The Crumple Zone. Review by Barbara Lewis. For anyone nervous their personal relationship might not withstand the stress of the festive period, “The Crumple Zone” offers a manic reassurance that we can survive the impact of an emotional crash, but the pain is excruciating.
plays
Tattooer. Review by Barbara Lewis. Love them or loathe them, tattoos have global appeal. But Japan’s version of permanently etching ink into the skin is culturally specific.
One Small Step. Review by Barbara Lewis. Japan’s Umeda Arts Theater, based in Osaka, began collaborating with London’s Charing Cross Theatre in 2019. It’s now back after a break for the pandemic and then a joint venture with London’s Menier Chocolate Factory last year.
Why Am I So Single?! Review by Barbara Lewis. From Jane Austen to “Friends,” the pursuit of heterosexual love has been the goal of romantic comedy. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, the makers of the international musical hit “SIX,” have turned that on its head with a musical comedy that celebrates “love friendship” between a non-binary man and a woman.
The Trumpeter. Review by Barbara Lewis. Mariupol, where Ukraine for nearly three months in 2022 resisted Russia’s determination to create a land bridge between Crimea and Donbas, became a byword for horror.
The Comedy of Errors. Review by Barbara Lewis. This is the HandleBards’ uplifting summer tour, which after 935 miles of pedalling, brought the cycling players to a picnicking audience in the grounds of Horace Walpole’s Gothic revival mansion at Strawberry Hill, west London.
Kyoto. Review by Barbara Lewis. If Shakespeare put the English town of Stratford-upon-Avon on the global map, the Kyoto climate treaty arguably did the same for an ancient Japanese capital.
May Be at Sadler’s Wells. Review by Julia Pascal. I walk into a Paris bookshop and ask if they can offer me play texts by contemporary French authors. The assistant directs me to a shelf of plays by Samuel Beckett. To the French, Samuel Beckett is one of theirs. He wrote in French. He lived most of his life in France. But was he Irish? Anglo-Irish? French?
Cutting the Tightrope. Review by Barbara Lewis. The arts have always had a role in saying the unsayable, making it all but inevitable that Arts Council England’s effort to clarify advice issued early this year on the risk of making political statements would only add to the controversy.
Sherlock Holmes: The Valley of Fear. Review by Barbara Lewis. A cast of five tackles all the complexity of Conan Doyle’s fourth and final Sherlock Holmes novel that is as clever, contrived and satisfying as a cryptic crossword.
Blue. Review by Barbara Lewis. George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, which triggered waves of Black Lives Matter protests, together with the U.S. Capitol attacks of January 2021, when off-duty police officers were found to be among the rioters, inspired June Carryl to write Blue.
Kyoto. Review by Barbara Lewis. Oil – the fuel of Western capitalism – was the issue in 1997 when the Kyoto Protocol delivered the first set of targets to limit its use. Nearly three decades later, far too little has changed.
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