and directed by Alexander Knott, and performed in the Old Red Lion Theatre and pub.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:30AMWednesday, December 30, 2020
With S-27, the Finborough once again punches well above its weight, making another compelling contribution to the brave new world of streamed theatre.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:00AMMonday, December 28, 2020
A couple of days ago I watched the live stream of Misfits, from the Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch. The show comprises four excellent fractured monologues, written by Kenny Emson, Sadie Hasler…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 02:27AMWednesday, December 23, 2020
The promise of being “urgent, responsive and fast” may not always be achieved, but at its very best the Royal Court’s Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative is both pertinent and full o…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:00AMThursday, December 17, 2020
A Christmas Carol is a seasonal standard. In a normal year, there are a couple of versions to be enjoyed, usually led by the Old Vic in London, but this winter it feels like there’s an epi…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 09:51PMTuesday, December 15, 2020
Travis Alabanza’s play Overflow at the Bush Theatre is both tender in its empathy for the different kinds of trans experience and passionately angry about prejudice.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:00AMSunday, December 13, 2020
Okay, COVID-19 really sucks. This play opened and closed on the same night, 4 November, as the second lockdown this year closed all entertainment venues in the country. Luckily, there had be…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 04:35PMThursday, December 10, 2020
Classical murder mysteries end with a neat solution — and with the arrest of the perpetrator. Postmodern murder mysteries play games with the genre, turning it upside down and inside out. …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 10:27AMWednesday, November 25, 2020
Today, I watched the first episode in the Tools for Change trilogy, digital reimaginings of three plays exploring racism, censorship, power and identity from the Theatre Uncut archive, in a …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 01:03AMSaturday, November 21, 2020
Playwright Philip Ridley has had a very productive lockdown. Despite the constraints of the pandemic he has been exceptionally creative. In March, when all theatres in Britain were closed, h…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 01:39PM 
