1,418 stories by "Aleks Sierz"
This film version of the Oscar Wilde classic The Picture of Dorian Gray is a brilliant critique of the digital age.
The Band Played On, the latest show from Chris Bush, is a tuneful celebration of stoicism, resilience and humour.
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 …
Typical, a film version of a powerfully poetic and painful 2019 monologue about institutional racism, is brilliant.
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 from…
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 th…
Read 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…
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 afterli…
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 pandemic gr…
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…
I watched the streamed version of December, written and directed by Alexander Knott, and performed in the Old Red Lion Theatre and pub.
With S-27, the Finborough once again punches well above its weight, making another compelling contribution to the brave new world of streamed theatre.
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, …
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 of joyo…
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 epide…
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.
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…
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. So…
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 …
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…
Misfits, from the Queen's Theatre Hornchurch, comprises four excellent fractured monologues, written by Kenny Emson, Sadie Hasler, Guleraana Mir and Anne Odeke, which focus on Essex,
There's plenty to enjoy in Little Wars' jokes, and then, later on, the final harrowing monologues about the genocide are both powerful and deeply moving.
Success smells sweet. The Bridge Theatre's pioneering season of one-person plays continues with sell-out performances of David Hare's Beat the Devil and Fuel's production of Inua Ellams's…
Originally commissioned as part of The Power Plays produced by Theatre Uncut in 2018, A Coin in Someone Else's Pocket is a wonderfully thoughtful meditation on what it means to be a female M…
When the history of British theatre's response to COVID-19 comes to be written, the names of two men will feature prominently: Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr. The "two Nicks" were the creati…
