The first show in the Royal Court’s much-anticipated 70th anniversary season sets high standards. Luke Norris’s new play is a two-hander, with a brief appearance by a third performer, set in cramped interior spaces, but it fills the main stage effortlessly. It concerns a couple, played by Rosie Sheehy and Robert Aramayo, going through the emotional pressures that come with trying to have a baby. It is difficult to write about the plot of ‘Guess How Much I Love You?’ without giving key events away, but it is fair to say that things do not go as they had planned. The play has an intensity to it with is rarely seen on stage. Played in the corners of a series of rooms – their flat, a hospital room, a doctor’s examination room – there is both a claustrophobia and an ordinariness to their experiences, especially as Grace Smart’s sets make these corners just a little tighter than ninety degrees. The walls are closing in on them.
The pair, unnamed, are ordinary too, but Norris’s writing pulls apart what ordinary means. The initial tensions in their relationship – for example over whether porn is exploitative or not – hint at Sheehy’s resentment of the role she is already playing, as she waits, pregnant, mid-ultrasound. As events spiral, the pair are faced with impossible moral choices and the way they treat each other becomes brutal in a deeply uncomfortable way. There is more than a hint of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ about the deep levels of love/hate played out on stage in scenes which seem too private for us to be watching. However, there is more emotional truth in the play than in Edward Albee. Although they say the most appalling things, it is entirely believable that people in their situation would react the way they do. The horror of living has rarely been exposed so honestly.
Jeremy Herrin’s direction brings out two very powerful pieces acting from Aramayo and Sheehy. He is patient, defensive, desperate and unable to cope. She is a ball of grief and pure anger. Rosie Sheehy will surely be in the running for awards for her performance, which is simply extraordinary. She is incredibly vulnerable in her deep distress, and there are a couple of moments when she completely lets go, with speeches that are difficult to hear and impossible to turn away from. Her commitment is total.
‘Guess How Much I Love You?’ is a lean and brilliant play, with an unwavering focus on the nature of love, what happens when it goes wrong, and how people really behave in a crisis. Norris also weaves in themes of religion and gender roles in a way that feels natural. There is a particular moment in the play that makes the audience’s hearts drop as though they were an express lift, but the entire evening is an unrelentingly intense experience. A play which pushes the capacity of theatre to communicate to its limits is the perfect start to the year for the Royal Court.
Michael Grady-Hall, Gwyneth Keyworth and Samuel West. Photos by Helen Murray.
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare – Barbican Theatre, London
Prasanna Puwanarajah’s production of Twelfth Night is a fascinating combination of genuinely funny comedy, and the underlying darkness that hangs over the play. There’s greater emphasis on the comedy though than in many productions, driven by the central figure of Feste, played with great presence by Michael Grady-Hall. He opens the evening, descending on a wire playing a guitar and singing, and takes a prominent role as intermediary between the stage and the audience. His post-interval audience interaction – an extended game of catch – goes on much longer than most performers could get away with, but no-one resents it. Dressed like a bumble bee in one of James Cotterill’s entertaining costumes, he performs a number of impressive physical turns but also spans the melancholy elements of the play, bringing tears to the eye with his performance of the play’s songs.
The production has a strong cast, offering distinctive interpretations. Gwyneth Keyworth’s Viola is no-nonsense, but rapidly flustered at the idea of dressing as a boy. Daniel Monks brings a certain incel quality to an Orsino with an edge. Joplin Sibtain’s Toby Belch is a tragic figure destroyed by alcohol, tall and lurching like a 1970s French House drunk. Danielle Henry makes Maria the character in the play you would actually want to spend time with, sharp and human. Freema Agyeman was off the night I saw the play and, annoyingly, her excellent understudy as Olivia was not identified, either in the theatre or through my subsequent enquiry to the RSC press office.
Sam West’s masterful Malvolio adds complete assurance to the production. He is one of those performers whose presence makes the audience relax, ready to sit back and enjoy his skills. He takes the character from chippy to hilarious – a ludicrous cross-gartered scene – to alarmingly vengeful, as though it was a natural character arc. Played against James Cotterill’s surreal giant church organ set, Puwanarajah delivers a show that fully understands of the humour and complexity of this strange but irresistible play.
