Reviews & features: Suzanne Black
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Waiting for Stanley
17 Aug 2012
Keep calm and carry on clowning
A woman with a red clown nose waits on a luggage-filled railway platform for her wartime sweetie to return. As her wait grows, she raids the suitcases around her, each contributing props to a captivating series of tales drawn from the experiences of…
Simple Matters
16 Aug 2012
Clowning around becomes a comedy of errors despite clear talent
This international troop of clowns present mime and physical comedy and, though skilled, grossly misread the audience to a less than comedic effect. Relying on 'volunteers', interaction that could work with a boozy, up-for-it Saturday night crowd comes…
Thread
11 Aug 2012
Poignant site-specific evocation of life and loss
After the success of last year’s Allotment, Nutshell Theatre returns with an immersive evocation of nostalgia, memory and love as the forces that bind us together in the second part of their thematic trilogy. The audience is invited to the Burntisland…
Boy in a Dress
10 Aug 2012
Thought-provoking and fabulous drag-related cabaret
Androgynous, third-gendered, ginger beauty La JohnJoseph makes a show-and-tell of the idea that all identity is a performance, and none more obviously than that which occurs on the stage, with his conflagration of gender theory, drag performance and…
Blake’s Doors
10 Aug 2012
Existential grappling that overreaches its capabilities
Revolving Shed, from the London School of Economics, offers a bleak meditation on the human condition. A neat framing device sets up the idea of human life being something between everything and nothing, existing in the momentous and the mundane before…
Hearts on Fire
9 Aug 2012
Immersive recreation of 2009 sweat lodge deaths
The Fringe guide makes this sound like a participatory event, but it's not any more so than any other performance. It is immersive, though, with a setting inside a heated sweat lodge at the top of C's most recently commandeered venue. Recreating the…
The Trench
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6 Aug 2012
Pitch-perfect evocation of the theatre of war
Les Enfants Terribles have built a formidable reputation for playfully macabre tales mixing drama, music and inventive staging to create gothic fantasies reminiscent of Tim Burton’s oeuvre. The latest from the company’s writer Oliver Lansley draws on…
The Girl With No Heart
6 Aug 2012
Children's storybook on loss of innocence fails to come to life
The Girl with No Heart is based on a short story book written by performer Louisa Ashton. A children’s parable about the loss of innocence, Sparkle and Dark’s Travelling Players use puppetry, silhouettes and origami to narrate the tale of a girl who…
Danny McLoughlin: The Truth, the Half-Truth and Nothing Like the Truth
5 Aug 2012
Lies, damned lies and comedy
At the top of the show Danny McLoughlin promises two things. The first is that the purpose of his show is to examine the role of 'enhancing' the truth for comedic effect. The second is an admission that not all of what he says during the next hour will…
Dave McNeill: Canoe Ride 3000
5 Aug 2012
Surreal silliness that goes for the easy laugh
Dave McNeill works hard. After an hour the vast amount of sweat dripping from his shirt is matched only by the volume of jokes he tries to wring from his surreal material. Describing a journey to China in a canoe, the plot of the show definitely falls…
Jim Campbell: Nine-Year-Old Man
3 Aug 2012
Wonderful timing, whimsical narrative
On the wrong side of 25 and facing the less exciting parts of contemporary life (mortgages, babies, failed dreams of being a rock star), Jim Campbell muses on the themes of growing up and assuming responsibility. It’s hardly unique subject matter and…
Kemble’s Riot
2 Aug 2012
Political intrigue with superbly engaging performance from Richard Hansell
Kemble's Riot recreates 66 nights of rioting in 1809 when the Covent Garden Theatre increased its ticket prices. With the audience drafted in as the rioters, split pro- or anti- theatre manager John Kemble, sitting on the fence is not an…
Hotel Methuselah
23 Aug 2011
