Julius Caesar

‘Julius Caesar’ is a harder sell as an outdoor family show than ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, which Principal Theatre Company is staging in Coram’s Fields on alternate days. In response, director Paul Gladwin has put everything in modern dress and upped the comedy quotient. We get football-style chants at Caesar’s … Continue Reading Julius Caesar

The Fear of Breathing

The Finborough is keeping time with real life in this harrowing verbatim piece, knitted together from secret interviews conducted in Syria by journalists Paul Wood and Ruth Sherlock and director Zoe Lafferty. A clamour of voices – including a hotel owner, a radio DJ, a student activist and members of … Continue Reading The Fear of Breathing

Ten Billion

think we’re fucked.” That’s Professor Stephen Emmott’s stark conclusion at the end of Ten Billion, which reveals in fascinating and horrifying ways the true nature of the damage we have inflicted on our climate in the past 300 years. Ten billion is the estimated world population by the end of the century … Continue Reading Ten Billion

Interview: Gregory Doran

Newly appointed RSC artistic director Gregory Doran talks to Tom Wicker about his Africa-set production of ‘Julius Caesar’ Gregory Doran is keeping his cards close to his chest when it comes to his plans for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Although he takes over from Michael Boyd as artistic director from … Continue Reading Interview: Gregory Doran

The Trojan War and Peace

The Scoop’s sunken amphitheatre is a natural fit for Phil Willmott’s ambitious adaptation of Aeschylus’s ‘Oresteia’ trilogy, the latest in Steam Industry Theatre’s annual series of free outdoor shows. The sequence kicks off with the child-friendly ‘The Trojan Horse’, which makes a song and dance of the siege of Troy … Continue Reading The Trojan War and Peace

Blue Remembered Hills

This adaptation of the 1979 Dennis Potter TV play (which starred Helen Mirren) gives us a childhood haunted by the Second World War and the spectre of adulthood. Storm clouds loom over the blue remembered hills of A.E. Housman’s Shropshire Lad as the actions of a group of seven-year-olds lead … Continue Reading Blue Remembered Hills

Blue Remembered Hills

Interior (Natasha Tripney): A thicket of skeletal trees made from scaffolding poles painted a jarring shade of blue forms the backdrop to Anna Ledwich’s stage adaptation of Dennis Potter’s television play. The cast, playing seven year olds, clamber and scramble across these metal branches; they swing by their arms and drop … Continue Reading Blue Remembered Hills

The Dark Side of Love

Red balloons litter the floor like bloodied, deflated hearts; knives are thrust into stomachs again and again; a couple dance with need and disgust; and we watch like voyeurs. The party is over in this splintered vision of love, staged in the bowels of the Roundhouse as part of the … Continue Reading The Dark Side of Love

Chicken

Mike Batistick’s play about identity crisis among ‘the working poor’ has some sharp lines and could be interesting in the right hands. But this lacklustre production does it no favours. Hard-up Big Mac addict Wendell (Craig Kelly) is struggling to provide for his pregnant wife, Lina, while trying to rid … Continue Reading Chicken

Interview: Tim Hoare

Theatre excels at transforming interior spaces into imaginative landscapes. Pop-up companies are breathing new life into derelict or abandoned buildings, staging Shakespeare in basements and blurring the line between film and live performance with secret cinema screenings. But walk past these places and you might never know what was going … Continue Reading Interview: Tim Hoare

The Park

The sun is out and the air is crisp and cold. The sky above is blue but the bench is in shade, sheltered from a busy street by two blocks of student accommodation. Sandwich wrappers and crisp packets spill out of a nearby bin, attracting pigeons that peck at stray … Continue Reading The Park

The Comedy of Errors

This brilliantly funny production of Shakespeare’s comedy of separation anxiety and mistaken identity – set in modern times and part of the RSC’s ‘Shipwreck Trilogy’ – is a bright splash of colour flung across the Roundhouse stage with assuredness and a keen eye by director Amir Nizar Zuabi. Antipholus and … Continue Reading The Comedy of Errors

The Witness

The photo of a badly burned Kim Phuc running naked and screaming as napalm rains down on her destroyed village turned the American public against the Vietnam War and is still shocking now. In one frozen moment it captures the human cost of conflict in a way that no statistic … Continue Reading The Witness