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News: Pubs and theatre. An age-old pairing.
This exciting project will no doubt resonate with anyone that has ever stepped into a pub, so this February, grab your pint of Drunken Nights and witness something completely original and unique.
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News: The 28 Day Project launches wonderful opportunities
The 28 Day Project is an exciting initiative offering emerging talent a step into the film business.
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Have you got the Star Wars X Factor?
Thousands turned away at open auditions after standing in the rain for hours.
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News: TheatreCraft returns to help young people’s backstage careers
The 8th annual event returns to the Royal Opera House later this month.
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BLOG: Theatre: the best casino shows around the world
Casinos around the world offer some of the best theatrical entertainment you can find.
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BLOG: 5 Best Actors in Superhero Cinema
Is “superhero” acting any less challenging?
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Blog: Films to study for inspiration
Watching great actors can often inform your own work.
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Blog: Shakespeare experimenting with the limits of contemporary drama
Briony Rawle heads to Yorkshire and takes a closer look at Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
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Review: Bat Boy, Southwark Playhouse ✭✭✭
A campy fun musical with bite screams Douglas Mayo.
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Review: Visitors, Arcola Theatre ✭✭✭✭
Barney Norris first full-length play is an exquisitely written examination of love and loss, writes Alex Delaney.
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Review: 1984, Almeida Theatre ✭✭✭✭✭
This fresh vision of 1984 feels like a rediscovery of Orwell’s dystopia, writes Sophia Longhi.
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Review: Secret Theatre – Show 4, Lyric Hammersmith ✭✭✭✭
This review comes with a capitalised, emboldened and even italicised, SPOILER ALERT. That should do, writes Briony Rawle.
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Review: In Skagway, Arcola Theatre ✭✭✭
Alex Delaney reviews a play that deals with the desperate struggles for freedom at the Arcola.
Add a commentEntering the Arcola’s smaller studio space, the audience are confronted with the interior of a rustic wooden cabin. Natasha Piper’s beautifully simple design immediately evokes the hardships and meagre comforts of the American wilderness – a pair of socks drying, an upturned crate for a seat, a wooden trunk and, in the centre of the stage, the stove. Beyond that the stage is almost bare; this is not a world of extravagance.
The inhabitants of this cabin are a trio of women: Frankie, the famous actress whose star has faded; Mae, her brightly cheerful companion, and T-Belle, Mae’s practical and frustrated daughter. They are all trapped – geographically in the desolate town of Skagway unless they can find the money for passage out of there; emotionally, by the set of debts, duties and lies they have built around them over the preceding decades; and, in the case of Frankie, physically in the shell of her stroke-destroyed body.
The women, and their desperate struggles for freedom, are movingly portrayed with clarity and truth by Angeline Ball, Geraldine Allen and Kathy Rose O’Brien. Disappointingly, however, for a play about women written by a female playwright, they seem to be given very little power. Each of them is hurt, conned or broken by the unseen men of the piece. Even their deliverance at the end is revealed not to have been earned or taken by them as T-Belle triumphantly believes, but rather handed to them grudgingly by the self-styled impresario of the town.
The actors are also hampered by a script which has replaced actual events with a succession of lyrical narrative monologues. Nothing much happens on stage, and since the characters rarely seem to actually talk to each other, we are also deprived of any interactions to supplement the inaction of the piece. We are left with a series of reported stories and re-enacted memories, which though perhaps appropriate for these women living in the shadow of past theatrical triumphs, is one layer of performance too many to be dramatically satisfying for its current audience.
*** (3 stars)
Runs until 1st March
More info