End is the final instalment of David Eldridge’s trilogy about a couple at different life stages, which began with Beginning in 2017, then Middle in 2022. It brings Saskia Reeves and Clive Owen together, recalling their 1991 incest film drama Close My Eyes. Gary McCann’s set is full of details which make it clear that Alfie and Julie are a 90’s couple – CDs, DVDs, a hi-fi. Alfie is a DJ who, in the opening lines of the play, is diagnoses with terminal cancer. Owen and Reeves create a fully convincing married relationship, still close despite a history that, as the play unfolds, is revealed to be less than smooth. Eldridge’s writing takes a straightforwardly narrative approach, documenting the pair as they wrestle with the decision about whether to continue with chemotherapy. Their daughter, who is coming round that night but never arrives, is the focus of their dilemma – whether to buy more time at the cost of a reduced quality of life.
Rachel O’Riordan’s direction gives dynamism to what is essentially a long conversation between the pair. Clive Owen conveys the sense of a man used to people, including his partner, deferring to him – even in the context of his funeral playlist. Saskia Reeves, a writer, comes into her own as her power in the relationship is gradually revealed, and her ability to interpret what is happening to her through fiction, becomes apparent. The play is not revelatory – there is little in here that is not familiar – but the experience of Generation X characters facing death is, in itself, new. Eldridge also uses very specific London geography well – the annoyance of having to change between Forest Gate and Wanstead Park to reach the cemetery for example – to convey the sense of real relationship, happening in real time.
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst adapted by Jack Holden – Almeida Theatre, London
Alan Hollinghurst’s much-loved novel, The Line of Beauty, won the Booker Prize in 2004. Looking back to the rise of Conservative politics in 1980s Britain, and the parallel AIDS crisis, it explored gay life and consciousness through the eyes of ingenue Nick Guest, who learns a lot in a short space of time. Now, adapted by Jack Holden and directed by Michael Grandage, it reappears two decades later on the Almeida stage.
Adapting novels as plays can be a thankless task, especially when they’re well known, but Holden does a good job in not allowing the book to kill the drama. Covering the period between the Conservative victories at the 1983 and 1987 elections, the play dramatises the collision of personal and political from the perspective of Nick, played engagingly by Jasper Talbot and his experiences in love, and while lodging with the family of a Conservative MP. Performances are universally strong, and Grandage’s production is very tightly delivered. Alistair Nwachukwu gives a standout performance as Nick’s first lover Leo, charming, clever and vulnerable. Arty Froushan, as cocaine-snorting playboy Wani, Charles Edwards as smooth, fatherly MP Gerald Fedden, Robert Portal’s menacing Badger, and Ellie Bamber as bipolar Cat Fedden are all excellent performances. Hannah Morrish channels the demeanour of Fergie in a way that is both hilarious and disturbing. Doreene Blackstock, as Leo’s mother, and Claudia Harrison as Gerald’s wife are also very strong, but their roles are rather limited – a problem with both book and play. The staging is sumptuous – sets and costumes by Christopher Oram – who has clearly delighted in recreating and subtley parodying the high society 1980s with its odd combination of frumpiness and glamour.
Some of the more literary aspects of the book get a bit lost in the dramatisation, such as the thematic significance of Henry James and of the ogee, a shape which swings both ways. What is more significant is how much of a period piece the play feels. Hollinghurst was writing about a period 20 years earlier, a time now approaching half a century from the present day. The key issues of the time – homophobia, social conservatism, privilege and the devastation wrought by AIDS should not be forgotten, but are not undiscussed. The play offers a highly professional and entirely entertaining evening, but it is unclear exactly why this novel needs to be staged at this particular moment.
Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond de Rostand – Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Simon Evans’ production of Cyrano is a very convincing and enjoyable account of a play which stands up well to re-examination. Evans has also adapted the play, with Debris Stevenson, giving the language a contemporary flavour without undermining the period setting, in a fantasy 17th century France. The play is held aloft by an exceptionally strong case who bring a notable level of star wattage to the stage. Adrian Lester, as Cyrano, exudes leading man skill and control, to the extent that at times he reminds us of Derek Jacobi, who triumphed in the role at the RSC for Terry Hands in the early 1980s, and at others of Simon Russell Beale. Cyrano is a part that requires a dashing, confident, yet vulnerable performance, and Lester provides this with apparent ease. He is brash in the tavern scenes, charming with Roxanne, conflicted with love rival Christian and, in the play’s final scene, when he drops the letter he is reading, supposedly the last missive of the dead Christian, and recites it to Roxanne from memory, devastating. Up until this point the play has been hugely entertaining, but it is this culminating encounter which makes it something special. The play’s emotional weight all builds to this moment of revelation, as Roxanne realises he has loved her all along, and Cyrano realises the same. There is not a dry eye in the house.
