Klervi Gavet, Author at North West End UK

23Apr

By Klervi GavetNo Comments

London

Nayatt School Redux – Coronet Theatre

I once described a Wooster Group production to a prospective theatre date as a “massage for the brain”. She was intrigued and tagged along. She and her hyper-rational brain then spent two hours beside me in quiet agony. Six years later, I texted her to say I was giving them another try, joking there might be a plot this time. She did not ask for a ticket. Probably for the best. Nayatt School Redux by the Wooster Group is less a play than a controlled act of disorientation. Conceived as a reconstruction of a partially lost 1978 production, giving center stage to T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, it embraces fragmentation as both method and message. It begins with Kate Valk, a long-time Wooster Group member and deadpan narrator, who delivers an avalanche of archival detail about the or...

2Apr

By Klervi GavetNo Comments

London

In The Print – King’s Head Theatre

It’s 1985. London. Rupert Murdoch secretly relocates his entire newspaper operation overnight from Fleet Street to a purpose-built facility in Wapping, locking out five thousand print workers without warning. Facing him: Brenda Dean, the first woman ever elected leader of a major British trade union, who must somehow hold a fractious coalition together against a man who seems to have already won before the fight even starts. In The Print, written by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky, takes this year-long standoff — known as the Wapping dispute — and wrestles it into 90 tight, no-interval minutes. Given we’re living through another era of tech moguls rewriting the rules while calling it progress, the timing feels pointed. The production values are impressively high. Claudia Jolly’s Bre...

28Feb

By Klervi GavetNo Comments

London

Last and First Men – Coronet Theatre

At a time when humankind seems increasingly determined to write itself out of its own timeline, Neon Dance’s Last and First Men feels uncannily well placed. This 65-minute movement piece is a resonant speculative journey, with at its heart an act of listening: to the future, to the deep past, and to the fragile thread that still connects them. Based on Olaf Stapledon’s visionary 1930s sci-fi novel, the piece imagines a far future in which the last remnants of humanity reach back across two billion years to address us, the “first men”. Under the inspired direction of Adrienne Hart, the dancers — Fukiko Takase, Aoi Nakamura and Kelvin Kilonzo — perform with an otherworldly, masterful precision that feels recognisably human yet unmistakably other, as if the genus Homo had remained while th...

16Feb

By Klervi GavetNo Comments

London

After Miss Julie – Park Theatre

What I find most unsettling about Strindberg’s Miss Julie these days is no longer the play itself, but that it remains one of the most frequently produced plays in the Western canon, a status that feels increasingly difficult to justify. Especially when, in the preface, Strindberg a well-documented misogynist openly articulates his hostility toward women, and feminists in particular, describing Julie as a degenerate product of emancipation, bound to self-destruct. Knowing this, one is left wondering why theatres keep returning to this text, and what is still being sought or defended in bringing it back to the stage. Knowing that, I had hoped Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie might reframe or redeem the problematic source or do for Strindberg what Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part...

The Debate: Baldwin vs Buckley – Wilton’s Music Hall

5Feb

By Klervi GavetNo Comments

London

The Debate: Baldwin vs Buckley – Wilton’s Music Hall

Timing is everything they say. The Debate: Baldwin vs Buckley could have not come at a better time. Watching a play that asks "Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?", just days before the Super Bowl, amid conservative outrage over Puerto Rican Bad Bunny being "not American enough" to perform at this all-American cultural institution, and against the backdrop of renewed ICE arrests, makes the piece feel disturbingly real and urgently demanding. The play restages the famous 1965 Cambridge debate between James Baldwin, literary leader of the civil rights movements, and William F. Buckley Jr., America's most prominent conservative intellectual, who took place shortly after the Mississippi civil rights marches. Striking in its simplicity, the staging offers only chairs ...

30Jan

By Klervi GavetNo Comments

London

The Tempest – Globe Theatre

"I know this play very well. I don't recognise this version..." So says Antonia at the end of this production — and that line pretty much sums up my experience too. This new production of The Tempest, produced by Shakespeare's Globe and directed by Tim Crouch, takes a deliberately experimental, Brechtian-leaning approach to Shakespeare's text. Performed in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the play is fragmented: lines are redistributed across characters, some spoken from within the audience, others added in contemporary English. The intention is clear and well articulated — to question power: who gets to speak these words, who gets to be on stage, what shifts when authority or identity change, and how theatre constructs illusion. On paper, it's an intellectually strong idea. The Tempe...

10Nov

By Klervi GavetNo Comments

London

Kodachrome – The Cockpit Theatre

It all starts with a thoroughly intriguing concept. Two performers mix live throughout — two DJs whose lives become romantically intertwined as they share and fight for sonic control. The decks become a site of power, identity, a place to take over, find refuge, or disappear. It’s a strong idea — the music mirroring the shifts in desire and domination, the distortion of a connection that turns toxic. Yet the form never quite finds its rhythm. The techno undercurrent often sits in the background rather than driving the story — a missed opportunity in a show built around pulse and control. Kodachrome captures with painful clarity how easily intensity can be mistaken for intimacy, how validation can slip into addiction, and how modern monsters are made out of the most vulnerable parts ...

Sung Im Her: 1 Degree Celsius – Southbank Centre

8Nov

By Klervi GavetNo Comments

London

Sung Im Her: 1 Degree Celsius – Southbank Centre

An empty stage. Neutral lighting. A square mat. Suddenly, a woman (Sung Im Her, the choreographer and company director) finds her way onto it and begins to move — in silence, cautiously at first, then with growing boldness. Nothing tells you the show has started. No lights dimming, no cue. Like life itself, it just begins — without asking for permission. As she leaves the stage, six performers arrive. They are the constant of the piece, the small society around which everything revolves. Their presence shapes the next fifty minutes: movement as language, relationships as rhythm. There’s something intriguing in watching them evolve, not through character but through tension, proximity, imitation. The soundscape by Husk Husk and Lucy Duncan is kept to a disconcerting minimum — alternat...

11Apr

By Klervi GavetNo Comments

London

Shanghai Dolls – Kiln Theatre

“Shanghai Dolls” at Kiln Theatre traverses nearly 60 years of Chinese history in a brisk 80 minute run, centering on the intertwined fates of two legendary women. United by a passion for theatre yet divided by political beliefs, personal values, and the sweep of history, one transforms into Mao Zedong’s wife while the other rises to become China’s first female theatre director. Directed by Katie Posner, the production tackles vast historical events but occasionally buckles under its own weight. There’s a palpable sense of rushing to cover too much ground at once, with the dense narrative sometimes feeling overloaded—especially for Western audiences less familiar with the period. A clever nod to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House frames the struggle of these women, suggesting that the search for mea...

Darkfield at The Ditch – Shoreditch Town Hall

5Apr

By Klervi GavetNo Comments

London

Darkfield at The Ditch – Shoreditch Town Hall

Set in the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall, Darkfield at The Ditch offers four immersive micro-experiences around theme of fear and darkness. I sampled two: VISITORS and ARCADE. VISITORS was a big no from me. After a monotonous and fast pre-show briefing that left me overwhelmed with instructions and still no clue as to what I was getting myself into, I was invited to take a seat and put on some headphones. Then hell broke loose. With noise-isolating headphones flooding my ears with 360-degree voices of the Dead and no visual cues to ground me, my body went into high alert; for 20 minutes I sat in palpable panic, hyper-aware of every breath and terrified at the idea of something suddenly appearing or touching me without my consent. The added instruction to stand with my back to a door ...