Month: January 2023

This is the autobiographical story of Vernon Vanriel who was six years old when he came to the UK from Jamaica with his parents, part of the Windrush generation. He grew up and went to school in Tottenham. He didn’t shine academically and he left with no O levels to become an apprentice electrician. However,… Continue reading On the Ropes

As Dawn Walton explains in the introduction which bookends Alfred Fagon Selected Plays, opposite a contribution from one of the winners, Juliet Gilkes Romero, but for the award in his name, Alfred Fagon might barely have been remembered today. That would be a shame, since the British playwright immigrant from Jamaica was ahead of his… Continue reading Alfred Fagon Selected Plays and The Death of a Black Man

Everyone knows Swan Lake—a sweeping statement I know, but if not the actual ballet and its many variations, then storybook versions and indeed Tchaikovsky’s familiar 1877 dramatic score, inspired, apparently, during a visit to his sister’s home in Ukraine in 1871. Petipa’s version for the Mariinsky opened in January 1895, and here we still are,… Continue reading Swan Lake

A strong cast and a vibrant production make this a memorable night at the theatre. Director Rebecca Frecknall stages it in-the-round on a bare platform. Cast members place props and essential furniture in reach when needed and throughout circle around the space observing and reacting to the action in or outside Stanley and Stella Kowalski’s… Continue reading A Streetcar Named Desire

Liz Kingsman’s One Woman Show has enjoyed a meteoric overnight success. Previously a member of an obscure sketch troupe Massive Dad, the demure Kingsman, an Australian who came to Durham University in England and stayed, has crafted a parody of Fleabag (and her imitators) that has made critics weak at the knees. Following sold-out runs… Continue reading One Woman Show

Rossini’s William Tell, which premièred in 1829, was his 38th and final opera. It deserves to be performed more often. (Nowadays the overture is played more often than the opera.) The libretto is based on a play by Schiller and set in the 13th century when the Swiss rebelled against the Austrian oppressors and fought… Continue reading William Tell

On a short visit to London in 2017, I wandered into the Old Vic and saw an earlier version of the play. Seeing it again at the Lyceum, I am intrigued by how different this is from the usual diet of touring musicals which fill local theatres and put bums on seats. Set in the… Continue reading Girl from the North Country

In 1942, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour the previous December, six-year-old George Takei and his family were among more than 125,000 Japanese-Americans rounded up and interned by the authorities. Allegiance is the story of just such a family, the Kimuras, a fiction but based on real life, who are removed from their home… Continue reading Allegiance

The peculiar plot of In The Net set in 2025 is ambitious without having any clear purpose or direction. Lots of possible themes are chucked in from climate change to Buddhist meditation, Jewish rituals, refugees and family grief but never really explored. There is also for no apparent reason a mention of Rosa Luxembourg and… Continue reading In The Net

Kurios, getting its European première at the Royal Albert Hall, set out to be a steampunk dream, a fin de siècle fantasy. First seen in Canada in 2014, it is inspired by renaissance cabinets of curiosities and Jules Verne, framing its circus acts in a world of mad white-coated scientists and their creations, retorts and robots, big-horned… Continue reading Kurios