Inside Bitch is a messy but enjoyable counter-balance to the usual women-in-prison scenarios. Roll on Clean Break.
‘I just wish I could have felt more engaged’: THE WOODS – Royal Court Theatre ★★★
You enter dark places when you enter the Royal Court and sometimes that can be enthralling and exhilarating. But there needs to be some kind of uplift. Sadly this time, it wasn’t present.
‘Something doesn’t quite gel’: GUNDOG – Royal Court Theatre ★★★
An interesting corrective to those soft-focus romantic images of rural equanimity, in the end, Gundog doesn’t quite come off. But, like grandad’s homily to his family, Longman too has bravely tried to capture something of the eternal and intangible: human attachment to the land.
THE FALL – Royal Court Theatre ★★★★
“Theatre is important. Theatre has the most amazing ability to give people an understanding of what can often be very complex social issues by telling human stories, while at the same time speaking truth to power.”
THE FALL – Royal Court Theatre ★★★★
“Theatre is important. Theatre has the most amazing ability to give people an understanding of what can often be very complex social issues by telling human stories, while at the same time speaking truth to power.”
BODIES – Royal Court Theatre
It’s a very strange feeling when you come across two new plays with almost identical themes – a zeitgeist moment where an idea floating in the ether gets picked up by two playwrights in close time proximity.
NUCLEAR WAR – Royal Court
There’s something refreshingly anarchic about Simon Stephens. In his very long preface to the printed text of Nuclear War, Stephens talks at length about the process of writing this play and how the origination of it came from his interest in writing a piece of text for movement/dance.
A PROFOUNDLY AFFECTIONATE, PASSIONATE DEVOTION TO SOMEONE (-NOUN) – Royal Court
First we’re ushered into what at first sight appears to be a variation on a classroom. We sit, like pupils, upright, on white stools.
THE SEWING GROUP – Royal Court Theatre
E V Crowe has been steadily building a reputation as a writer of taut, stringent control since her debut, Kin (2010) followed by the positively garrulous (by her standards) but impressive Hero (2012) with Daniel Mays. Last year, Brenda, a study in mystery and abuse, premiered at the High Tide festival and certainly took no prisoners. Nor does her latest, The Sewing Group.