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Local arts-specialist school Pilrig Park presents its latest show, which almost every child has contributed to in some way, from dancing to costumes.
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11 Sep 2009
'I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.' Virginia Woolf's sentiment is one the characters in Actus tragicus might well understand - though her black humour would probably be lost on them. Filling the stage is an impressive…
26 Aug 2009
When the the Guardian calls a show a 'Top ticket', it tends to sell well. The picture accompanying their list of five such tickets features Rhys Ifans as Don Juan in the 2006 premiere of Patrick Marber's Don Juan in Soho (after Moliere); the caption…
A group of girls from Youth Arts Leicestershire, all in their late teens, all dressed as wood nymphs, rock slowly back and forth as we file into the theatre. Their synchronized movements suggest the ebb and flow of the tide. 'To begin at the…
25 Aug 2009
The preoccupations of suburban housewives are presented in four, well-observed sketches. Sarah and Lois, trapped in a larder during a kids’ party, argue the merits of ‘genuinely sustainable’ party bags. Paula and Cathy, rehearsing their pitch for a…
23 Aug 2009
This play – which tells Margaret’s life story backwards – gets worse as it progresses. While Margaret’s nursing-home frustration and childless marriage are movingly portrayed, her toddler angst is less convincing. Actors never leave the stage and slick…
21 Aug 2009
It’s 11.40 am real time, perhaps slightly later dramatic time, and before even the stage lights go up we are treated to explicit, morning-gloom sex. But this is not ‘shock tactic’ Fringe theatre. This sex is cartoonish, speeded-up and half-ironic. So…
19 Aug 2009
A mix of slick physical theatre and naturalistic dialogue, The Grind Show follows wide-eyed ‘Boy’ through a surreal circus. Underworld characters, including the double-bodied Miss Von Ambourg (whose act involves splitting apart to throw daggers at her…
In this one-man verse play, we are guests at a ‘welcome-home party’ for Sylvia, complete with 80s pop and cheap decorations. Slowly - in rhyming couplets that feel remarkably natural - we learn why we're invited. Our host is chatty, evasive, and…
18 Aug 2009
Unselfconscious and excitable, nine-year-old Rachel is full of unaired grievances and incisive observations. Targets include her exasperating Bulgarian nanny, ‘best friend’ Hortense and young, blonde schoolteacher Miss Danielle (who the other girls only…
Sex has a tricky habit of getting in the way. So discover the Lords of Navarre when, soon after they swear an oath of celibacy, the alluring Ladies of France arrive on the scene. Despite this young cast’s fashionably modern attire, their production…
Shipwrecked between continents, a lone woman bobs along in her suitcase considering her childhood abroad and the liberal views she inherited from her mother. This energetic one-woman play would work better as a series of sketches: the characters are…
12 Aug 2009
Iago re-performs his soliloquies and conversations in a one-man abridgement of Othello. The other characters, filtered through Iago’s perspective, become caricatures, and his own pathology is thrown into relief. This production resists the urge to…
An affair between middle-aged, middle-class Peter and his children’s Slavic nanny is told with contemporary dialogue and passages from Paradise Lost. Milton’s long lines feel rushed and therefore unlike real-life musings, but powerful body language…
10 Aug 2009
Greeted outside the theatre with bread and gooseberry jam, those ‘scared of the dark’ are advised to leave. Those willing to take the risk are led into a darkened room, where the actors’ unmoving shapes are semi-visible. The dark is full of our…
An Evening with Psychosis is a tiresome and ill-conceived multi-media play about losing touch with reality. Dramatised extracts from verbatim interviews conducted with people whose lives have been affected by psychosis (the mother of a psychotic teenage…
27 Jul 2009
David Leveaux’s West End revival of Stoppard’s Arcadia is the first since its 1993 premiere, not because it’s not good (it’s excellent) but because it’s daunting. It is a play of big, basic questions; of eroticism and advanced mathematics; of…
27 Apr 2009
Directors Sam Fowles and Alice Jones promised an ‘original’ Much Ado. ‘While we would never dare to look outside such a wonderful script for inspiration,’ they explained, ‘we basically took this as something of a carte blanche to experiment.’ The…
24 Apr 2009
Incompetent Productions On The Rocks arts festival It's sometime in the ‘80s, somewhere in the North, in an underperforming all-boys secondary school. The unremarkable nature of this setting is there in the set’s drab schoolroom furniture, in the…
Two-Day Productions in association with Mermaids and the Antony Tudor Fund On The Rocks arts festival Though a good Hamlet does not always a good Hamlet make, a bad Hamlet does (every time) do the opposite. Fortunately, Jamie Wightman, who played…
23 Apr 2009
Noumenon, the programme explains, is ‘The thing-in-itself as opposed to the phenomenon- the thing as it appears to an observer.’ In an ‘introductory comment’ prior to the performance, Prof. Sarah Brodie of the School of Philosophy at University of St…
22 Apr 2009
Aristophanes’ The Frogs Theatre Odyssey On The Rocks arts festival, St Andrews The first half of Theatre Odyssey’s take on Aristophanes’ The Frogs, an offering from the new On The Rocks arts festival in St Andrews, felt like the most painful kind…
21 articles.
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