Care

May 21, 2026May 21, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Care by Alexander Zeldin – Young Vic, London

Alexander Zeldin’s Care begins before the audience has realised. The Young Vic stage is transformed into a care home sitting room and, as they file in, Taru Devani’s Aditi sits slumped in a wheelchair, staring fixedly at nothing. Most people seem not to notice. The final stage of life when, as elderly, dependent people, we are looked after out of sight, is the focus of Care. It is notable how much of what Zeldin shows, despite being an inherent part of everyday life, is unfamiliar on stage.

Rosanna Vize’s set is hyper-realistic, down to the hand sanitiser, wipe-clean armchairs and reproduction pictures. It is a functional, depressing and entirely familiar setting. Here, a group of elderly people are looked after by two overworked members of staff. Each is in a different world of their own, struggling to understand where they have ended up, or to communicate. New arrival Joan, played by Linda Bassett, thinks her family will take her home soon. When they visit, it is soon clear she can never live with them again. The play is the story of her time in the care home and, without giving too much away, it is intimately concerned with death.

Zeldin, who also directs, has written a play which he describes as influenced by Harold Pinter, but also shows the influence of Caryl Churchill. The dialogue among the residents is fragmented, full of confusion, pauses and non-sequiturs as they wrestle with their diminishing realities, but it is also fully realistic and beautifully observed. The presence of Linda Bassett is a reminder of Churchill’s Escaped Alone, which she starred in: another play about aging and death which foregrounds the apparently inconsequential chatter of everyday life, revealing it to be full of significance. Care does something similar, examining the apparent banality of the strategies we use to cling onto life, Bassett’s performance is extraordinary, among an exceptional cast. Arriving confident but confused, she changes before our eyes, experiencing rage, despair, and strange, unexpected joy on her journey.

Rosie Cavaliero is remarkable as her anguished daughter, Lynn, widowed and struggling with two teenage boys. William Lawlor plays elder son Laurie with the perfect blend of teen social terror and obnoxiousness, and his aggressive relationship with his younger brother Robbie (an excellent Ethan Malony on press night, alternating with Charlie Webb) is one of the most uncomfortable and convincing sibling relationships seen on stage.

The other care home residents give universally stunning performances, full of carefully physically observed movement: Diana Payan as a tiny Paula, Ann Mitchell as confused otter-fancier Agnes, Winston Sookham as Eugene, drifting through the background. Richard Durden is responsible for two of several heart-stopping moments during the evening, suddenly breaking into song, and stripping to his incontinence underwear to hug Joan, who settles for affection from someone who thinks she’s his dead wife. Hayley Carmichael, as Simone, is a disruptive force, constantly challenging authority, discussing sex and demanding wine, while Agnes accuses her of having been ‘a woman of the night’. Overseeing the residents is Llewella Gideon’s head nurse Hazel, a towering performance as the emotional centre of the play, and her naïve assistant Fanta (Aoife Gaston) who we delight in seeing grow into her job.

Zeldin’s direction is not perfect – the production has some pacing issues which may well be ironed out during the run, and the rhythm of the residents’ disconnected dialogue requires an intense precision which is not always achieved. The play also has occasional weaknesses, and the sub-plot around the death of Lynn’s husband feels like a distraction. However, Care is an impressive achievement. At times it is very funny. Hayley Carmichael has some of the best lines (“Your otters don’t mean shit to me”).

It is also incredibly sad, and very moving. A lengthy, silent scene, in which Hazel gives Joan, naked to the waist, a bed bath is firstly shocking, then tender and moving. A final death scene represents the process of dying – rasping, alternate breaths as the body shuts down – with an accuracy perhaps never seen before on stage, despite the innumerable stage deaths across theatrical history. Zeldin’s decision to have characters who have died sit in the audience is a small piece of genius. No one who sees this play will forget it, and few will leave dry-eyed.

