After the interval, The Three Sisters, mercifully, in mood and pace, could be a different play. I left happy enough. But goodness, the first scenes badly need more vigour. And a trim.
‘It is the seed-corn of theatre & of new writing’: INK FESTIVAL 2019 – Halesworth
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I saw 22 plays in two days at the INK Festival 2019, but it was hardly half a bite of what was on offer. In three days there were 40, each performed several times. Everyone made jigsaws, scuttled between them, as if at a miniature – and better-natured– Edinburgh fringe.
‘A gorgeous, good-natured hour-long confection’: HOTEL PARADISO – Touring
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Here’s to indicative handstands, meaningful cartwheels, benign defiance of common prudence, here’s to Lost In Translation Circus’ Hotel Paradiso.
‘The main joy is in the puppetry’: WHERE IS PETER RABBIT? – West End ★★★★
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My one grudge against the Old Laundry’s loving Beatrix Potter production Where is Peter Rabbit? – first aired three years ago – is that they waited till my youngest toddler was 31.
‘Raves, cartwheels, windmills, head-slides & tears up the stage’: IN THE WILLOWS – Touring ★★★★
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This isn’t the Wind in the Willows by Alan Bennett or Disney. In Metta Theatre’s cheeky, exuberant hip-hop musical version, Kenneth Grahame’s oar-plashing sylvan tale is kidnapped by the unruly class at The Willows school, next to the rough Wildwood Estate where the Weasel gang rule.
‘Honest, humane & thoughtful play’: KUNENE & THE KING – Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon ★★★★★
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Specific though the SA setting is, Kunene & The King opens great vistas of heart-stopping universal wisdom about death, guilt, reconciliation and human need.
‘You can’t fault the atmosphere’: THE TIDE JETTY – Touring ★★★
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You can’t fault the atmosphere: Jasmine Swan’s set takes you straight to the wide skies and muddy, reedy mystery of Breydon Water, where the Norfolk and Suffolk Broadland rivers meet and strange old structures rot quietly into history.
‘Glorious, a sharp & timely treat’: ADMISSIONS – West End ★★★★
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Admissions is by the same Broadway writer as Bad Jews and even better. And nicely topical too, both sides of the Atlantic, since it’s about the middle-class obsession with shoehorning their 17- and 18-year-old kids into the ‘right’ colleges.
‘A cosy nightmare legacy of the 1930s’: MARY’S BABIES – Jermyn Street Theatre
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Mary Barton and her husband Berthold Wiesner ran a pioneering fertility clinic: they were among the first to offer, with full anonymity, artificial insemination by donor for couples they thought were “good stock”.
‘Brilliant, necessary, questioning’: DOWNSTATE – National Theatre ★★★★★
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If we accept that people are widely diverse, we have to accept that paedophiles are too. Not all the same identi-monster. Moreover, if their horrifying actions pose us questions we need to think very clearly about answers.