1,418 stories by "Aleks Sierz"
Do you know the Urdu word for story? No? Well, look it up. Okay, this might prove a bit tricky, so let me suggest an easier route: buy a ticket to participate in We Are Shadows: Brick Lane, …
Theatre is just different organisms in close proximity. It's a great image, and one of many that float gently to the surface in Ben Duke's In a Nutshell, a monologue which explores with a ma…
This is a masterly revival of An Evening with an Immigrant, Inua Ellams' 2016 autobiographical one-man show which is both poetic and engaging.
Although I have visited Brick Lane a number of times over the years, much of We Are Shadows: Brick Lane this was refreshingly new to me and the adventure was a delightful experience.
During the current pandemic, stories about isolation have a particular resonance. Feelings of claustrophobia, loneliness, and frustration slide off the stage and echo in our subconscious " y…
Simon Stephens and Juliet Stevenson create a perfectly beautiful and haunting installation for our times in The Blindness at the Donmar Warehouse.
The strength of the response to the re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter campaign has encouraged some theatres to create provocative, new work. Often, the keynote is a personal feeling. On…
The bright colours of the performance underline the surrealism of Scrounger's quest for justice, and Athena Stevens, the first actor in a wheelchair nominated for an Offie, performs her stor…
Can the act of dusting be a metaphor? This is the all-too-obvious question that jumps into the mind while watching Spring Cleaning, a very site-specific immersive theatre production that …
This is the age of marketing, not the age of criticism. To give an example, I'll start with a small incident that has a wider symbolic value. In November 2013, a new show called Gastronau…
Lorraine Hansberry's debut, A Raisin in the Sun, was the first drama written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, where it opened in 1959. It is now an American classic, but it's …
Edwardian dramatist St John Ervine was once, along with Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, Harley Granville Barker and George Bernard Shaw, hailed as a British Ibsen. They wrote problem…
A rediscovered Edwardian problem play gives a clear picture of marriage and morals in a bygone era.
Lockdown occasionally spawns some real delights. Like the surprise appearance of a strange creature from the most profound depths. One of these must be Andrew Scott's superb performance in S…
Yesterday, I took a break from my sunny local park and turned a room in my house into the Finborough fringe theatre. You know the kind of thing: very small, very dark, very hot and airless, …
In Continuity, Gerry Moynihan explores the men's fanaticism and the effects of their frustrated masculinity on their political beliefs.
This venue's urgent response to the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter campaign is powerfully realised.
Alan Bennett writes that "I've always had a soft spot for George III", for no better reason than that he had studied the monarch's reign at secondary school and then again at uni.
If any musical can attempt to live up to this title in these troubled times, it must be this show from Graeae, a theatre company whose mission is to champion the work of Deaf and disabled ar…
We are living, I have frequently been told, through weird times. Maybe. But do weird times necessarily require weird art? Do bad times provoke bad art? Well, one of the most unusual response…
The problem with creating theatre in an era of lockdown is that the constraints of working online tend towards a uniformity of creativity
We are living, I have frequently been told, through weird times. Maybe. But do weird times necessarily require weird art? Do bad times provoke bad art?
In his wide-ranging, and widely read, survey of postwar British theatre, called State of the Nation, the Guardian critic Michael Billington sets out his stall: in the introduction t…
This revival of a 2011 HighTide hit, reconceived for streaming, stars Diana Quick and is intimate and quietly moving.
During the lockdown, the best online theatre, more or less, are shows that are specially created for this digital format. Much better than dull records of dramas that might have worked well …
