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"Crocodile Tears". Burton Taylor Studio

A love affair. A broken heart. An Italian summer filled with romance, grass, sky and architecture. Two people gripped by a passion so intense it consumes them, and then moves on, leaving them empty, resentful, yearning for what they so briefly had, but feeling only the emptiness of the memory. Who ever loved that loved not at first sight? Natascha Norton’s twinkling jewel of a playlet captures a summer everyone should experience if they can. Heartbreak is so often the key that unlocks previously hidden halls of creativity and expression, and that is certainly what has happened here. Norton’s play is only forty minutes long. It’s a theatrical haiku that concentrates all that youthful desire into the blink of an eye. Over a series of brief, snapshot scenes, two characters, ‘Her’ and ‘Him’ fall in and out of love. Their very namelessness confers a kind of universality on the experience. How many empty hotel rooms in hot European capitals hold the shadows of a Her and a Him by the end of S...
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"Bear". Burton Taylor Studio. Review by Victoria Tayler

I had always thought I’d choose the man. When women said they’d choose the bear, I (a self-proclaimed good feminist) purported to understand. But I always felt the hypothetical was so radical that it was, at most, symbolic, a bit surface-level even. I understood the point about male violence (I said) but I didn’t think it mapped very easily onto reality. Secretly, I chose the bear. This play completely changed my mind. The writers of this production powerfully interpret the online meme/thought-experiment “would you rather be stuck in the woods with a bear, or a man” as a commentary on women’s autonomy, and the restrictions thrust upon it. It boldly questions what patriarchal power really is, how it sustains itself, and how it can be unsettled. Though it’s not afraid to dive into the seemingly endless darkness of such dynamics, it’s also a real story of hope, providing a reminder that no power dynamic is truly unshakeable, even if sometimes resistance can be unthinkable.  Without re...
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"The Writer". Pilch

You may have seen plays about plays ( The Seagull , or even Noises Off ). And you may have seen a play within a play ( A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Critic ). But you have never seen anything quite like The Writer by Ella Hickson. This is a play after a play; a play outside a play; and ultimately a play before which the audience loses the ability to determine what a play is at all. Real, fictional, metafictional, or real within the fictional world of the play itself - nothing is what it seems, and everything means something. For a dazzling firework display of theatrical techniques and trompes l’oeil , The Writer has an almost touchingly simple and heartfelt message at its heart: ‘Dismantle capitalism and overturn the patriarchy’. Five scenes in the life of a young playwright follow her from innocent newcomer at the mercy of a domineering and sexually exploitative director to a life of success and stability with her partner. Along the way, like creative writers from time immemor...
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"Blood Wedding". Oxford Playhouse. Review by Victoria Tayler

Woodchoppers, death in the guise of a woman, and a character who is the literal moon: Blood Wedding is one strange play. What is so seductive about Full Moon Theatre’s new adaption is that it confronts the weirdness head-on, meeting it with vivacious acting and a bold willingness to explore García Lorca’s embattled ideas about love.   Federico García Lorca’s ‘Bodas de sangre’ or Blood Wedding is the story of a rural wedding turned murder mob in twentieth-century Spain. The nameless Bridegroom (Gilon Fox) opens the production starry-eyed about his bride (Thalia Kermisch) and absorbed in a future fantasy of family, land ownership and rosy romance. With dumb hope, he navigates the sometimes scathing reproaches of his mother (Siena Jackson-Wolfe) and the bubbling rumours about extant affection between the bride and her ex-lover Leonardo (Gillies Macdonald), until their wedding day sees the fantasy crumble into dust. Leonardo and the runaway bride escape on horseback, and are pursu...
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"Art". Burton Taylor Studio

My most enduring memory of the late 1990s (yes, I'm really this sad) is going up and down tube escalators in London en route to work, and constantly passing the posters for Art at Wyndham's Theatre. The poster featured the three characters in the play, and it seemed like every time I glided past it, the actors changed. George Wendt, Nigel Havers, Warren Mitchell, Albert Finney. Over the many years of its run, Art became a who's who of the acting elite of the late 20th century. The final cast was the League of Gentlemen team. And, to my eternal regret, I never went to see it. So what a relief finally to put that right. But was it worth the wait? Art , in case you don't know, is the French play with the big white painting. Conceptual-art-lover Serge has bought this ostensibly blank canvas for 200,000 francs (that's about £25,000). His friend Marc is incredulous and describes the painting as 'shit'. And Yvan can't decide. Torn between his two friends, he...
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"The Great Gatsby". Trinity College Garden. Review by Victoria Tayler

How do you bring something as titanic as The Great Gatsby to life? This production does it with an addicting mix of inventive choreo, cinematic acting, some well placed umbrellas, and costume to boot. It walks the line between tragedy and parody, and the result is delightful, light-hearted, but touching, immersive, real. Perhaps the best part of this production is that it just exudes excitement. The band is loud and joyous. The cast really gets into the dance numbers. They flounce around in sequined costumes, arms extended. It’s a play made with love (or perhaps adoration), and the enthusiasm gives it the flavour of indulgence, glamour, and euphoria which is the essence of The Great Gatsby. Who needs a Broadway set? George Lyons and Izzy Moore can conjure an aeroplane out of pure imagination, create a dance hall out of grass, build a car out of dresses and umbrellas. I watch them play with reality and remember why I love theatre. The Trinity Players’ Gatsby is both familiar and surpris...
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"Are You Sure?" Burton Taylor Studio. Review by Victoria Tayler

How long is a piece of string? