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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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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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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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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“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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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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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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“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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If there is one drive that is common throughout the work of dramatist James Graham, it is the search for a modern British identity. From assessing Gareth Southgate’s reforming tenure in his play Dear England, to tacking his own divided Nottinghamshire village in his BBC show Sherwood, Graham’s dramas are...
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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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A selection of poetry, prose, photographs and artwork submitted as part of The Boar Magazine. Ma, Archi Adhikari I am writing a poem that you’ll never read That you never can read Your eyes will skip over these words The uncomfortable contours of a second language Like stumbling legs...
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‘Listen to the stories. Hear it in the songs. Angry men don’t write the rules and guns don’t write the wrongs’, sings the hopeful Balladeer, who leads us through the many folk tales that make up John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. The 1990 musical spins the tale of nine...
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The story begins with a storm. A dingy motel room, and a door that swings open to reveal a man. The opening tableau of Katori’s Hall’s breakthrough play The Mountaintop is a striking theatrical image – reminiscent of Willy Loman’s entrance in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. MLK is...
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