London Archives - Page 59 of 149

Mind Mangler: Member of the Tragic Circle – Apollo Theatre

22Mar

By Carole GordonNo Comments

London

Mind Mangler: Member of the Tragic Circle – Apollo Theatre

Mind Mangler, Keith (performed by Henry Lewis), is a mentalist, a human lie-detector, an expert at prophesy, a man who can read your mind. As this show comes from the crazy team at Mischief Productions who also devised the hugely successful The Play That Goes Wrong and Peter Pan Goes Wrong, it's not long before the Mind Mangler's tricks spiral into chaos. Lewis is an imposing figure with a sonorous voice that is perfect for this role. He exudes misplaced self-confidence in his abilities, while recognising that his past is not without its flaws. A lot of flaws. This is a performer with huge aspirations to play Las Vegas but who fate will undoubtedly and inevitably kick to the end of the pier. There's a lot of audience participation, from revealing personal secrets to mixing up Rubik cube...

22Mar

By Jennifer LaishleyNo Comments

London

Faith Healer – Lyric Hammersmith

This season the Lyric in Hammersmith are showcasing some of the best classic pieces of British and Irish Theatre for modern audiences. Faith Healer was written by Brian Friel in the 1970s and will appeal mostly to audience’s who lived through or understand the political context of the time. Rachel O’Riordan’s direction is imaginative and powerful use of spacing helps to lift moments in this play. However, the stream of consciousness nature of the monologues in the play could lose some audience members. The key flaw here being that this is a play from another Era and audiences today will only give an awkward chuckle to moments that would have initially intended to fill a room with hysteria. Nonetheless, as Rachel O’Riordan describes ‘some of the best British and Irish talent around’ have be...

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...

20Mar

By Dave SmithNo Comments

London

Murder In The Dark – Richmond Theatre

After a car crash on a wintry, snowy night, Mrs. Bateman (Susie Blake), a local farmer, brings a fairly dysfunctional family back to her isolated farmhouse to shelter for the night before the trains start running again. It is New Year's Eve and everyone has better plans, but instead, they are left without food or wine along with plenty of acrimony. Danny (Tom Chambers) was a pop star once. Perhaps with a chance of making real music with his brother William (Owen Oakeshott), a hint of fame and fortune led him to leave his brother behind and join the teen pop group Dance Party 5. A string of hits and a jet-setting lifestyle saw him indulge in drink and drugs, leaving his wife Rebecca (Rebecca Charles) and young son Jake (Jonny Green) behind. Many years later, he crashes the car with his f...

20Mar

By Olivia CoxNo Comments

London

Karen – The Other Palace

Break-ups are always hard, but Karen’s Protagonist (Sarah Cameron-West, also the writer and producer) has just had a particularly rough one: it’s her 30th birthday, she’s at Alton Towers eating a Calippo, and she’s just been unceremoniously dumped by her long-term boyfriend, Joe. And if things couldn’t get any worse for our Protagonist, it turns out Joe has also been having an affair with her office nemesis, Karen. This very unfortunate event kicks off Karen, a laugh-a-minute, utterly shameless exploration of the messiest parts of heartbreak and self-discovery. For the next 60 minutes, Karen immerses the audience in the internal and external worlds of Protagonist, who often breaks the fourth wall to talk to the audience as if they’re the other characters she’s interacting with. ...

20Mar

By Eleanor HallNo Comments

London

Fat Chance – Theatre503

Rachel Stockdale gives a high-energy performance in this autobiographical and unapologetic confrontation with fatphobia’s entrenchment within modern culture and social attitudes. Consequently, the piece was full of provocations to challenge our prejudices. Clad in a silk robe, Stockdale became “Stocky the boxer”, a clever spin on the rhetoric of ‘fighting’ through weight loss. As she sang and danced and told us of her story, a trio of projector screens acted as windows into Stockdale’s past, displaying the dates during which she worked various jobs and the impact this had on her weight. This was also intercut with statistics to demystify BMI and highlight the great failings of diet culture. Ultimately, the numbers and facts were emphasised by a deep sense of personal indignation. There was...

18Mar

By Kira DanielsNo Comments

London

Cold, Dark Matters – The Hope Theatre

It is said that curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back. It is also said that you shouldn’t go sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, and that good advice is almost certain to be ignored. Cold, Dark Matters is a very curious play, and every aspect of its production at the Hope Theatre is morbidly satisfying. Altogether more thought provoking than it has any right to be, this fun, dark tale is neither cynical nor vapid, instead approaching its murky subject matter with a refreshingly forthright earnestness, much the way one might attempt to earn the respect of a particularly wilful horse, or an intimidatingly intimate crowd. Writer and performer Jack Brownridge Kelly doesn’t bother with charming the audience, he simply gets straight to work, and wins them over by be...

17Mar

By Kira DanielsNo Comments

London

The Good Father – Riverside Studios

What are you doing for sex tonight? When was the last time you felt comfortable singing in front of someone? Who do you belong with, really? The Good Father poses all these questions and leaves plenty of empty space in its performance for you to spend the whole night coming up with your own personal answers. Directed by Mark Fitzgerald and written by Christian O’Reilly, this play is somewhat lacking in theatricality and sitting in the audience you get the sense that it’s only being performed live in front of you because there wasn’t enough budget to turn it into a proper film. Both actors’ performances are serviceable and occasionally attention-grabbing, but they have a lot of empty space to fill, and it is an intimate enough story that audiences feel more like interlopers than particip...

17Mar

By Zoё MeeresNo Comments

London

Hide and Seek – Park Theatre

Touching on issues like identity, peer pressure, friendship and the negative impact social media culture is having on young people, Hide and Seek doesn’t feel like entirely untrodden territory. Written by Italian playwright Tobia Rossi and translated and directed here by Carlotta Brentan, Hide and Seek charts the course of an unlikely friendship formed by two boys, Gio (Louis Scarpa) and Mirko (Nico Cetrulo) under quite bizarre circumstances. Bullied and belittled by his classmates, Gio retreats to a cave to escape after leaving a final mark on social media. Mirko finds him, and the two bond over their shared role in sensationalising Gio’s disappearance to feed the ensuing media circus, resorting to some fairly drastic measures to twist the story and stay relevant. As their friendship b...

14Mar

By Kira DanielsNo Comments

London

Harry Clarke – Ambassadors Theatre

A rose by any other name… still has its thorns. It’s what we love about our favourite conmen, Anna Delvey, Elizabeth Holmes, Remington Steele… They’re beautiful but also terribly cringe inducing. We love to hate them but can’t quite bring ourselves to look down on them, so powerful is their allure. Maybe it’s the accent, each one unique and bizarrely captivating, all the more for its inauthenticity. Harry Clarke’s is immaculate, as is Philip Brugglestein’s. In fact, all of the characters Billy Crudup speaks on behalf of over Harry Clarke’s 80-minute runtime are perfectly articulated, under the supervision of vocal coach, Deborah Lapidus. The stage cousin of Matt Damon’s Talented Mr. Ripley, Crudup’s Philip Brugglestein / Harry Clarke is no less charming for being 30 years his film fellow’s...