I go to Russian theatre for the performances of actors whose skills are extraordinary. Theatre of Nations’ double bill did not disappoint.
plays
Marcus Brigstocke makes his play-writing and directorial debut as actors Bruce and Sam Alexander, father and son in real life, give drama and poignancy to a story that begins with the funeral of the father.
Chilean singer-songwriter, poet, cult figure Violeta Parra’s most famous work “Gracias a la vida” can be viewed as an outpouring of gratitude – or as a suicide note.
Joy Wilkinson’s latest play tells the story of a troupe of fictional women fighters scrabbling to earn a living in the real-life world of lady’s boxing in Victorian London and become world champion.
The idea of this drama came from an interview with a Kurdish soldier who had fled to England seeking asylum.
Almost exactly 100 years ago on April 13, in Amritsar, the British Indian Army fired into a crowd of unarmed Punjabis, killing and harming hundreds. Director Phil Wilmott marks this appalling example of man’s inhumanity to man by transporting Othello from Venice and Cyprus to the India of the British Raj.
Medea is perhaps the most potent myth for the #MeToo generations. First-performed in 431 BC, Euripides’ drama has had countless interpreters.
Of all the Miller revivals currently doing the capital’s round, ‘The American Clock’ is not the softest option for any director, actor or audience to take on. Part social documentary, part human drama, part political commentary, it can feel at times like it has bitten off more vision and message than it can theatrically deliver.
It is rare to see productions of Brecht in London today. It is even rarer to see them performed in Russian.This jewel from Moscow came only briefly to London but it showed audiences that there is an antidote to endless naturalism.
The Cherry Orchard lays bare, in elegiac tones, the passing of the old, entrenched aristocratic order and the emergence of the new at the expense of the old.
One of the strengths of this piece of thoughtful social melodrama is that, by the end, any credibility stretched by the child-mob scenario is less important than the way we are moved to analyse our own response to one manifestation of historic institutionalised British child abuse.
by Julia Pascal • plays, theatre • Tags: Julia Pascal, plays, theatre •
As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s most crazy comedies and one of his most tedious plots.