Kira Daniels, Author at North West End UK

Twelfth Night – Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre

14May

By Kira DanielsNo Comments

London

Twelfth Night – Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre

Twelfth Night or What You Will is a little wishy-washy. Is it a girl or a boy? A grief comedy? A musical or a straight play? It is what you will make of it. The building blocks are all there. The humour, the grief, the ribaldry, and the bleeding heart, all come out to play. Owen Horsley’s new production lives its life to the fullest, making great use of the Open Air Theatre environment, breathing vitality into the too oft neglected queer imagery of the text, and taking full advantage of the Regent’s Park audience’s willingness to be delighted, transported, and even occasionally challenged. This is a production is a rarity among contemporary stagings of Shakespeare’s work in that treats its historical material with full reverence without taking anything in it for granted. Audiences overly f...

The Government Inspector – Marylebone Theatre

10May

By Kira DanielsNo Comments

London

The Government Inspector – Marylebone Theatre

Government inspector? I hardly know ‘er! Those familiar with Gogol’s work via other translations or adaptations will be surprised to find this story transplanted from Imperial Russia into a farcical and fanciful imagining of Victorian England. Top hats tip, feathers flail, and breeches bust as the rambunctious set populating this unspecified vaguely historical small provincial town bob and blunder all over each other. There is no gag this cast is likely to sneer at with steady, practical stage violence, direct comic address to spectators, and even the launching of a cabbage into the melee all being paraded under the audience’s nose. The cynical heart of the play, although invoked in a couple of jarring directorial choices, never quite manages to fight its way to the surface of the burbling...

7May

By Kira DanielsNo Comments

London

Draft 23 – Old Red Lion Theatre

Somewhere between Waiting for Godot and waiting in a mile long bathroom line behind the two most annoying people at your college while they slowly figure out they don’t actually even like each other, Draft 23 is set in a shifting landscape of tottering piles of laundry, watches, belts, and ashtrays. This play follows the slow and inevitable demise of a fictionalized relationship that cannot maintain itself without the structure of a functional script. The stakes are low and the characters themselves are lower, alternating between various tableaus of languidity as they mope about the playing space without any vestige of playfulness in them. Self-important but unable to self-articulate, the text is under-rehearsed and both actors’ performances are pervaded by a self-consciousness that underc...

5May

By Kira DanielsNo Comments

London

Captain Amazing – Southwark Playhouse

Good for a laugh and great for a cathartic sob, Alistair McDowall’s Captain Amazing takes only a few minutes (65 give or take) of bedtime storytelling to spin back time and create a whole new universe. The world of Captain Amazing is a sparse one. He goes to work at a store and tells people not to buy things they don’t need, brings chain vouchers on his dates, and lives in an apartment with one chair (and another upstairs if you want him to go and get it). He’s not one to take a stand or cause a fuss but he’ll do his darndest to save an innocent life. Directed by Clive Judd and produced by Matthew Schmolle Productions in partnership with charities working on male mental health and support for single parents, this production is extraordinary. Mark Weinman’s chimerical performance as Capt...

29Apr

By Kira DanielsNo Comments

London

Moby Dick – Wilton’s Music Hall

You know the story. Boy meets whale. Whale eats boy’s leg. Boy never gets over whale. The enduring power of the novel, Moby Dick is difficult to relate to in this modern day and age for audiences without a special interest in whale anatomy or sperm oil derivation methods. Some productions take on this difficulty by recontextualizing the story, playing up its tragic or romantic elements, and this production, by the theatre ensemble simple8 technically checks both of these boxes. Our narrator/protagonist Ishmael (Mark Arends) and his beloved bunkmate Queequeg (Tom Swale) have more than a hint of chemistry and jokingly allude to a sea marriage. The doomed Captain Ahab (Guy Rhys) and his gloomy mate Starbuck (Hannah Emanuel) both take their respective roles in spreading their component element...

