1,385 stories by "Aleks Sierz"
The great thing about Lucy Bailey's 80-minute production of Oleanna is its sense of balance. And I have to say that it changed my mind about the power balance in the drama.
By the end of Orange Tree Theatre's production of Bryony Lavery's Last Easter the certainty that friendship and love are life's true miracles is quietly and effectively realised.
I finally caught up with Michael Longhurst's restaging of his 2012 Royal Court production of Nick Payne's Constellations, a gem of a two-hander.
With many theatres now reopening again, it is surely a good moment to celebrate all those venues which managed to stage live shows in the past few months " often in very stressful circumstan…
Although some theatres are tentatively reopening, the creative vigor of other companies is undimmed. Clean Break, which works with women in the criminal justice system, has recently released…
After months (and months) of watching theatre on screens large, medium, small and tiny, I definitely feel great about going to see a live show again. Of course, it's not the usual theatre ex…
Although some theatres are tentatively reopening, the creative vigour of other companies like Clean Break is undimmed.
Online 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…
Amy Berryman's ambitious debut play Walden about siblings, climate change and space travel is full of ideas, but what happened to the emotions?
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…
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…
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 Dav…
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 play…
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, then…
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 Separation…
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 Dav…
Mark Ravenhill's new play Angela is a fragmentary sonic autobiography, both tender and occasionally fraught.
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…
