Sunday, October 25

Tag: New Diorama Theatre

Stuffed – New Diorama Theatre
London

Stuffed – New Diorama Theatre

An inverted pyramid approach in its true form, where action takes place before crisis analysis and having a creative response to it. The audience is stuffed ahead of the show Stuffed by Ugly Bucket. The ensemble is around you while you chug a free drink and share a meal in the New Diorama Theatre foyer with strangers. By opening with a shared meal before diving into the performance, the show flips the traditional structure placing audience connection and collective action ahead of the crisis analysis itself. The capacity of Stuffed to enter with you and exit with you pushes the boundaries of a devised performance space with curtains, projections, plastic crates, and a live DJ. The testimonies attack you and create an air of tension that makes 60 minutes move faster, leaving one with an ...
King Troll (The Fawn) – New Diorama Theatre
London

King Troll (The Fawn) – New Diorama Theatre

A “dark and otherworldly thriller” by Sonali Bhattacharyya, King Troll was a finalist for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Playwriting, and now arrives on the London fringe in a production by Milli Bhatia. The topic is the experience of migrants within the UK, and the plot relies on a mystical, magic realism device, the fawn of the title. At first the story appears straightforward, as South Asian sisters Nikita (coolly efficient Zainab Hasan) and Riya (vulnerable Safiyya Ingar) deal with the latter’s application to stay in the country. Photo: Helen Murray When they decide to phone the friend of their late mother, a delightfully eccentric Shashi (Ayesha Dharker), a lifeline and possible sponsor appears to protect Riya, but at what cost? The bold physicality of Dominic Holmes’s Fawn adds ...
Rewind – New Diorama Theatre
London

Rewind – New Diorama Theatre

Rewind opens with Andres Valesquez talking to the audience, he is informal and casual. As he introduces himself and the rest of the cast, he gives us some context around the story they will tell. In Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, dictators and regimes often supported by the United States were in charge. People disappeared, often without a trace. Valesquez dons a white shawl to represent Madres de Plaza de Mayo, known in English as The Mothers Of the Disappeared, and then a blue coverall, the uniform of an investigator for El Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team.     It is clear that Ephemeral Ensemble have a very set vision for the show. Through very little dialogue relying instead on music, puppetry and physical t...
After The Act – New Diorama Theatre
London

After The Act – New Diorama Theatre

On the 18th November 2003, Section 28 Local Government Act 1988 was finally wiped from the statute books.  This Act was established to silence teachers and other educators from discussing same-sex relationships in any form.  A whole generation of children who were lesbian, gay, bi-sexual or trans were ostracised, taunted by their classmates for being ‘different,’ ‘not normal’. In the anniversary year of its repeal, Breach Theatre are dancing on the grave of this act, which acted like a festering wound, its bacteria growing and infecting society, and in a way, we are still feeling it today.  From the beginning, Breach hit the ground running with their passionate musical delivery of this extremely well-written piece of theatre.  Taking their storyline from original dialo...
Everyday – New Diorama Theatre
London

Everyday – New Diorama Theatre

Deafinitely Theatre’s Everyday, commissioned by New Diorama explores the term witches as a group of people come together on the new moon to refresh, revive spirit and release from the traumas they have experienced.  Newcomer Aislinn is open and eager to explore with others to help them heal but struggles to admit her recent trauma but with watching her friend be brave, she too can come forward and release from the bind. Deafinitely Theatre is deaf theatre company which was really incredible to see a story for a deaf audience that wasn’t about being deaf but about life, their complexities and surviving relationships with toxic people. It’s a story we don’t often see in theatre and felt really warming to be a part of that audience and to broaden my horizon of different theatre. Paired wit...