Lester’s triumphant performance helps create the conditions for the whole cast to shine brightly. Susannah Fielding, as Roxanne, is exemplary – riding a wave of breezy, charming detachment until her emotions catch up with her. Her outrage at discovering she has been deceived by Cyrano all along unleashes a fascinating cascade of conflicting impulses. Levi Brown is excellent as a casuallly insulting Christian de Neuvillette, cocky and doomed. Scott Handy’s Comte de Guiche is very funny, appearing to belong to a parallel aristocratic world where nothing quite makes sense to him. And Greer Dale-Foulkes makes Abigail, Roxanne’s companion, a very amusing comic adjunct to the action.
Performed on Grace Smart’s sets of torn posters, worn plaster and red velvet curtains, the play fills the Swan stage as though written for it. Evan’s has conjured a hit, somewhat old-fashioned – in a good way because it successfully revives a classic for a new generation without significantly remaking the play. It’s a significant achievement, and makes for a very satisfying evening watching very good actors show us their skills.
Bog Witch by Bryony Kimmings – Soho Theatre, Walthamstow
Bryony Kimmings’s last show was in 2018, in a different era. Her disturbingly personal and raw shows made her a 2010s fringe star. Her unpredictable, apparently chaotic style proved highly influential on the style of alternative theatre performers. Now she’s back with her first show since having a son, separating from her partner (Tim Grayman, well known to audiences from their joint show, Fake it ‘til you Make it), and moving to the countryside with a man called Will. Bog Witch unpicks this experience. To some extent it is classic Kimmings. She is disconcertingly direct, about herself and the way she feels, tells rude jokes, and wears ludicrous costumes. She is a very engaging performer, always undercutting herself with double takes at her own explanations. The audience loves her, and there is a very welcoming atmosphere in the vast, gleaming, newly refurbished Walthamstow branch of the Soho Theatre.
However, Bog Witch does not deliver the energy levels of previous Kimmings work. The size of the venue does not help. Beautiful although it is, the new venue is much larger than any comparable fringe venue and there is a sense that this show would have worked better in a more intimate space, more suited to Kimmings confessional style. Working (for the first time?) with a co-director, Francesca Murray-Fuentes, Kimmings works hard to occupy the cavernous stage, using everything from a long white backcloth to an epic witch costume, rustic paraphernalia and an amusing ‘burning at the stake’ tableau. However, the work to achieve this detracts from the show, with Kimmings often engaged in moving props around.
There is also a lack of the wildness and abandon apparently promised by the title. Bog Witch is a controlled show, which threatens to flatline at a couple of points in the second half (not that there is an interval, despite the near 2-hour running time). The themes she is addressing are very grown-up – depression, miscarriage, social compromise, climate responsibility. She (her performance persona, that is) seems changed by her experiences of getting older and having to compromise more, with some of her edges rubbed away. We have to buy into her changed self to stay involved in the show. The story of redemption she has to tell lacks excitement at times, and the audience-participation finale is somewhat flat. Although watching Kimmings on stage is always a good use of time, this is not the most driven or electrifying of her shows.
Stephen Daldry’s production of David Lan’s new play, about the moral dilemmas in the aftermath of World War II and their lifelong consequences, piles the pressure on relentlessly. Juliet Stevenson plays Ruth, now in her 70s, living in London. Someone she hasn’t seen for 50 years arrives – Thomas (Tom Wlaschiha) – and we watch the story of what happened to him unfold over the next two and a half hours. Ruth was a young woman working for the UN in Bavaria, the American sector, after the German surrender. She and her small team of women look for children stolen by the Nazis from Eastern Europe and checked for Aryan characteristics. Those who passed the tests were given to German families with new names. Those who did not were murdered. Once the children are identified, the hard part begins. Thomas is with parents who hide his real identity, but are distraught when he is removed. Ruth becomes attached to him, saving him from the fate of many children – removed en masse by the Russians or by the Americans to be rehomed. But she doesn’t send him back to Poland either, where he might have rediscovered his original family. He has flown to London from New York to reveal the consequences.
