It’s hard to dismiss someone who looks you in the eye and tells you their truth. We were in the front row for Atlas des Kommunismus at the Gorki Theatre in Berlin, so the amateur performers could and did catch our gaze – amateur because they were there to tell their stories not to dazzle with professional sheen. This is a documentary play from the Argentinean director Lola Arias – whose … [Read more...]
Come for the sex dolls, stay for the protest
The Young Vic is calf deep in sex dolls. Tacky plastic fake-flesh spills over the stage as Measure for Measure begins, a ‘huge peach heap of vinyl orifices,’ as critic Natasha Tripney wrote. Mouths agape, legs akimbo, pneumatic and tumescent, it’s a prospect of everready rut. Officials pick their way gingerly through them: the deputy Angelo (Paul Ready) raising his bible to avoid … [Read more...]
Road movie
London Road should never have worked on stage. It really shouldn’t work on screen. It's a musical about a horrible news story – a series of murders of prostitutes in eastern England committed by Steve Wright, who was convicted in 2006. The writer Alecky Blythe, who has developed a morally telling form of verbatim theatre that preserves her interviewees’ vocal quirks and stumbles, paired up with … [Read more...]
The revolution will not be staged
Some shows marinate in time. Immediate gratification fades or problematic satisfactions deepen over weeks. I came round to Little Revolution just a couple hours after it ended on Saturday night, over a fish supper and the walk home. It hadn’t been what I expected: with its poster image of a brick smashing into a ‘Keep calm and carry on’ mug, the Almeida Theatre promises an incendiary bulletin from … [Read more...]