Despite its absurdist style, Pass Over is a political play whose message is indisputable. The evening is a powerful mixture of male camaraderie, brutality and almost casual defiance.
If the intimate play A Number feels a bit lost in the vast space of the Bridge, the performances are big enough to give it the required punch.
Genetic engineering is in the news again. This follows the resignation of Andrew Sabisky as special advisor to Boris Johnson after a twitter storm about his comments on race and intelligence…
Random and topical thoughts and quotes gathered by My Theatre Mates contributor Aleks Sierz, first published on www.sierz.co.uk.
History plays should perform a delicate balancing act: they have to tell us something worth knowing about the past, that foreign country where they do things differently, and also something …
Last week, I went for the first time to Stoke Newington's Tower Theatre, whose company has since 2018 been putting on a repertory program, which is inclusive and ambitious, on the outer r…
No playwright has had greater influence on successive generations of theatre-makers than Samuel Beckett. Yet it is surprising how rarely his work is revived in the big London theatres, of wh…
Random and topical thoughts and quotes gathered by My Theatre Mates contributor Aleks Sierz, first published on www.sierz.co.uk.
This well-focused revival of Caryl Churchill's, brief dystopic classic Far Away is vivid but frankly unexceptional.
"Fetch me 'ammer." (Edward Bond, Saved) "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." (Bertolt Brecht) A couple of years ago, our family got a new puppy. It …
If neither newspapers nor intelligence services will lose sleep over the way Blyth represents them, The Haystack is insightful enough to be a contemporary state-of-the-nation parable.
Total surveillance: this is the idea that every moment of our waking existence can be spied upon by the state, or by some foreign country. It's a paranoid notion based on the huge growth of …
Your sweet tooth can get you into trouble. Lots of trouble. In this revival of Lucy Prebble's provocative debut, first staged at the Royal Court in 2003, the metaphor of sugar, and of the po…
A new monologue about rage, racism and national identity, Death of England at the National Theatre is magnificent in its fury and perception.
A star cast led by Daniel Radcliffe, Alan Cumming and Jane Horrocks make light work of the Beckett classic Endgame.
Random and topical thoughts and quotes gathered by My Theatre Mates contributor Aleks Sierz, first published on www.sierz.co.uk.
Tonight, I discovered the gasp index. Or maybe just re-discovered. The what? The gasp index. It's when you see a show that keeps making you exhale, sometimes audibly, sometimes quietly. Like…
Random and topical thoughts and quotes gathered by My Theatre Mates contributor Aleks Sierz, first published on www.sierz.co.uk.
Do you hear the people sing? In recent months, you're more likely to have heard news stories about the longest running West End musical than the actual music. Stephen Sondheim " who celebrat…
New touring play The Gift from Eclipse is a wonderfully complex and emotionally powerful account of race and Empire.
Random and topical thoughts and quotes gathered by My Theatre Mates contributor Aleks Sierz, first published on www.sierz.co.uk.
Theatre is a business as well as a craft. And surveys about theatre often have a business side to them. So a recent survey about how many Shakespeare quotations members of the general public…
Excellent revival of Lucy Prebble's disturbing debut play The Sugar Syndrome about loneliness, the internet and illegal desire.
Queen Victoria is a strong symbol of the old British Empire. For some 200 years, up to the 1950s, the country's colonial history dominated the national mindset, and arguably we still live in…
Random and topical thoughts and quotes gathered by My Theatre Mates contributor Aleks Sierz, first published on www.sierz.co.uk.