20Apr

By Kira DanielsNo Comments

London

1884 – Shoreditch Town Hall

What makes a house a home? What makes a hall a theatre and what makes a game play? Conceived by theatre-maker Rhianna Ilube and brought to life by immersive game-theatre makers Coney, 1884, is a hoot and a half. Split into two parts, the first running around two hours that go by in a flash and the second making less of a second full act than a stunningly complex coda, this experience doesn’t waste a minute of the time it takes from you. Intriguingly complex, Jacob Wu’s set design is as functional as it is whimsical and establishes the playfulness of the environment being curated right from the get-go. Audience members self-select seatings of seven to begin the game and from these small pods communities are born. Each activity is thoughtful, engaging, and accessible. Sound designer, Mwen, a...

20Apr

By Kira DanielsNo Comments

London

The Glass Menagerie – Rose Theatre

Directed by Atri Banerjee and designed by Rosanna Vize, this stylized performance of Tennessee Williams’ iconic family drama both juices up and strips down the physical environs of a timeless story, but its enduring appeal is undulled by theatrical innovation. A restaging both faithful to its formidable script and imbued with a magic of its own, this production is truly enchanting. Geraldine Somerville scintillates as the reluctant matriarch Amanda Wingfield whose erstwhile husband “fell in love with long distances” and hasn’t appeared in more than a decade save in his grinning portrait on the family’s mantle. This production’s rendering of the Wingfield family home places this mantle on the invisible fourth wall which is neither broken nor ever explicitly mended in this staging but rat...

Pansexual Pregnant Piracy – Soho Theatre

1Apr

By Kira DanielsNo Comments

London

Pansexual Pregnant Piracy – Soho Theatre

Get on board, baby. It’s Pansexual Pregnant Piracy at the Soho Theatre. Creators Eleanor Colville, Ro Suppa, and Robbie Taylor Hunt also make up three quarters of the four-person cast singing and dancing their way through the totally possibly true and occasionally even accurate life story of real-life eighteenth-century pirate Anne Bonny. Played with great aplomb and shimmering gravitas by Suppa, Anne is a solid lead audiences root for as easily as she uproots gender conventions. Colville’s panachefull presentation as Calico Jack is delicious and the joy of creative performance shines out of every porthole. Elizabeth Chu rounds out the cast in a practically perfect performance as “hot wet babe” Mary Read, and an even more transfixing interlude as an even wetter fish. Creator, perform...

23Mar

By Kira DanielsNo Comments

London

Mary’s Daughters – The Space Theatre

Why do we tell ghost stories? To titillate? To frighten? To inspire? To warn? To grieve? To honour? Mary’s Daughters, written by Kaya Bucholc and Will Wallace and directed for The Space Theatre by Kay Brattan, attempts all of these feats. A haunting triplet performance by Megan Carter as Mary Wollstonecraft, Rachael Reshma as Mary Shelley, and Kaya Bucholc as Shelley’s forgotten half-sister and Wollstonecraft’s “unfortunate girl,” Fanny Imlay, sets out to right the wrongs of history and restore a legacy to three women who despite their brilliance did not get the option to control their own historical narratives. Many of the salacious details of the three women’s lives long known in fun fact format and prized as illuminating context by scholars of their works are here fleshed out, rep...

20Mar

By Kira DanielsNo Comments

London

Indigo Giant – Soho Poly

“I will plant Indigo in your head.” Both threat and promise, this is the doom of a story’s characters and the hope of its audience in this touring production of Indigo Giant. Written by Ben Musgrave, directed by Gavin Joseph, and with production, dramaturgy & lyrics by Leesa Gazi, this moving play has been travelling between venues and currently finds itself nestled in the basement room of the Soho Poly, a somewhat cramped venue still in the midst of its renovation but steadily working its way toward re-emerging as a cultural and theatrical hub. Telling the story of the Bengali Indigo Rebellion, the plot begins shortly after the wedding of raiyat Sadhu (Diljohn Singh) and Kshetromani (Amy Tara), a young woman whose father was ruined by British planters exploiting both labour and lan...