Arts

There’s an air of expectancy in the National Theatre's Dorfman, a buzz back grounded by nervous laughter. No wonder, this is the NT’s response to leaving the EU and they have made a verbatim play taken from hundreds of interviews from people of all ages and backgrounds from the UK about the issues around it. The stage design by Katrina Lindsay looks like any we would expect to see on an election night (except this is the EU referendum) :...

A narrow stage runs 3/4 round the outer edge of the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs. It serves as a walkway and platform for its love obsessed characters A, B, Man, Woman and Younger Woman. Merle Hensel’s back walls are painted green, reminiscent of old school blackboards. The characters in the eye-catchingly titled "a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (noun)" draw complete or incomplete circles in chalk, or scratch up “F”s and “F”s back to front. Like school children or...

By EJ Stedman I’ve already run it up the flagpole that I don’t do any research before going to a show. In the illustrious world of writing theatre reviews, when a PR company asks me if I’d like to go to a show, all I do is check my diary. If I’m free, the answer is yes. Especially on Wednesdays because my partner is playing netball, and otherwise I have to go and watch and the weather isn’t that reliable...

Andrew Scott is a lean and yet crumpled waif of a Hamlet who looks like he buys his clothes from Zara. Appearances are deceptive and helpless innocence isn’t everything though. As he waits as Angus Wright’s Claudius ignores his nephew in favour of Luke Thompson’s more buoyant Laertes he becomes a dark cloud which slowly and surely makes its presence felt on everyone else even though Hamlet is silent. In fact, Scott’s first entrance is so unannounced and unassuming and...

The safety curtains part the stage like an eyelid. A spotlight flicks on and a woman, barely recognisable from her face or from her tight bandage wrapped body, stands awkwardly and unevenly, gripping her support frame for all she is worth. A voice (Buffy Davis), like the computerised Siri, takes her through the Virtual Reality (VR) world she is about to enter and which may be able to ease the pain from her burns by at least 60%. This is...

Well blow me down and call me Charlie, I think I’m going to have to sell my soul to the devil. When the classist, sexist and maybe xenophobic Satanic antagonist of a show is the only thing that makes it remotely interesting, all my morals go out the window – along with half the cast (more on that later). The Sorrows of Satan is a play within a play, following the eternally broke writer Geoffrey Tempest and his new musical...

After rising like a phoenix from the flames of the fire that devastated the beautiful former council building, the cool South London cultural hub of the Battersea Arts Centre continues to dazzle, bringing London's unique untold stories to the stage. And Conrad Murray is certainly unique - nimbly looping and live mixing beatbox, guitar and rapping about his own extraordinary childhood, while sampling lines from Hamlet, Murray's autobiographical one man show is as courageous as they come. For a one man show it...

This take on Arthur Schnitzler’s sexual debacle La Ronde is a welcome venture into the sex, love and death lives of the older generation by Visible, but ultimately feels less than the sum of its parts. The seven vignettes, where each character’s story is pushed forward into the next scene for their story to conclude, confront some traumatic home truths. However, director Anna Ledwich takes Sonja Linden’s interconnected stories and embeds them within a circus locale. A Ring Mistress comperes...

This Dream is a bit of surprise- silent weavings of the spirit (or fairies) explode at the end of director Joe Hill-Gibbins' interpretation to give us something in the epilogue that is both nightmarish and joyful and brings new meanings to the play’s normal tranquil self. To this end it is clever.  At the beginning, as the audience file in, three mirrors arranged in a triptych hang threateningly in front of the audience. We can’t see anything else and in...