Reviews & features: Theatre, Issue 610

Class Enemy

A different class

When Nigel Williams’ Class Enemy made its debut at London’s Royal Court in 1978, hip hop was still a phenomenon of the American underground. It would never have occurred to a director to incorporate it into this portrayal of a bunch of teenagers in a…

George Orwell's Coming Up For Air

Funny, tragic stage adaptation of little-known text

What swiftly becomes apparent about this adroit adaptation of George Orwell’s lesser-known 1939 novel is how powerfully it resonates today. Written on the eve of World War II, while the author was in Morocco recovering from an injury sustained fighting…

The Caravan

Impressive site specific verbatim piece

One of modern Britain’s cruel realities is that, while a US presidential hopeful dominates front page news, the continued homelessness of thousands of UK citizens after the 2007 floods, has gone largely ignored. When this situation is mentioned, it is…

St Nicholas

All theatre critics are bloodsucking scum

Conor McPherson was clearly settling old scores when he wrote St Nicholas in 1997. Like many of his earliest plays, it’s a monologue and tall tale. This one is told by a successful Dublin theatre critic, a self professed ‘hack and a drunkard’. Bitter…

Britt Ekland: Britt on Britt

A Swedish sexagenarian’s exploits

‘Who is Britt Ekland?’ So the former Bond girl and one-time wife of Peter Sellers begins her frank and surprisingly funny whistle stop tour of her enchantingly colourful life. Offering glimpses of the young starlet who entranced the likes of Rod Stewart…

The Bird and the Bee: The Bird

Tales of love and abuse

It almost goes without saying that abusive behaviour visited upon a person in childhood can lead to dysfunction later in life. This idea is explored in this second part of successive companion pieces at the Fringe from Kandinsky, whose earlier work…

Take 5: Plays with a gruesome body count

Topping the morbidity league with plane upon planeful of passengers heading to a nasty end, Charlie Victor Romeo takes transcripts from black box recorders and re-enacts those scary final minutes of sky-high tension. Not every passenger dies, but most…

Office Party

Tasteless delights

Seldom were ham and cheese so well combined in a sandwich as in Cal McCrystal’s interactive version of that familiar titular institution, the office party. The show may be disrupted here and there by its structure, but this seems to do nothing to dampen…

Yasser

An original take on the Middle East conflict

The concept of national identity becomes ever more fragile in the absence of a nation state. A people bereft of the glue that binds modern communities together – whether real or imagined – risk having their identity defined by others, moulded by…

We All Fall Down

Playing with the Plague

Who'd have thought the Black Death could be so much fun? Or that a tale with such a strong moral heart could be so full of laughs and silliness? The story of two 17th century villages both blighted with the plague, the show explores the selfish and…

Amir Nizar Zuabi - Jidariyya

Poetry in motion

Perhaps the greatest psychological pain humans can feel occurs when they are denied language. The sense of frustration that builds from a voice unheard, marginalised or rendered irrelevant by the listener can be overwhelming. This is as true of the…

Bite the Dust

Polish satire lost in translation

First there is the show that should have been. Originally staged in the late-70s, Bite the Dust is a satirical sideswipe at the military mindset. It proved so controversial in Poland that playwright Tadeusz Rólewicz withdrew the performance rights.

Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About A Girl He Once Loved

Bold, original show from sickeningly talented young performer

Stefan Golaszewski’s a sickeningly talented young man. Squished into a sweaty attic in the Pleasance and armed with nothing more than a handful of props and some banging techo music, the young London lad is bowling over audiences with his first solo…

Esoterica

No ordinary card

The paradox of a culture that loves to see magic and the sixth sense at work, while refusing to believe in either of them, becomes particularly apparent when, sitting in a darkened room watching one man appear to read another man’s mind, your brain…

Borderline

Repetitive beat poetry

The Stone Roses come on, and over in the corner there’s always one monged fella pivoting off the wall. He starts monkey-dancing closer like he thinks he’s Ian Brown, gurning and chewing his face off with the pills. He’s pointing at you. He’s looking you…

Supper

Food for thought

In any conversation, there’s always another conversation going on beneath the ostensible day to day chat. This premise is the starting point for Supper, which amounts to an intriguing conceit about love, subjectivity and memory. The audience are…

Paperweight

Flawed peek into daily office life

Squeezing into one of the tiniest Fringe venues – a modest office in the Assembly Rooms – this two-man show is about as up close and personal as you can get to what’s happening onstage. Arrive early for a seat: you have the choice of a box against the…

The Six Wives of Timothy Leary

Surprising glimpses into a controversial life

It’s a tragedy of our age that the 60s, a period of unparalleled liberation and social progress for ordinary people, is portrayed today as a kind of absurd self-indulgence from which we were all lucky to recover. This piece goes a little way to…

Sister Cities

Death and the maidens

If naturalistic plays set in living rooms are not your bag, then it might be wise to avoid Sister Cities. But, for all its conventionality, Colette Freedman’s black comedy contrives to constantly amuse with crisp, observant dialogue and nicely tempered…

Boys of the Empire

High-camp boy’s own comedy deserves six of the best

This self-consciously silly, satirical stab at the boy’s own adventure wants to be Just William with a nod towards The History Boys by way of Michael Palin’s Ripping Yarns. Set between an English boarding school in the late 1930s, and the newly re-named…

Sideshow: The Weirdest Show on Earth

Electric cabaret with a dark side

This isn’t any cabaret show. This is a circus on acid (or perhaps the poppers that the beautiful freak crowds are into nowadays). This is a late-night step into the realm of nightmares for a dastardly conglomeration of comedic, titillating…