325 stories by "Jake Orr"
We tend to forget, living in our cosy homes in the UK, that there is a wider world beyond our waters. The world is an expanse of land and sea inhabited by seven billion humans, living their …
In Matt Trueman’s Noises Off this week on the Guardian Blogs he highlighted the spat caused by the recently launched online publication The Globe Mail in Australia over its fi…
Dario D’Ambrosi, an Italian performance artist, has had little exposure to UK audiences before now. His work slips between the cracks of theatre, art and performance, and is perhaps an…
As the puppet Punch celebrates his three-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, Improbable brings its take on “that’s the way to do it” in The Devil and Mister Punch in the Barb…
Homer’s Odyssey is the epic Greek poem of King Odysseus’s 20-year journey to return to his homeland and wife Penelope. He meets goddesses, kills a Cyclops, survives Poesiden&#…
Philip Ridley’s The Pitchfork Disney in its revival at Arcola Theatre leaves you with more questions than it provides answers. Ridley’s text is wondrously descriptive, evoking a …
In June 2011, Lyn Gardner and I co-hosted a discussion through Improbable’s ‘Devoted and Disgruntled Satellites’ with the question: “What are we going to do about the…
Federico Garcia Lorca‘s The House of Bernarda Alba is a formidable play that holds wickedness and envy between every line and subtext is all the dialogue and action. Bernarda Alba is a…
In Hideki Noda and Colin Teevan’s The Bee, a collaboration between Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre and Soho Theatre in association with NODA MAP, two men push the limits in a dangerous game…
Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu’s play Skeen! has its audience in fits of hysterics within the first few lines. Appearing in Oval House’s 33% London, a festival dedicated to the 33% of lond…
Growing old and dying are two things that haunt us all. I fear that as I get older, the person I once was will begin to disappear. I worry about the fragments of my life that I will leave sc…
In 2011 Julian Assange rose to formidable ‘fame’ through the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks that he founded. Revealing the truth behind things that governments would rather be …
Classic texts such as Mary Stuart by Friedrich Schiller are often given a facelift by companies wishing to explore them in new and exciting ways. The classic texts are often considered a rig…
Blind Summit do puppetry well. In fact, they do it bloody brilliantly and The Table is most definitely proof of this. Launching the 2012 London International Mime Festival, Blind Summit brin…
The making of theatre for and with real-life family seems to be hitting London’s fringe scene, if my theatre viewing of late is anything to go by. First was Rebecca Peyton’s Some…
In February 2005, BBC journalist Kate Peyton died from a gun shot wound in her back whilst reporting in Somalia. Her story has since been worked into a one-woman show written and performed b…
Accidentally Festival is back again for 2012 returning to The Roundhouse and presented by students of BATP Performance Arts at Central School of Speech and Drama between 31st May and 3rd Jun…
Theatre-Rites’ Mojo is a fusion of live music from around the world with skilled and illuminating puppetry. What starts as a rhythm and beat-busting musical experience evolves into a s…
Ah, promenade theatre, how you test the most adventurous of our theatre makers and show that it’s not always a style worth investing in. Promenade theatre lives or dies within the firs…
What makes a perfect flatshare? Is it the people, the beliefs, the parties or the simple things such as harmony through the washing up being done? Bridges and Balloons by young company Imagi…
Lucinda Coxon’s Herding Cats is a curious play. I say this because I left feeling somewhat perplexed and frustrated by it. Somewhere during the 80 minutes of Coxon’s play it …
Language is something that, when I focus on a theatre production, I seem to forget amongst the excitement of the live actor before me. When reading Tim Crouch’s Plays One, comprising h…
If theatre is a live product then Thomas Ostermeier’s Hamlet is a wake-up call to British directors who continually present the undead of theatre – the sort of theatre that merel…
In Shireen Mula's newest play Same Same, the impenetrable bond between mother and daughter is explored in a lyrical and poetic performance that sets the bar high at Oval House Theatre. Mula'…
When I joined Twitter two or so years ago, I had no idea that this platform would somehow propel me into an industry that I loved and dreamed to be part of. I had no idea that several years …
