Steve Cramer

Glasgay! - Tennessee Williams

18 Sep 2008

Some years ago, I attended a conference where a debate about the work of Tennessee Williams came very nearly to blows. The bone of contention involved Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which the character Brick confesses an attraction to a friend that surpasses…

The Sick House

18 Sep 2008

HORROR (18) 104min (Showbox DVD retail) Young archaeologist (Gina Philips) finds her research into London’s great plague of 1665 barred when public health officials reveal that the former orphanage she is excavating still contains plague.

Mother Courage and Her Children

4 Sep 2008

One of the neglected aspects of Mother Courage and Her Children, Brecht's great condemnation of capitalism as it is manifested in war, is its humour. There's a certain dark perversity to Brecht's story, which depicts a mother inadvertently sacrificing…

Absurd Person Singular

4 Sep 2008

Alan Ayckbourn's decades-long journey through English suburban angst was seldom better exemplified than in Absurd Person Singular. Central to the story is the compulsion of people to consume and accumulate wealth to the detriment of their emotional…

Amada

4 Sep 2008

Stories about prostitutes in the theatre are generally tales of suffering and abuse, yet this piece, adapted by Cora Bisset from a short story by Isabel Allende, takes an unorthodox approach to familiar subject matter. There's a transformative beauty to…

Botched

4 Sep 2008

An inept jewel thief (Stephen Dorff) is given one last chance by Russian Mafiosa with a heist from an apartment block. Our robber and his Russian cohorts inevitably screw up, and are the pursued, along with an eccentric group of hostages, through a…

Jesus Camp

4 Sep 2008

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s fly-on-the-wall documentary might easily be classified as a kind of real life horror film. In it we follow one Pastor Becky as she gears up to, and runs a summer camp for born again Christian children and their families.

National Lampoon's Cattle Call

4 Sep 2008

It’s a shame that National Lampoon, long associated with tasteless but somehow crudely endearing comedy, should have lent its name to this effort by writer/director Martin Guigui (Swing, Changing Hearts). In it, we meet three young males who hatch a…

I Went To The House But I Did Not Enter

Musical reflection of literary masters

29 Aug 2008

There has been no shortage of theatre that examines the disaffection and atomisation of modern life over the last century, but it’s less common to find a piece that selects four noted 20th century authors to explore the theme, then translates their work…

Devil's Ship

Intriguing, atmospheric Iranian chiller

26 Aug 2008

This Iranian story, with a lurking subtext of supernatural horror, performed in Farsi with English subtitles by Bazi Theatre Company, features a group of women in a claustrophobic emotional vacuum. While the women rely on custom to get them through the…

365

Magical reflection on children in care

26 Aug 2008

The idea of a play about children in care might not immediately strike you as the an entertaining festival night out, but overcome your prejudices. Vicky Featherstone’s production of David Harrower’s script for the NTS touches upon the issues that…

Class enemy

Heavy-handed adaptation

21 Aug 2008

Haris Pasovic’s production of Class Enemy for Bosnian company East West retains the central theme of Nigel Williams’ 1978 play - the desperate need for nurturing among young people neglected by an under-funded education system - to powerful effect. Yet…

In Conflict

21 Aug 2008

A verbatim theatre piece featuring astute performances from a young cast, this series of interviews with US military personnel who have served in Iraq reflects everything from bitterness to a defiant kind of idealism. Director Douglas Wager adds some…

Lough/Rain

Quietly tragic relationship drama

21 Aug 2008

This piece, co-authored by Declan Feenan and Clara Brennan, opens on an early morning scene involving a couple (Jot Davies and Kate Donmall) living in a rural Northern Irish community, which segues into a day sometime later, when the male half of the…

Loving Burns

21 Aug 2008

Two female performers weave songs from the Bard of Ayrshire into a pretty thin story which connects the many women in Burns' life. I'm not sure we really need another play about the errant but lovable rogue, but if we do, this isn't it, for the longing…

Once And For All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen

Kids' stuff

21 Aug 2008

OK, so enough with the sweet cheeky kids already. The audience pretty much obeyed the injunction in the title of this new piece from Belgium's Ontroerend Goed at the Traverse and came away amused, if not exactly enlightened. The piece essentially…

Table 23

21 Aug 2008

A young man, who has turned his back on his family to write a novel, returns home after his sister's death to wind up the family restaurant. Contrasting with this apparently downbeat narrative is a performance style that incorporates physical comedy and…

The Producers

21 Aug 2008

COMEDY Mel Brooks’ classic and surely – with full respect to High Anxiety and Blazing Saddles – his greatest film still stands up brilliantly forty years on. For those unfamiliar with its plot, we meet a rapacious Broadway producer (Zero Mostel) and…

Under the Bombs

21 Aug 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE This piece from former documentary maker Philippe Aractingi speaks loudly of his own artistic origins in reportage. In it, a mother returns to Lebanon at the end of the Lebanese-Israeli war of 2006 in order to find her son, who has…

Once and for all, it's just a matter of opinion

Steve Cramer's festival blog

18 Aug 2008

I don’t know, perhaps it’s me. There’s always one show of every festival where a critic appears to be out of kilter with his peers. For me, this festival the show would appear to be Once and For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are, So Shut Up and Listen…

Looking at Tazieh

Fascinating filmed version of millennium-old Persian drama

16 Aug 2008

This video installation by Abbas Kiarostami renders into real emotion a filmed version of Tazieh a millennium-old form of Persian drama enacted annually to commemorate and grieve the loss of Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Mohammed. But the felt…

Office Party

Tasteless delights

14 Aug 2008

Seldom were ham and cheese so well combined in a sandwich as in Cal McCrystal’s interactive version of that familiar titular institution, the office party. The show may be disrupted here and there by its structure, but this seems to do nothing to dampen…

Amir Nizar Zuabi - Jidariyya

Poetry in motion

14 Aug 2008

Perhaps the greatest psychological pain humans can feel occurs when they are denied language. The sense of frustration that builds from a voice unheard, marginalised or rendered irrelevant by the listener can be overwhelming. This is as true of the…

Sister Cities

Death and the maidens

14 Aug 2008

If naturalistic plays set in living rooms are not your bag, then it might be wise to avoid Sister Cities. But, for all its conventionality, Colette Freedman’s black comedy contrives to constantly amuse with crisp, observant dialogue and nicely tempered…

Supper

Food for thought

14 Aug 2008

In any conversation, there’s always another conversation going on beneath the ostensible day to day chat. This premise is the starting point for Supper, which amounts to an intriguing conceit about love, subjectivity and memory. The audience are…