Les Enfants Terrible, a company now synonymous with this experience-based immersive theatre, take us through white-walled holding cells, to a cathedral with neon Donald Trump and Putin effigies, to grimy prison workrooms.
THEBES LAND – Arcola Theatre
A playwright wants to write a play about patricide, but with an actual criminal onstage instead of an actor. Initial research leads him to a young man called Martin Santos, serving consecutive life sentences in Belmarsh for killing his father.
THE LISTENING ROOM – Theatre Royal Stratford East
Can violent criminals be rehabilitated, and can their victims ever forgive them? The Listening Room says yes. This verbatim piece tells the stories of three violent crimes, primarily from the perspective of the perpetrators. Some character background sets the scene for climactic moments where they commit their offences, but at least half of each of […]
HEATHER – #EdFringe
Harry receives a children’s book manuscript from an unknown writer, Heather Eames. Impressed, he wants to discuss an advance, rights and making her book the Next Big Thing, but Heather’s based outside of London, heavily pregnant and ill.
THE ENCHANTED – Bunker Theatre
This is a pretty piece of expressionistic theatre that pleases the eyes and ears, but its favouring of poetic ambiguity and metaphor over concrete details and characterisation creates emotional distance. It’s difficult to find sympathy for a psychopath when their childhood trauma is nostalgically romanticised or vaguely alluded to when we see so little of them directly.
THE MONKEY – Theatre 503
John Stanley’s dark comedy could easily descend into poverty porn, but he avoids this pitfall with a focus on detailed characterisation and the consequences of drug addiction, both of which can translate to any social class.
DADDY’S GIRL – Vault Festival
Prison dramas are practically a genre in their own right on television and the silver screen, but for the stage they are not so common. Daddy’s Girl, which is directed by Alice Malin, focuses on Terry – in jail for life for armed robbery – and his adult daughter Eliza.
THE COLLECTOR – Greenwich Theatre
When the British army arrived in Northern Ireland, beleaguered Catholics came onto the streets offering them tea, biscuits and cake. How long did it take for the story to change to the one that we know today?
JOANNE – Soho Theatre
We never meet Joanne. We do however, meet four women who encounter her at different points over a crucial 24-hour period of her life, and one that remembers her as a child. We learn that she cuts a tall, striking figure, makes immediate impact on those she meets and she doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere the world. Joanne is homeless and has just been released from prison.