Anna Chiari, Author at North West End UK

14Aug

By Anna ChiariNo Comments

Scotland

Pauline – Pleasance Courtyard

Pauline is a pure example of storytelling where the words, voices and testimonies of three generations of women meet and confront each other in what turns out to be a moving and necessary memoir for all contemporary women. An all-female story, with a strong feminist character that always remains intimate and never aggressive. A veritable exposé of human nature, of what it means to be a woman, of weaknesses, insecurities, sins even, and of the great moral strength that such a gender role seems to bring with it, the play lays bare three characters, three women who are different but bound together by blood and art, by a love of storytelling and telling. An excavation in the memory of the actress, alone and unique in this one-woman show, who seems to want to cling with all her might to what sh...

The Man Who Thought He Knew Too Much – Pleasance Dome

14Aug

By Anna ChiariNo Comments

Scotland

The Man Who Thought He Knew Too Much – Pleasance Dome

An intoxicating vortex that for an hour sucks you in, leaving you breathless, captures your senses with its live music and virtuoso acrobatics, and ravishes your mind in an excess of incidents, accents, jokes and twists. Everything is perfect in this little gem of visual storytelling, a rare example of physical theatre where the theatrical action surpasses in suspense, action and acrobatics the speed and pace of a cinematic experience. A genre parody, the play retains the tone of a 1960s comedy and the suspense typical of Hitchcock, of which it is a satire without ever descending into exaggerated grotesquery. Rather than farce, in fact, the show claims the self-deprecating, light-hearted tones of some 1960s comedy-thrillers, such as Charades, where the grimaces and impressive facial exp...

The Sian Clarke Experience – Underbelly, Cowgate

13Aug

By Anna ChiariNo Comments

Scotland

The Sian Clarke Experience – Underbelly, Cowgate

There is a lot of dirt, a lot of grime, a lot of mess and a lot of rage on stage of the Sian Clarke experience, a physical performance that is as deliberately irreverent and uncomfortable as it is necessary for our society. It seems like an out-of-control rage that of the young comedian, Sian Clarke, but it is instead a calculated fun guaranteed by the strong stage presence of the performer who fills the stage with mastery and awareness. Sian does not want to be sexy, she does not want to be funny, she does not want to be "a good girl", she wants to be uncomfortable, desecrating, attacking a sexist and patronising society that threatens women on a daily basis and frames them in demeaning and humiliating categories. Hers is a necessary testimony, unfortunately shared by all the women pre...

Crossing The Void – theSpace on the Mile

11Aug

By Anna ChiariNo Comments

Scotland

Crossing The Void – theSpace on the Mile

Ghost stories are never what they seem, or at least they should not be. As Henry James taught us with his The Turn of the Screw, any self-respecting ghost story should know how to play with the appearance of things, with the ambiguity underlying reality itself, with the perception of the reader or, in our case, of the spectator, and create, through allusions and linguistic traps, a labyrinthine reality, phantasmagorical in fact, a game of reflexes where everything can be the opposite of everything. This is what Crossing the Void succeeds in achieving, to the viewer's great satisfaction, as a result of young scriptwriter Sally MacAlister's collaboration with queer actresses’ koi collective in their debut as a theatre company. A student of Drama Writing at the University of Manchester, Ma...

Hens and Heroines – theSpace on North Bridge

10Aug

By Anna ChiariNo Comments

Scotland

Hens and Heroines – theSpace on North Bridge

It should be inspired by Ovid's Heroides, Hens and Heroines, and mark the debut of the Bristol Badminton School at the Fringe 2022. It should interrogate the audience with atavistic dilemmas concerning life and death, fate and free will, desire and duty. Yet the only dilemmas it is able to raise seem to be those about the why of its own production, about the ultimate meaning of what it wants to convey, arousing a general perplexity about what the audience is watching. In spite of the limited half-hour on stage, the play strikes with force for its lack of coherence and credibility, for a poor script and for forced and awkward acting. As much as one can appreciate the effort of the seven girls involved in the production, some of them very young, the play appears as a badly cut plot, w...

Are You Being Murdered? – Pleasance at EICC

9Aug

By Anna ChiariNo Comments

Scotland

Are You Being Murdered? – Pleasance at EICC

What would happen if Agatha Christie met Father Brown? This seems to be asked by David Semple, the acclaimed writer of the famous series branded BBC ONE, in bringing to the stage the one man shows entitled "Are You Being Murdered?" A show focused exclusively on the talents of "Allo Allo" actor Arthur Bostrom, capable of bringing together comedy and mystery, suspense and social satire. Set in the golden age of old BBC sitcoms, the show proves to be marked by a glossy nostalgia that winks at a specific generation and targets that generation specifically. Although with its lively monologue and ready wit, the show seems to take up, like a dress worn out by too much use, certain stereotypes of a genre unable to speak to a contemporary audience with sharper and more irreverent tastes. The...