1,385 stories by "Aleks Sierz"
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…
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…