Handle With Care

May 12, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Handle With Care by Ontoerend Goed – Camden People’s Theatre, London

Ontoerend Goed are masters and mistresses of theatre-making, maintaining an unerring focus on the question, generally overlooked, of why we – the audience – are there. In doing so, they are very willing to break through the boundaries of what we consider theatre to be. This reaches an apogee with Handle With Care, in which they do actually turn up. The entireity of the show is contained on a box delivered to the theatre and placed on the stage, alongside cards on each seat which read “The performance begins when someone opens the box”. It is a delightful and rather brilliant conceit. I don’t know whether anyone has ever failed to open the box, but on the night I attended someone got down to it straight away. Eventually wearing a cap, provided, reading ‘Not the director’ they initiated a train of instructions setting out the dramaturgy for the performance, and bringing various audience members into carry out tasks.

Without giving too much away, the point is that every performance will be different, as it made by audience content, engagement and attitudes. Of course, all theatre is different every time, but Handle With Care swings the focus away from the stage to the people who attend every night, who are the cause of what happens on stage, and also the difference. With subtle touches, Ontoerend Goed open up the potential for moments of deep reflection, startling emotion, unexpected exuberbance and spontaneous creativity. Can an audience fill an hour essentially entertaining itself? Handle With Care shows that yes, they emphatically can. Simply occupying a space with strangers is one of humanity’s most powerful and underutilised resources. Ontoerend Goed make most theatre seem shallow and naïve, cutting directly through to what matters with uncanny precision. In some ways, all of their cumulative experience and power as a company is contained in this magical box.

Krapp’s Last Tape / Godot’s To Do List

May 12, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Photo by Jack English

Godot’s To Do List by Leo Simpe-Asante / Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett / – Royal Court Theatre, London

The Royal Court’s production of Krapp’s Last Tape is generously prefaced by a new short play written by Leo Simpe-Asante, which won the inaugural Royal Court Young Playwrights Award last year. Shakeel Haakim plays a flustered, bowler-hatted Godot who is at the mercy of a recorded female voice highly reminiscent of Alexa, voiced by Flora Ashton. Directed by Aneesha Srinivasan, the show takes place in front of the chaotic set for Krapp’s Last Tape, piled with boxes. Godot is apparently unable to do anything other than peform the endless tasks set by the voice, many of which are ridiculous or ill-advised. Haakim has the engaging presence of a natural comic, although the play does not develop far beyond its basic premise, which is a good joke but perhaps doesn’t tell us much that we don’t expect to hear.

The main attraction is Gary Oldman’s Krapp. Oldman has directed and designed the production as well, of course, as playing 69-year old Krapp as he confronts his younger self, addressing him from Reel 3, Spool 5. Oldman begins in a good humour, which rapidly dissipates as he realises the extent of the changes that happen while we are looking elsewhere. Beckett’s work is masterfully focused, every word hitting home hard. It is one of the greatest male roles in theatre and, as such, there is doubtless a temptation for an actor to make it their own, and leave their mark. This is evident in Oldman’s production and performance. He is very good, and anyone seeing his interpretation as their first will have a very worthwhile evening, but it feels like a crowded performance.

The set is very literal – a hoarder’s cavern of piled boxes of junk and teetering shelves, which Krapp roots through to locate the relevant spool. Alongside, Oldman gives the impression of playing an old man. This is not necessary. Beckett, surely, intends the actor to play themself. It’s only through being entirely oneself, on the surface unaltered from the 39-year old on tape, that the true horror of passing time is revealed to the actor and the audience. Stephen Rea understood this better in his 2025 Barbican performance, which left space all around for the darkness and, perhaps, a little hope to seep in.

Escaped Alone

May 8, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Photo by Masquar Pascali

Escaped Alone by Caryl Churchill – Coronet Theatre, London

Published at Plays International

Caryl Churchill’s unsettling, beautifully crafted play is presented at the Coronet Theatre by Italian company lacasadargilla, seen at this venue two years ago with Churchill’s L’Amore Del Cuore (Heart’s Desire). Escaped Alone, written in 2016, involves three women chatting in a back garden, joined by a fourth – Mrs Jarrett – who happens to be passing. They talk inconsequentially over tea, but as they do so it becomes clear that, under the surface, they are all wrestling with their own dark inner landscapes. Lena cannot leave the house, and is consumed by depression. Sally, a retired doctor, is irrationally scared of cats. And Vi has served time in prison for killing her husband. Meanwhile, Mrs Jarrett steps out of the conversation at regular intervals to deliver terrifying but surreal monologues describing apocalyptic scenarios consuming the world – landslides, poisoning, flood, famine, wind, disease and fire.