Daldry crosses the play’s two time periods over one another – literally, with Ruth and Thomas occupying either end of a long traverse stage holding Miriam Buether’s London apartment set .while the events of 1945 play out across the middle. The pacing is effective, with the flashback action erupting into the civilised lives they have both built. Stevenson is remarkable, her calm demeanour drawing the audience’s attention to the emotions shifting tectonically below the surface. Wlaschiha is blank faced, traumatised, and expressing himself through music – although it’s a shame he stands aside from the action for much of the play, providing a catalyst rather than participating. The character Thomas is a pianist, and Wlaschiha has remarkable skills too, performing live on the apartment piano as a number of other characters also do, including Stevenson. It is an ensemble performance, with strong performances from Kate Duchêne as Ruth’s mother, Marek Oravec and Cosima Shaw as Thomas’s adopted parents and Caroline Lonq as Elise in a cast that includes several European stage actors appearing at the National Theatre for the first time.
Lan has uncovered a little documented set of events from a time that is much pored over, and has constructed a rigorous, emotionally hard-hitting story. It is an excellent vehicle for the talents of its very high end cast and production team.
The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon
Yaël Farber’s production of The Winter’s Tale is played against the backdrop of a giant, three-dimensional moon. It glows pale white or blood red to signify the contrasting locations in the play: Sicily and Bohemia. Soutra Gilmour’s designs, both set and costumes support an interpretation which has pace and coherence, which can easily vanish with the complete shift in setting and characters that occurs between Act III and Act IV. The early scenes of jealousy, as Leontes pulls apart the lives of those around him, are staged in an almost noir context, with a barefoot king and queen in loose grey clothing. The intensity is completely gripping, in some of Shakespeare’s most driven and desparate scenes. Bertie Carvel’s Leontes is rangy and wired, his paranoia entirely convincing. John Light’s Polixenes, the object of his irrational hatred, is outwardly jovial but wary just below the surface. Madeleine Appiah’s Hermione is full of goodwill, which makes her destruction all the more unbearable. Her trial scene, where she defends herself with patches on her dress from lactation, having just given birth, is very upsetting.
Farber combines the characters of Time and Autolycus to create an rogue / thief / everyman character, played with Geordie accent by Trevor Fox, who ranges around the action, sitting on the edge of the stage smoking a cigarette and linking the two settings. His ballad singing is augmented by Farber with additions from Brecht, which do not neccessarily clarify the play’s themes. Nevertheless, the Bohemia scenes combine pagan and rave themes, and are exciting and tense, which is rarely the case. Lewis Bowes as Florizel and Leah Haile as Perdita are both young, energetic and naïve. Polixenes’ violent fury in this scene, as he exposes their planned marriage, has clear parallels with Leontes’ destructive rage. It is clear that male coercion and violence is the driving theme of the play, and Farber emphasises this by using the same actors to play a band of women around Hermione and around Perdita.
At the centre of the female resistance is Paulina, played by the excellent Aïcha Kossoko who brings power and fearlessness as she stands between Leontes and his victims, then implements 16 years of penance as he submits himself to her authority. The final statue scene, an exercise in standing still for the actor playing Hermione, is played beautifully and plucks the heart strings of everyone in the audience. Farber reveals the play as a complex fable with simple ideas of human love and kindness at its heart, the reason it still makes us weep.
A simple show, but completely absorbing. Three performers dance to rave music, with a set consisting of coloured strip lights. Yes enough to create the atmosphere of a warehouse party. The dancing is free like a rave, but choreographed, with all three moving in unison. The performers become more sweaty and exhausted as the show goes on, grabbing gulps from a table of plastic water cups. It becomes an endurance test for them. Watching people moving in a situation where you would only ever take part gives surprising perspective on an activity that is expressive, involving and strangely fascinating.
The combination of dance and Holocaust memory is unusual but effective. Roger White has recorded interviews with his grandmother, whose father was Jewish. The family left Germany in 1939, and Marianna’s memories provide a vivid account of the day-to-day persecution and the terror that one day her father wouldn’t come home. He was saved by a tearful policeman, and her recollections include more humanity than might be expected. The darkness is underlined by the dancers whose angular movement is sinister but also tender.
Valentina Tóth is a very accomplished classical pianist and singer, a child prodigy who hated performing. She reclaims performance on her own terms, with a brilliant show that ties together stories of ‘hysterical’ women. She draws on Dutch misogyny and sex abuse scandals with a set of songs that also cover her domineering Russian piano teacher (her mother in disguise), menstruation, revenge (in the persona of a Southern belle) and a song about a rape. It’s tuneful, remarkably well performed and unrelentingly dark and confrontational. She even gives us the Queen of the Night aria. She is very convincing, totally in control and remarkably good.
Ontoerend Goed are a cut above most alternative theatre companies. They strip back the assumptions an audience brings to a production, leaving a blank slate which they then fill in ways that are entirely original. Thanks For Being Here is a remarkable example of their work. The audience is shown itself – footage of everyone entering and finding their seats, and live film of everyone in the auditorium, watching themselves. There is no narrative, and no need to persuade us we are interested. The performance is the event, it’s happening live and it is us. The concept is so simple it sounds like nothing, but it is really something. Everyone is fully engaged, present and hanging on what will happen next. It’s strangely moving and profound, a real masterclass in stripping theatre back to its essence: people together in a room.
Khalid Abdalla’s one man show is about a lot of things: his family history of political activism in Egypt; his life as an actor, including playing the lead hijacker in United 93; British colonialism in the Middle East; Abdalla’s arrest on a Gaza protest in London; the death from cancer of his friend. He is a charming, charismatic presence and he holds our attention throughout, using a range of theatrical techniques in a production by Fuel. It’s often like an illustrated lecture, with clever camera and projector work. But the show really comes to life when Abdalla uses movement. As a poised, posh performer it comes as a visceral surprise when he expresses his feelings physically. Although enjoyable throughout, Nowhere tries to cover too much territory, leading to history lessons of limited value. It’s at its most engaging when Abdalla communicates his helplessness in a world he cannot change.
Two male dancers are rehearsing a piece, overseen by a rude, cherry tomato-eating director. The comic framing is silly but fun. The dancing is exceptional, with the pair combining contemporary and street dance techniques in a tight knit performance which is exciting. And they do it twice, with a second run-through: very demanding, and compelling to watch.
This show creates a fantastical scenario in which an aging actress with dementia is supported in a care home by a small team perpetuating her belief that she is rehearsing King Lear. Her son, whose relationship with her is messy, is asked to communicate with her in character, sometimes and Goneril or Regan, sometimes Cordelia. This Lear, however, has a happy ending in which Cordelia forgives her father. The actor is played for much of the show as her younger self, by an excellent Venetia Bowe. Later she’s a brilliantly handled puppet, then an older woman. The staging, directes by Colley, is very high quality but the scenario does not provide the insight needed to take this to the next level.
The Shaggs, rediscovered in the 1990s, were forced to rehearse and perform by their coercive father despite having no apparent musical talent. They became proto-punk heroes, but it didn’t do them much good, although Tom Cruise owns the biopic rights l. The three performers who are In Bed With My Brother approach their story in the style of the band – as though they’ve never seen theatre before. None of the conventions of performance are acknowledged, and the show is anarchic, bizarre and brilliant. Their roadie, who doubles as the Shaggs appalling father, is murdered by the trip multiple times and keeps coming back to life. He’s outside selling t-shirts at the end, covered in blood. He represents the patriarchy, which is the real focus of the show’s anger. The story of the Shaggs is told in captions, accompanied by pummelling music and gunfire, but Nora Alexander, Dora Lynn and Kat Cory focus their energy on the society around them, from the male music industry to the arms industry. They are chaotic, confrontational and, despite the impression they work hard to create, rigorously political.
Breaking Bach by Kim Brandstrup / Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment – Usher Hall
The unlikely combination of The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and street dance, choreographed by Kim Brandstrupz is strangely brilliant. A slimmed down version of the Orchestra plays rhythmically tight Bach, which creates a grid of sound for the troupe combining professionals and young break dancers. They perform on a reflective silver dancefloor, with the OAE perched on a platform above them. The dances are performed in different combinations to Concerto for Two Violins, Brandenburg Concerto No 3 and shorter solo cello pieces. It’s clever and thrilling.
Red Like Fruit is stripped down to two voices – a man and a woman. The woman (Michelle Monteith) is a journalist investigating a domestic violence story with political repercussions. It triggers memories of sexual abuse in her teens, both from a tour guide and her older cousin. She is taking part in group therapy in a gloomy Toronto hospital room We only know this because she has asked a man (David Patrick Flemming) to speak on her behalf. She says little, but her distress is very apparent. The man reads from a script, but at various points she asks him direct questions about what he thinks. The crux of the play is the insidious use of power that leaves women thinking, decades later, that what happened to them may have been their fault. Hannah Moscovitch’s writing is excellent – honed, insightful, lacking cliche. Combined with a simple, devastating production, it makes for some of the best theatre you’re likely to see.
