Author: The Reviews Hub - London

Writer: Anna Ticehurst Director: Lilly Butcher When we first meet Bea, she is moping around her flat, unable or unwilling to leave and letting the mail pile up. When her childhood friend and former flatmate, Frank, arrives to check on her, he discovers that Bea has split up with her girlfriend and is clearly not coping. Anna Ticehurst’s short one-act play relies upon the chemistry between Bea and Frank. Anna Ticehurst (who also wrote the piece) gives Bea a measure of likeable ineptitude, confident in her own sense of humour to announce she should be a stand-up comic, but forever…

Writer: Samantha Harvey (based on the novel by Barbara Pym) Director: Dominic Dromgoole The quiet, unaffected life is the subject of Barbara Pym’s novel Quartet in Autumn, adapted for the stage by Booker Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, as four office workers in late middle age contemplate what their lives have amounted to without anyone else to rely on, all stuck in their ways to differing degrees. Dominic Dromgoole’s production at the Arcola Theatre is full of subtle character excavation, merging dramatic scenes with internal monologues that explore respective unimportant self-importance. Letty, Marcia, Edwin and Norman share a quartet of desks in…

Choreographer: Annabelle Lopez Ochoa Composer: Peter Salem Yorkshire-born Victorian Anne Lister was certainly unconventional. Given to dressing in all-black suits more commonly worn by men, she was insistent on dealing with the estate she inherited from her uncle on the same terms as the local businessmen. Coupled with her affairs with women, she has some claim to the description some have given her as “the first modern lesbian”. Lister was also an expansive diarist. Written in code, the diaries’ five million words include descriptions of Lister’s identity and affairs, as well as national events and her business interests. It is…

Writer and Director: Alexander Zeldin Almost unbearably tender comes Alexander Zeldin’s new play, Care, about the end of life and the indignities that accompany it. The Young Vic’s space has been turned into a cavernous care home, with faded yellow chequered walls that do little to dispel the otherwise institutional surroundings. Nondescript chairs and low tables are scattered in the communal room, dull paintings hang on the walls, and as the audience takes its seats, one old woman slouches in her chair, caught in her own world. It’s unerringly and depressingly familiar. However, Care centres on another woman, Joan, who…

Writer: Peter Shaffer Director: Lindsay Posner Some plays live long in the memory; the quality of the writing that intrigues and engrosses the audience; the performances of the cast that create spellbinding dramatic moments; the magic of the lighting and sound design that simply and effectively create gripping scenes that transport us into another world. Peter Shaffer’s iconic play Equus, which we first saw in 1976 at the Albery Theatre, is certainly one of those plays. The Menier Chocolate Factory’s reimagining by Lindsay Posner will create lasting memories for another generation of theatre goers. The original version brilliantly created the…

Writer: Rosie Holt (additional material by Stewart Lee) Director: Daniel Clarkson Heading for the Edinburgh Festival in a couple of months’ time, Rosie Holt’s 70-minute satire Churchill’s Urinal, playing at the King’s Head Theatre, takes issue with stone – or in this case ceramic – deification of great men as a new female chancellor must contend with the presence of a stained old urinal once used by Winston Churchill in her private Treasury bathroom. Taking swipes at the current government with plenty of topical references to an unstable political situation, this gathering farce takes Britain to crisis point while eventually…

Writer and Director: Adam Savva This weekend, the police successfully kept apart two rival protests: that of Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally and the pro-Palestinian Nakba Day demonstration. Adam Savva’s timely new play showing at this year’s high-quality Peckham Fringe imagines a situation where the police are unable to maintain the peace between two sides, and riots break out in the unnamed English town. The first few minutes of Infinite Colours on the Drink Aisle are the most exciting of any show in London this year. Four Far-Right protestors, two counter-protestors and one policewoman find themselves trapped in a…

Writer/Performer: Alex Floyd In As You Like It, the melancholy Jaques utters one of the most famous metaphors in Shakespeare’s canon, if not the whole of literature. “All the world’s a stage,” he intones, “and all the men and women merely players.” That is the inspiration, it seems, for French performer Alex Floyd’s piece of stand-up deconstructionism. If all the world really is a stage, if everything happening on Earth is part of one large performance, then what is the point of people gathering in a small black box to watch a performer, when the real show never ends? What…