Author: The Reviews Hub - London

  Creator and Arranger: Andrea Cockerton Wrap-around social media, mobile technology, live streaming and 24-hour consumerism mean we now live in a constantly wired world. Our senses, bombarded with information, make it harder to switch off, except perhaps when we sleep. In The Dark, started by Andrea Cockerton in Cambridge in 2017, provides the perfect antidote.  This unique live music experience is back in London for the first time in two years and promises to shut out the pesky noise and wrap you in a place of peace, beauty and human connection. For music lovers, this live concert is like no…

Writer: Titas Halder Director: Matthew Xia Linnea Berthelsen is a tour de force in Titas Halder’s 90-minute dramatic monologue Darkling about the Bhopal disaster of 1984. A catastrophic industrial accident at a huge American-built pesticide plant led to a leak of toxic gas that killed thousands of people. Thousands more survived but developed serious health conditions, including blindness, respiratory diseases and cancer. Berthelsen is simply billed as ‘She’. We first see her as a very young girl contendedly playing in the mud under the blue skies of home, happy in the companionship of her father and older sister. The lighting…

Writer: Anna Ticehurst Director: Lilly Butcher 20-something Bea was doing okay until her girlfriend, Talia, dumped her, and she smashed her phone against the wall in a fit of rage. Now she is definitely not doing okay. She is grieving, her flat is a complete mess, and the neighbour upstairs keeps banging on the ceiling. She has not showered or been out in days, and the relaxation tapes and rock songs she sings along to are not helping. Worse, the lights keep flickering ominously, usually a theatrical cypher for some kind of supernatural influence at work. Into Bea’s (Anna Ticehurst,…

Writer: Clifford Odets Director: Sam Yates American playwright Clifford Odets honed his craft at the height of the Great Depression, in the mid-1930s. The opulence of the 1920s had long since faded into memory, and alongside economic hardship at every turn, the dread of another world war loomed on the horizon. Odets funded his stage plays by writing Hollywood film scripts, in an era when, alongside the classics fondly remembered today, countless other fair-to-middling melodramas were churned out and then forgotten. Golden Boy does feel like it could fit into that category, though it’s easy to see why it succeeded when…

Writer and Director: Lilwen Faulkner How much do you really judge your friends, especially the ones who have chosen an entirely different lifestyle to your own? Lilwen Faulkner’s new play Scar Tissue analyses 25 years of male friendship in just 55 minutes as two very different friends unpick their shared history and whether anything but habit keeps them together. Performed at the Old Red Lion Playhouse, Faulkner has an ear for ordinary conversation that skims between topics and offers some interesting thoughts on the social glues that bind people together, which could be further developed. Arriving on his doorstep at…

Seven Deadly Sins Music: Kurt Weill  Libretto: Bertolt Brecht  English translation: W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman  Director: Alejandro Bonatto  Musical Director: Adrian Salinero The Human Voice Music: Francis Poulenc  Libretto: Jean Cocteau  English language translation: Joseph Machlis  Director: Alejandro Bonatto  Musical Director: Elspeth Wilkes Brecht and Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins is rather less fun than it sounds. The sins are more against the Great American Dream of getting rich quick than the Ten Commandments. There’s a strong whiff of grim earnestness and the desire to ensure the bourgeoisie doesn’t have a good time that gives Brechtian alienation a bad name.…

Writer: Rachel Wagstaff Director: Jonathan O’Boyle There is a tendency to believe that Agatha Christie’s novels are quaint little period pieces, harking back to a time of society parties, maids in service, endless cups of tea and when villages were microcosms unaffected by the outside world. But while adaptations often portray them that way, Christie’s novels were often contemporary affairs that touched on a changing world, even if those changes were viewed from the perspective of the English middle and upper classes. A case in point is 1962’s The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, the last of Christie’s Miss…

When it comes to historical fiction, timing is everything. For his second novel, Jack Jewers returns to the 17th century and it’s hard to think of a better period in which to create drama. Just a couple of generations’ reach from Shakespeare, and a few years after the Great Fire of London, not to mention the restoration of Charles II to the throne, Jewers’ novel, Seething Lane, is set in 1670 and bears witness to these seismic changes through its principal character, diarist Samuel Pepys. From the start, Jewers makes it clear that this Samuel Pepys is a work of…