Naoise McDevitt

Possessors, Self-Dispossessed: ROMANS: A NOVEL at the Almeida Theatre

By the end of Alice Birch’s new epic-masculinity saga, I’m left half-astonished. Romans: A Novel is a play of great ambition – something that new plays should always be striving towards. Problems arise when a play’s fascinating form does not move in time with its content. Spanning over a century of...
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Posted Sep. 26, 2025

Trump in no man’s land

In the final scene of Harold Pinter’s play No Man’s Land, the nostalgic old poet Spooner states to his elderly counterpart Hirst: “No. You are in no man’s land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent.” I kept thinking of...
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Posted Sep. 23, 2025

Poetry feature: Teaching

His most common song– ‘Come over here and listen’.   He stands with Dick Rodgers for an opening night triumph.  I look round for another kid. The voice searches for me. A Harlem baritone that’s on the move. His hand leans down, presses my palm and tells me to hear...
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Posted Aug. 11, 2025

Playwright spotlight: Why Kane matters

A radical in her time and ours, Sarah Kane is one of the greatest English Playwrights of the last fifty years, who is nearly never performed on the commercial stages. It is as if her plays have been given, like the biblical story that she was brought up with, a...
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Posted Aug. 1, 2025

What Reform reveals

Famed literary critic and professor Edward Said once wrote that “no one today is purely one thing.” Said suggested that our collective identities are not fixed markers, but instead “no more than starting points”. He noted that the old European empires, while consolidating a mixture of cultures and identities, forced...
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Posted Jul. 30, 2025

La revolución de Lloyd! An Evita for Our Time

The curtain has risen, and I’ve already lost my breath. The opening scene of auteur director Jamie Lloyd’s production of Evita at the London Palladium billows with smoke and passion. Hooded mourners, a disgruntled Che (Diego Andres Rodriguez), stone steps lined with floodlights, and a life-size neon EVITA sign set...
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Posted Jul. 11, 2025

Poetry feature: Masada

Swirling, striking and by blunt force piercing the littlest ones. Shards. Shrapnel. Dust that rolls into dirty glooms which make plaster casts. In this cloud, people lose time. Space is meshed together, breaking against skin and bone. Children unable to move. Mothers bursting, then dusting off and with all courage,...
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Posted Jul. 1, 2025

Love comes round for a chat – Hold, Please

“You’re not performing. We are.” says the lyrical prologue to the devised hour of delight Hold, Please. For a show made of short, concentrated scenes, I left the FAB feeling I’ve been served a full theatrical meal. Following four characters (Clemmie Mayhew, Max Green, Bea Kelly, George Jasper, Thomas Sykes)...
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Posted Jun. 29, 2025

Dreaming on shifting ground: Homebound review

Beginning with birdsong and a meet-cute, the first moments of Homebound are open and sweet, with many possibilities as to what will happen to our young, idealistic central couple, Noah and Zara. Then the war is revealed. Every day life is curfewed and communities become broken by bombs. The loose...
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Posted May. 7, 2025

A short history of motherhood in theatre

Parents are reflected in their children, and society is reflected in the theatre, both can be for better or for worse. The mother is a constant character that has been in theatre since the Greeks. Euripides’ neurotic yet strong matriarch Medea, in clashes with her lover Jason, brings out potent...
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Posted Apr. 3, 2025

Superstar playing superstar: hosanna for Cynthia Erivo

“All your followers are blind! Too much heaven on their minds.” Judas’s lyric in the opening number of Jesus Christ Superstar sums up the problem harrying its latest production. The musical, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice, is set to play in concert form at...
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Posted Mar. 10, 2025

Stories beyond the script: The theatre of Seamus Heaney

On the cusp of the millennium, Seamus Heaney reflected “We can’t keep on writing elegies.” Four years after receiving the Nobel Prize, the 60-year-old Irish poet was being interviewed by Channel 4’s Jon Snow in his home in Blackrock, Dublin. Snow asks him what kind of story is to be...
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Posted Feb. 2, 2025