30 stories by "James Bell"
Roundelay, a series of vignettes on love and sex in the third age, is a show of many parts. On the one hand, it is tightly spun web of interlinked stories and voices, all essentially asking …
The topic of gender is never far from our minds. It informs our every interaction with other people, and goes right to the core of our self-perception. Society has made huge strides in recen…
How (Not) To Live in Suburbia feels both timelessly personal and very much of the current zeitgeist. It follows Annie Siddons, the work's author and main protagonist, on her life as a recent…
On a bare stage, filled only with four chairs and an incongruous looking cello, a man hesitantly appears, looks cautiously around him, picks up the cello, and begins to play. He produces a c…
"How do you make space for yourself in a world that's over capacity?" This, in many ways, is the central question of The Litterati " a short piece of original writing performed as part of th…
In 1902, when Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths premiered at the Moscow Arts Theatre, Russia was a sprawling and unwieldy empire in flux. The revolution of 1905, lead in part by the 'lower orde…
There's a certain air of the Coen brothers to The Albatross 3rd and Main, currently playing at the smaller of Park Theatre's two spaces. The setting is similar (small town America at an inde…
Drift Theatre, a kind of talent incubator formed in 2016 by Laura Jane Ayres, Jess McKenna, Emma Wilkinson and Laura Sedgwick, certainly seems to have had a successful year. Having hosted a …
Balancing Acts, a subtle yet powerful piece of new writing from the Kaleido Film Collective and Feral Foxy Ladies, is part video installation, part physical theatre and part confessional mem…
The era of silent cinema will seem to many as remote as the last days of the Roman Empire. It is difficult, therefore, to imagine the revolution the "talkies" would have sparked in the Holly…
There's a moment in After October, a restaging of a 1936 Rodney Ackland play, that made the critics in the audience collectively draw breath. "By what right" goes Clive's (Adam Buchanan) adm…
Boys is a sprawling behemoth of a play. Although based around a small group of friends in modern day Edinburgh, it spans the full gamut of emotions the unsettled and insecure generation of w…
Perhaps expecting a musical to be subtle is like expecting a cow to understand the finer points of quantum mechanics. But even so, while Rumpy Pumpy, a piece of original writing by Barbara J…
Intermission Youth Theatre is, by its own admission, no ordinary theatre company. Originally founded by an actor-turned-minister in 2001, its mission is to bring young people from disadvanta…
Method in Madness, on for a short run at the Greenwich Theatre, is part period piece, part physical theatre and part Shakespearean drama that is a joy to watch. The story follows an unnamed …
What are we without a voice? This is the central question of Can you hear me running?, a charming and funny, but also oddly inscrutable, show playing this month at the Pleasance Theatre. The…
In a way you know what you get with Beckett. The sparse, unsentimental text; the ghostly, post-apocalyptic staging. But a new performance or, even more excitingly in this case, a new work, b…
Plays about family dynamics are hard to get right. Often they are stuffed with melodrama and unfold like an episode of Coronation Street, or they are lengthy, ponderous disquisitions on over…
Blown Youth, on this week at the Wimbledon New Theatre's studio space, is a sprawling, expansive work with resonances of Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir and above all, Shakespeare. Its fasc…
A young woman is alone in a small but tidy flat, doing yoga on a pink floor mat. She stops, catches her breath and opens a bottle of wine. As she sips she stares pensively into the middle di…
Imprisoned, two monologues written by Marie Hale and directed by Kasia Różycki and Hugh Allison, are nothing short of astonishing, both in terms of their conceptual basis and the power…
Sellotape Sisters, playing this week at the Tristan Bates Theatre in Covent Garden, gets off to an inauspicious start. Ethel and Phyllis, played by Charlotte Weston and Kellie Batchelor, are…
There are many positives in this production of Philip Ridley's Dark Vanilla Jungle. I could mention the pared down staging, the simple yet effective lighting or the careful injections of hum…
The Two Sides of Eddie Ramone, is as the title might suggest, a play built on conflict and tension. We see the titular character (played by Chris Sullivan), a formerly popular comedian now c…
The King's Head Theatre on Upper Street is one of a series of venues which are playing host to Festival 46, a showcase of the best of new British writing. This week is the turn of Don't Look…