The production, directed by Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli and Alessandro Ferroni, is performed in Italian with subtitles. This is a little problematic as it puts up a barrier between the audience and Churchill’s apparently casual, but very carefully chosen dialogue, much of which depends on the tone of voice in which is delivered – apparent normality thinly cloaking something very different. The English subtitles also need a good proof-read. It takes some getting used to, but the cast does draw the audience in. The performances, and the production, are more cartoon-like than the hyper-reality Royal Court première. The sets by Marco Rossi and Francesca Sgariboldi present a hedge-maze parody of an English garden, in which the women drink tea from china cups, mix Bloody Marys and, bizarrely, play a little cricket. This Italian take on Englishness adds humour and provides a different take on the play, seeing it in a way that’s more akin to the fantastical comedy in Churchill’s earlier writing – plays such as Cloud Nine.

Caterina Carpio as Sally, seems in control, but is at first funny then heartbreaking as she launches into a speech about the imaginary cats that plague her life. Company co-founder Alice Palazzi is Lena, equally moving as she describes the depression that has taken over her life, saying ‘Why move your mouth and do talking?’ Ariana Gaudio’s Vi jokes about killing her husband, but it becomes apparent that it has ruined her life. Meanwhile Tania Garribba, as Mrs Jarrett, prowls the set but knows there is no way out for anyone. The cast work together well, including a hilarious acapella rendition of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, which they use to tease one another and the audience.

Escaped Alone – its title a quote from The Book of Job via Moby Dick, “I alone am escaped to tell you” is very prescient – her climate disaster scenarios seem less and less fictional by the day, ten years on. The way in which reality is filtered and distorted by social media is threaded throughout the play. The characters watch shows and adverts of terrifying emptiness on a big screen, emphasising the arrival of AI in our lives. The scenario might sound bleak, but Caryl Churchill something much less obvious. Escaped Alone is a play with an all-female cast of characters whose relationships with men are only occasionally discussed, and that is perhaps its most significant feature. A decade on, the play seems not so much concerned with an impending apocalypse as with the mechanisms women use to cope with life. The comfortable, interdependent conversations they have in the garden about sea birds, Julius Caesar, the definition of a billion, or the price of fish and chips are actually the most important things anyone says. The support they give one another is the reason all the characters, despite their deep troubles, are still there. Evening always comes too soon, especially in a sunny English garden, but there is no better place to be.

Between the River and the Sea

May 5, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Yousef Seid. Photo by Holly Revell.

Between the River and the Sea by Yousef Seid and Isabella Sedlak – Royal Court Theatre Upstairs

Yousef Seid’s one-man, which he has written with Isabella Sedlak and performs himself, is an exploration of identity in the most contested setting of all: Israel. The show is autobiographical, and Seid discusses the experience of being an Christian-Arab Israeli. He grew up in Haifa, an Israeli citizen but not the kind who fits into perceived categories. The show was originally presented in Berlin, where Seid now lives with his family having decided that his children did not need the tensions that came with living in Israel. He himself has run up against abuse as a child for being an Arab, and for not being Arab enough. He is in the process of getting divorced from his second wife who, like his first wife, is Jewish.

Seid’s performance is open and genuine, and it feels as though he is compelled to tell us a story he simply cannot keep to himself. He tells us he does not want to talk about politics, and instead filters his experiences through a personal lens. He performs the voices of his father, girlfriends, school friends and adult friends by stepping to the side and addressing the space he has just vacated through a mic. He is very adept at this, using physical characterisations to identify the people he voices, for example the kindergarten child who picks his nose while informing Seid he’s a dirty Arab. He also speaks in English, Arab and German at various points, straddling cultural boundaries all the way.