Stunning and inventive multimedia production
In a war-time hotel night porter Harry delves into his memories in this tense, mysterious multimedia work from Imitating the Dog. A frame around the stage offers limited views of the actors who work in tandem with pre-filmed dialogue and supplementary…
The New Conway Experience
23 Aug 2011
Bringing hilarity to the masses
Appearing haphazard while remaining in control isn’t easy. John Conway is the genial host for an assortment of skits and bits that feels more like post-pub drinks at the house of a funny friend. Balancing the well-crafted with the pleasingly…
Unanswered, We Ride
23 Aug 2011
An emotional portrait of grief
Joe Tippett and Martha Wollner take on multiple roles to flank Joy Barrett’s journey as bereaved mother Reese in a portrait of all-consuming, selfish grief. Despite one jarring attempt at an Irish accent, all aspects collide to create an engrossing…
Cul-De-Sac
23 Aug 2011
Capable garden-fence comedy
Scripted by Matthew Osborn, this natty little three-hander (Alan Francis, Mike Hayley, Toby Longworth) relocates The ’burbs to Middle England. Taking the tested trope of a seeming idyll masking a sinister reality, the deviant Tony Deveraux rules the…
Silken Veils
23 Aug 2011
Tenderly performed memories
We join a Persian woman (Leila Ghaznavi) as she freaks out about her impending nuptials. Using puppetry, silhouette-work and animation to complement live action we are taken on a journey through her memories of Iran, suffused with the poetry of Rumi. A…
Ian D Montfort - Spirit Comedium
23 Aug 2011
Witty send-up of hand-wringing mediumship
Resplendent in the New Age uniform of beads and sandals, Tom Binns takes on an industry that is at best delusional and at worst predatory. While sending up the vagaries of ‘cold reading’, Montfort drops ‘real’ psychic insights. A witty send-up of…
New Art Club: Quiet Act of Destruction
23 Aug 2011
Comedy-dance due don't do their talents justice
War between two English villages provides the narrative for this comedy-dance duo’s latest. Tom Roden and Pete Shenton’s years of working together shows and at moments their previous inventiveness shines through, but an hour that’s light on dance and…
Russell Kane
17 Aug 2011
Caustic and hilarious self-flagellation
It’s hard to judge Russell Kane’s show because he’s already done it. For the ‘difficult’ follow-up to his Edinburgh Comedy Award-winning 2010 show Kane performs Manscaping as himself, offers up heckles, anticipates critic and audience responses and even…
Beowulf – A Thousand Years Of Baggage
17 Aug 2011
Postmodern interaction with a classic
As Beowulf was pitted against the manbeast Grendel in the Old English epic, NY theatre company Banana Bag & Bodice pits Beowulf the man against Beowulf the text in this clever, stylish interaction with a classic. Seemingly set in a jazz club, three…
The Dark Philosophers
17 Aug 2011
Dark Welsh classic given a postmodern twist
Death is no impairment to being on stage (as being a goat is no impairment to being a stagehand) in this darkly comic delight from National Theatre Wales and Told by an Idiot. Weaving together two novellas from Welsh English-language writer Gwyn Thomas…
Medea's Children
17 Aug 2011
A cautionary tale for divorcing parents
Lung Ha’s Theatre Company is known for its use of performers with learning difficulties. Teaming up with Swedish company Unga Klara they bring us an exploration of the psychic trauma felt by children affected by divorce. The script, originally…
The Time Out
17 Aug 2011
Interactive theatre with a motivational aspect
An interactive piece for 12 players who get to don swimming caps (with headphones inside) and become a water polo team. If this fills you with trepidation, it’s meant to. The focus shifts between Ken, the cliché-spouting coach with motivational tidbits…
Tom Goodliffe
16 Aug 2011
Lightweight autobiographical material, but with lovely rapport
Goodliffe rails, good-naturedly, against middle-class problems like not liking your job, not having a girlfriend and the annoying questions people ask him because of his name. Taking in his love of maths (with an insistent musical riff on the subject)…
