Reviews & features: Theatre, David Kettle
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Monkey Bars
20 Aug 2012
Kids say the profoundest things
‘Sometimes adults don’t really listen to children,’ suggests the actor playing dialogue artist Karl James at the start of Chris Goode’s masterful new verbatim play. And that’s exactly what this astonishing piece seems to be telling us – that there’s so…
Uninvited
20 Aug 2012
Ambitious production fails to spring to life
Our unnamed protagonist, obsessed by order and routine, returns home from work to discover a stranger in his house. So he makes him a cup of tea. But that’s the least of his worries: the talking wallpaper seems to have opinions on everything, and his…
Othello – The Remix
17 Aug 2012
Energetic reimagining of the Moor of Venice
The third of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s highly successful adaptations of the bard – following The Bomb-itty of Errors and Funk It Up About Nothing in recent years – Othello: the Remix reimagines the Moor of Venice as an American rap god, recently…
Good Grief
17 Aug 2012
Meandering musical hour of delightful schadenfreude
Gone Rogue’s likeable, funeral-set musical might start off in a subdued atmosphere of deep sorrow, but by the end of the show most of the mourners have ended up half naked, high on hash cookies or reeling from shocking family revelations. Using a family…
Strong Arm
16 Aug 2012
Thought-provoking look at transformation and self-betterment
At the age of 13, Roland Poland weighs 20 stone. In his early 20s, he’s a muscle god, pumped up on four-hour gym sessions, hourly protein shakes and arcane shark’s fin supplements. But in breaking himself so that he can grow even stronger, has he lost…
Night of the Big Wind
9 Aug 2012
Touching show set in an Irish fishing village, ambitiously told
Following last year’s hugely enjoyable Street Dreams, Canterbury-based Little Cauliflower Theatre Company return with more puppetry, physical theatre and clowning in this whimsical and sometimes dewy-eyed show set in an Irish fishing village. But here…
Teach Me
9 Aug 2012
Touching comedy from Edinburgh-based young company
Simon is a naïve 18-year-old, keen as mustard to get his first taste of naughtiness but clueless about how it all works. Emma is ten years older, in a ‘complicated’ relationship with a married man, and now unexpectedly alone with Simon in a bedroom at a…
NOLA
8 Aug 2012
Underwhelming take on the 2010 BP oil spill
Theatre company Look Left Look Right scored two hits last year with innovative interactive pieces – You Once Said Yes and You Wouldn’t Know Him, He Lives In Texas – and their offering this year is a verbatim documentary piece about the 2010 BP oil…
After the Rainfall
8 Aug 2012
Ambitious multi-layered show that bears repeat viewing
A young British diplomat makes a desperate bid to get home from Suez in the 1950s. Thirty years later, a Cumbrian art student creates a memorial to a trapped miner. An Egyptian backpacker struggles across Europe, and an ant expert releases an explosive…
The Blind
7 Aug 2012
Stunningly powerful outdoors multimedia spectacle
Krakow-based KTO Theatre pulls off a rare feat in combining stunning visual effects with a potent emotional impact in its gripping, wordless show The Blind. Whether through pounding music, imagery that’s by turns shocking and poignantly beautiful, or…
Still Life: An Audience With Henrietta Moraes
7 Aug 2012
Immersive monologue-cum-life-drawing-class
It’s pretty disconcerting being addressed by a naked, middle-aged woman, but you soon get used to it. And when she invites you to draw her body, you might feel self-conscious at first – but as writer and actor Sue MacLaine’s life drawing-cum-monologue…
The Barwell Prophecy
7 Aug 2012
Insidiously effective late-night horror with talented young cast
Pennsylvania’s Slippery Rock Theatre delivers that rarest of things: a genuinely creepy late-night horror show. They follow 2010’s historical shocker Deepchurch Hollow with something bang up to date, set in a shadowy Homeland Security monitoring office…
Golden Gloves
6 Aug 2012
Messy if hugely entertaining boxing show
Croatian theatre company Box Teatar’s Golden Gloves is a bit of a mess, but it’s a very enjoyable, hugely likeable mess. Mixing up boxing and theatre – a topical combination, with sport on everyone’s lips at the moment – the show delivers a series of…
Dubrovski
6 Aug 2012
Ambitious adaptation that’s let down by the fundamentals
Sheffield-based Headlock Theatre Company have transformed Alexander Pushkin’s unfinished 1832 novel Dubrovski into a devised stage piece that mixes a passionate Russian revenge tragedy, an energetic physical staging and a live violin-and-piano…
The Boat Factory
4 Aug 2012
Poignant, moving evocation of a lost way of life
If you don’t think a play about a shipyard sounds like your kind of thing, think again. This moving two-hander by Dan Gordon, performed by Belfast’s Happenstance theatre company, is a real gem, at once an evocation of the city’s Harland and Wolff boat…
A Clockwork Orange
4 Aug 2012
Stylish, shocking, all-male adaptation of Anthony Burgess' classic novel
Theatre company Action to the Word’s high-energy, all-male adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s classic novel relocates the fable to a futuristic northern England, full of rippling muscles, bronzed flesh and lashings of casual sex and…
And the Birds Fell from the Sky
23 Aug 2011
Striking multi-sensory experience
Don a pair of video goggles, put headphones in your ears and surrender yourself to the bizarre Faruk clowns in this short immersive experience, where you’re the main protagonist. Production values are high, and the performers make every effort to ensure…
Rose
16 Aug 2011
Oblique drama on father daughter relationship partly successful
As a vehicle for Art Malik’s powerful and practised acting skills, this oblique drama about a father and daughter’s troubled relationship is strongly successful. His daughter Keira, however, is quite shrill when playing a child. But the play’s theme of…
The Curse of Macbeth
8 Aug 2011
Great staging, shame about the acting
From the knife-wielding thugs that welcome you into the venue, it’s clear that this production of Macbeth is going to be bold, brash and in your face. And in those terms the show doesn’t disappoint. Its striking design – all bloodstained mirrors and dry…
Generation 9/11: So Far / So Close
8 Aug 2011
Captivating and quietly profound one-man show
Don’t let the subject put you off. This is a captivating and quietly profound one-man show by San Franciscan Chris Wolfe that refracts 9/11 through the memories of ordinary people, right up to the present day. He’s a charismatic performer, and his…
Dr Apple’s Last Lecture
8 Aug 2011
Energetic acting, but ultimately without a point
Depicting a drug trip live on stage was always going to be challenge. But in this tale of an uptight psychology professor deciding to expand his consciousness, the end result is self-indulgent rather than revelatory. Many of the play’s images are…