Of course, there is no avoiding the politics and the show eventually brings us to a place where Seid, in the eyes of others has to choose. The October 7 attacks split Israelis and Palestinians like nothing before, and suddenly he found there was no room in anyone’s lives for somebody perceived not to take sides. A close Israeli friend ends contact when they feel he does not understand their feelings about relations who were murdered; a Palestinian friend feels he does not sympathise over her friends sexually assaulted and arrested by IDF soldiers. It is heartbreaking to witness the impact at individual level of divisive political discourse which makes nuance and understanding a despised commodity. Seid is left to fantasise about a utopia without Middle Eastern borders, where no-one cares who you are – a scenario that terrifies us we consider how entirely unobtainable such a world remains.

Do You Come From Gomorrah?

May 1, 2026May 1, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Photo by Roz Kavanagh

Do You Come From Gomorrah? by Frank McGuinness – Abbey Theatre Peacock Stage, Dublin

Frank McGuinness’ new play for the Abbey Theatre is stripped right back: one performer, Ryan Donaldson, describing his experiences. These come in bursts of returning memory – recounting first his boyhood with his alcoholic mother, then the Belfast boy’s home he lived in when she died, then the abuse orchestrated by the home’s boss, ‘Beastie Billy’. The place is a brothel for soldiers in the British Army, including top brass, who abuse underage boys. We never learn the narrator’s name.

It’s a harrowing piece, but barely fictional. Everyone watching the play, certainly in Ireland, will instantly make the connection to the notorious Kincora Boys Home, run by William McGrath, in which systematic abuse was accompanied by Presbyterian Unionist rhetoric, backed with beatings. Unproven stories have circulated for half a century about who knew what was happening at Kincora, and who took part in the appalling abuse that took place.

McGuinness does not attempt to explore the conspiracies: he is only interested in the experiences of the narrator, what happened to him and how he dealt with it. His language is rich and precise, carefully chosen and crafted. We know we’re in the hands of a craftsman. Ryan Donaldson performance is gripping, changing from an unsettling insistent teenager to a desperate young man before our eyes. His is both engaging and sometimes threatening, giving glimpses of the techniques he used to survive.

Sarah Baxter’s production is boldy staged in an abstract black box, with a mirror above and a pool of water below, in Alyson Cummins’ striking designs. Sinéad McKenna’s brings the setting to life with flickering reflections and long shadows. The pool, which separates Donaldson from the audience, is used for a coup de théâtre at the play’s emotional climax when he breaks through the barrier. ‘Do You Come From Gomorrah’ is seriously high quality theatre, with one of Ireland’s great playwrights bringing his remarkable skills to bear on the human cost of corruption and abuse of power.

The Plough and the Stars

April 29, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Photo by Roz Kavanagh

The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey – Abbey Theatre, Dublin

Published at Plays International

Sean O’Casey’s 1926 play is a super-local drama, describing events that took place on the Abbey Theatre’s doorstep during the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. Set in a nearby tenement block around the corner from the General Post Office, as it is besieged by the British Army, it is a masterpiece with Shakespearian character and scale but, as a modern work, a more immediate impact. Tom Creed’s centenary production for the Abbey revisits a play which, at its première, upset sections of the audience so much they rioted. Theatrical riots can seem strange and archaic: it is hard to understand why the Abbey’s patrons got so hot under the collar at the Abbey première of A Playboy of the Western World twenty years earlier. However, it is entirely different with The Plough and the Stars. Creed’s riveting production reveals it to be provocative and iconoclastic one hundred years on, and relevant to an extent that should alarm us as a society.

In Dublin, where streets and stations are named after Easter Uprising leaders and 1916 is commemorated all over town, questioning the credentials of the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers is close to heresy. Sean O’Casey tears the rebels to pieces, along with the British. He pulls idealisers to the ground, and elevates ordinary, fundamentally flawed people who do not live the lives politicians imagine for them. Snatches of Patrick Pearse’s speeches ahead of the uprising drift through the pub window during the play, his calls for a blood sacrifice to cleanse the soil sounding fascistic and unhinged. As we fail to learn the endlessly repeated lesson that violence brutalises and destroys, the play still has the capacity to upset the accepted view of history.

