In his latest, Blackout Songs, a powerful 95-minute two-hander, Joe White uses a flexible structure to represent some excruciating emotional material, and the result gives an almost overwhelmingly sense of the horrible realities of addiction, both to alcohol and to people.
‘Hard, clever, truthful, sometimes funny’: BLACKOUT SONGS – Hampstead Theatre
Blackout Songs is another sharp, pared-down studio production: in 95 minutes Joe White delivers a necessarily painful two-hander about youthful alcoholism and the disaster of colliding addictions. We watch two lovers, over an uncertain wavering timeline, who can neither control nor remember their lives and real selves: we get flashes, snapshots of their meeting, coupling, celebrating, fighting, betraying.
‘Fierce & fresh’: LIVING NEWSPAPER – Royal Court Theatre (Online review)
Sneaking in in the nick of time, I catch the delights of the second edition of the Royal Court’s Living Newspaper.
NEWS: Casting is announced for Wuthering Heights at Royal Exchange Manchester
Alex Austin has been cast as Heathcliff opposite Rakhee Sharma as Cathy in the new stage adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights by Bruntwood Prize winning writer Andrew Sheridan at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre.
‘Great chemistry between the two actors’: THE END OF EDDY – Unicorn Theatre
The End of Eddy, starring Alex Austin and Kwaku Mills (in his professional debut) star in this tale of growing up poor, an outsider in a rural France.
‘Unremittingly bleak’: GUNDOG – Royal Court Theatre
In the claustrophobic atmosphere of Chloe Lamford’s design, Vicky Featherstone’s production of Gundog provides too little variation of tone, especially as Simon Longman’s storytelling resists the propulsion of forward narrative.
‘Dark & brutally honest’: GUNDOG – Royal Court Theatre
Gundog at the Royal Court Theatre joins other plays in recent years about farming and rural life, standing out in its bleakness, thematic complexity and disarming poetry. This small play has the epic roar of modern canon.
‘First the goats, now the sheep’: GUNDOG – Royal Court Theatre
New misery fest about the hard graft of rural life is symbolic, but it really lacks drama and resonance.
NEWS: Arcola announces winter season of drone strikes & politics
Arcola Theatre today announces its winter season for the remainder of 2016, with new plays by David Greig, Ron Hutchinson, Christina Lamb, Belarus Free Theatre, Christine Bacon, Sergio Blanco and Spitting Image’s Henry Naylor.
YEN – Royal Court
Powerful play about brothers comes storming into Sloane Square from Manchester, trailing tenderness and terror.