Swiping Right by Sophie Anna Veelenturf – Zoo Southside
Sophie Anna is in her mid-20s. She has been dating on Bumble and, while the majority of her partners are left wingers like her, she’s had short relationships with three politically right wing men. An engaging and sophisticated performer, she tells a story very well, using verbatim performance from interviews she has conducted with ex-boyfriends and people who date across the political divide. The subject isn’t quite up to it though. Her set-up seems too artificial to carry wider meaning. She is someone to watch, and with stronger material she could be exceptional, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the men in question don’t have well-thought-through political convictions, but are just not great partners.
Kelly’s play is firmly in the territory of the Irish kitchen table family drama, in a lineage from Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr. Four generations of women gather for a celebration but it becomes very clear that something is wrong. The play has high quality elements and is often very funny, but is also uneven. The great granddaughter, Muireann, is a bundle of clichés about over-sensitive Gen-Zers. The great grandmother Eileen (Julia Dearden) is a foul-mouthed force to be reckoned with, and Dearden’s performance is the highlight of the show. The remaining women are neither Gothic caricature, nor believable individuals, leaving the play stylistically stranded. It’s funny and dark, but it is never really clear why it needs to be written now rather than a generation ago.
THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME. by Hannah Caplan and Douglas Clarke-Wood for WoodForge – Summerhall
Hannah Caplan’s play is about an on/off relationship between Grace and Eli. It’s told in reverse, partly, in a sequence of timestamped scenes going back several years. Performances, from Amaia Naima Aguinaga and Francis Nunnery are both charming and involving, working the audience expertly in a tiny Summerhall room. They are actors to watch. The writing lacks focus, with too many themes swirling but unresolved – addiction, S&M, depression – all within the structure of a meta drama about writing and truth. It’s promising, but there’s too much for it to hang together.
Mimi Martin’s play, which she performs, is personal. She writes about the Hong Kong democracy protests from the perspective of an expat teen, looking for fun while her parents are away, but caught up in violence. Her writing and energetic performance are very effective at conjuring the terrifying atmosphere of HK as the Chinese police machine brutally crushes demonstrating schoolchildren, including her friend. With the democracy movement shunted off the UK front pages, this feels like a politically important show, but it is also atmospheric, impressive theatre by a talented young performer.
The Ego by Anemone Valcke & Verona Verbakel – Zoo Playground
Anemone and Verona are two Belgian actors with limited public recognition and, they claim, more famous friends. Their show is stripped of convention as Verona, then Anemone, present their stories. At first it seems they are telling us about the difficulty of making a living in the industry, but it becomes apparent they are really discussing sexual abuse. Both experienced exploitation as young actors, and some upsetting video footage takes us back to how they felt. It’s not often a performer shows us themselves, outside a role and completely vulnerable. Verona’s video diaries are genuinely shocking. The pair also use music to stunning effect: a version of The Winner Takes It All, playing on its dark lyrics; a wild, exposing, sex simulating dance to Marilyn Manson which is a savage satire of sexually exploitative male directors; and a highly loaded performance to Sinead O’Connor’s Phoenix From the Flames. There’s humour too, as supposedly more famous colleagues from Ontoerend Goed appear in filmed segments. The show is exceptional: uncompromising either in subject or performance style. Flemish theatremakers show us how it should be done.
Dancers Merav Israel and Claire Pençak spend much of the performance moving stones around the stage. It sounds a little beyond parody, but actually the experience is mesmerising. The two women take turns to arrange and rearrange rocks in shades of iron and chalk in spirals, circles and heaps. Then they move around them together in a mutually supportive dance. They position stones on one another’s bodies, and move around the space, at one point opening the balcony door. It’s as though they are marking the space in a long, slow ritual. There’s no explanation, and no apology – and by the time it ends, we feel as though we’ve been initiated into something special.
Emma Frankland is a trans woman strongly influenced by Kurt Cobain, and specifically Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance. She plays with the internet conspiracy theory that Cobain was trans. While he certainly wore dresses, the significance is more in the cultural weight he could have lent to beleaguered trans identity if it has been true. Emma plays a raw version of All Apologies, drips black candle wax over her bare torso, smashes her guitar, sets fire to the case and performs an Icarus sequence. Despite powerful ideas she spends a lot of time moving props around. It’s impossible to take issue with the heartfelt plea for trans rights, but the show lacks coherence.
Tom Bolton 