O’Casey’s towering achievement is to craft a play built around such a large, complex, yet wholly convincing cast of characters. His tenement inhabitants reveal a society with an ease comparable to the Henry IV plays. There are many fine roles, but it is particularly notable how well he wrote the female characters, who are all complex, unidealised and alive – an achievement beyond most male playwrights of the time. The Abbey’s cast are fully immersed in the play’s world, and seem to emerge from the setting rather than imposing their performances on it. Kate Glimore’s tragic Nora Clitheroe puts everything she has into saving Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty’s doomed Jack, knows exactly what she has to lose, and fails. Her descent into madness is horrifying. Mary Murray’s Bessie Burgess is confrontational and aggressive, but also unexpectedly kind, with a tale as confounding as anyone. Kate Stanley Brennan is very funny as Mrs. Grogan, her lyricism and larking a terrible counterpoint to her hollow-eyed, dying daughter Mollser (Evie May O’Brien). O’Casey’s incorporation of humour into the dark events is a masterclass in dramatic writing. Caitríona Ennis’s Rosie is desperate, but achieves a moment of remarkable dignity when she, accused of being a prostitute, her silence speaks volumes.

The men in the play do not understand what is coming, and what the consequences of war will be. Michael Glenn Murphy’s Peter Flynn is a comic braggart, perhaps the most ludicrous character in the play, from a Shakespearian lineage of old men who fancy themselves as soldiers. Thommas Kane Byrne’s Marxist Young Covey is smackably smug and very entertaining, but also the only man who lets his front fall apart at the end. Fluther is one of the great comic everyman roles, a man who survives despite his own best efforts, and Dan Monaghan delivers both entertainment and depth. Ash Rizi, Fintan Kinsella and Conor Wolfe O’Hara as the British soldiers who arrive on the scene to make things, inevitably, much worse are frightened and dangerous.

Jamie Vartan’s sets are somewhat confrontational, consisting of unpainted, plywood flats and minimal decor, but they prove very effective. At times the characters feel like ghosts, inhabiting a place that is fading out around them, casting long shadows on the bare walls. The revolve is elegantly used to switch scenes, and seems to echo the transience of time and the lives it contains. The production is superbly powerful – in the commitment of the performers, the vivacity of the characters who live on, a century down the line, and the uncompromising message of the play – that war is madness. Creed’s production reaffirms O’Casey’s status as a great writer who still has much to teach, and whose work remains gripping from start to finish.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

April 22, 2026April 22, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

LJ Parkinson, Mark Gatiss and Mawaan Rizwan. Photo by Marc Brenner.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht – Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Sean Linnén’s revival of Brecht’s Arturo Ui could not be better timed. The play has seemed more apt to the times with every passing day since it was announced. With Mark Gatiss as Arturo, the RSC has pulled over a casting as well as a programming coup. There is a sense of excitement around this production, and it delivers in an evening of visual excitement and political chills.

Brecht mocks the Nazis by transporting their rise to a comic Chicago underworld, with shades of Bugsy Malone. There, shadow Hitler Arturo Ui rises to dominate the city’s cauliflower trade through threats and thuggery, before setting his ambitions on the entire USA. The American setting echoes differently with us now, as we live through the rise of a new 21st century American version of fascism. Linnén plays into the comedy, arming his gangsters with vegetables rather than weapons and creating an atmosphere of imminent farce throughout the evening. The play has a new soundtrack by Placebo, performed live by a house band perched on a podium (a reminder of the importance of live music, under threat at Stratford). Their music drives the show forward, building momentum and becoming more ragged as events accelerate and Arturo gains power.

Mark Gatiss is very watchable as Ui, capable of being both pathetic and deeply sinister. Dressed unashamedly as Hitler, he wheedles his way into the orbit of tortured politician Dogsborough, the cypher for German President Paul von Hindenburg (a moving performance from Christopher Godwin), before using his associates to force him into doing what he wants. As he gains influence, he seems to gain physical presence, until he looms over the stage addressing the city from a platform. Gatiss is repulsive and chilling, but recognisably very human.

The most difficult aspect of the play is giving individuality to characters who are essentially allegorical types, while also giving full reign to their outrageous, appalling behaviour. The cast does a fine job. Kadiff Kirwan as Roma, chief gangster and Erich Röhm analogue, bring a sense of tragic betrayal to a character who is unredeemably nasty. The decision to cast Maawan Rizwan as both lead gangster Gigi and the compere works well, as his Cabaret-style rabble-rousing blends into psychopathic prancing around the stage, wearing hats taken from his murder victims. LJ Parkinson is his gleeful accomplice, Girola. Janie Dee is understated, as the defence lawyer among other parts, in a way that shows how decency, lawful behaviour is overwhelmed by aggressive, stage-stealing populists.

The show is a visual treat, with sets and costumes by Georgia Lowe, who dresses the cast in cartoonish 1930s Chicago outfits. The band’s podium slides on an off stage, as they play on top, retreating to reveal new sets. These include Arturo in his bubble bath, a white coffin around which Gatiss and Dee play a Richard III-esque seduction scene over the body of her husband, and a courtroom with a bloodied defendant unconscious in the dock. The Night of the Long Knives is staged as a St. Valentine’s Day massacre, in which Roma and his men are machine-gunned, writhing in slow motion and casting rose petals from their pockets for what seems like an impossibly long time. The evening is full of memorable tableaux.

Linnén shows the play to be as relevant as we might have feared. He resists temptations to make any direct comparisons with the Presidency of Donald Trump, rightly seeing that these comparisons make themselves. Brecht wrote Arturo Ui in 1941, but it was not staged until 1958, by which time it had acquired an epilogue reflecting the post-Nazi perspective. It has always, therefore, been a play about fighting future fascism, and the Resistible in the title is rallying call. As such, Mark Gatiss final lines: “The bitch that bore him is in heat again” is a direct warning about times that we are now living through. Staged in a county now run by a Reform council, this production gives the RSC a much-needed voice in the battle with regressive values that threatens to consume the world.

John Proctor is the Villain

April 2, 2026 / vanishedcity / Leave a comment

Photo by Camilla Greenwell

John Proctor is the Villain by Kimberly Belflower

Kimberly Belflower’s play premièred in the US in 2022, and has been successfully revived twice already, most recently on Broadway last year directed by Danya Taymor. It’s UK première at the Royal Court is a recast version of her production,. Set in 2018, during the increasingly distant #metoo era, it re-examines the gender politics and in-built prejudice of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, as studied by a high school class of five girls, one of whom is absent for reasons that become apparent. The girls, questioning standard assessments of John Proctor as a hero of American drama, propose the formation of a school feminist club. Their teacher, Mr. Smith, who they admire and, in some cases, fancy deems it too controversial, but suggests bringing in two boys, after which it apparently flies under the local social radar. The relationships between the pupils and their teacher become complex in ways that, although not for revealing in a review, are hardly surprising.

This is the problem with the production. Nothing presented on stage feels unexpected or new, and there is a sense that the audience is having its world view confirmed. The most shocking aspect of the play, to a UK audience, is the idea that feminism is so controversial an idea that a school would stop pupils discussing it for fear of ‘what people might say’ – a truly terrifying bulletin from US conservatism. But the production itself displays a level of conservatism that makes it seem old-fashioned in comparison to the work the Royal Court is staging from British writers at the moment. The characters of the girls seem surprisingly formulaic, like types rather than individuals. There are some highlights among the performers. Sadie Soverall is excellent as the awkward but Shelby, who arrives like a ticking time bomb. Reece Braddock as the sweetly daft Mason is very funny – the two boys are both convincingly written as teenage idiots, but he has the better role. Dónal Finn is strong as the charming, untrustworthy teacher who is the analogue for John Proctor.

However, the heavily realistic classroom set by AMP featuring Teresa L. Williams, and Taymor’s direction, tie the action down, while the writing makes it difficult to believe that many of the characters are real people. The play is well-intentioned, and its John Proctor-cancelling is an intriguing, even exciting ideological position. Despite this, the production and performance-style seem leaden-footed. The climactic moment, with the girls taking over the classroom and dancing to Lorde’s ‘Green Light’, feels manufactured and fails to deliver the catharsis it insistently sells to the audience.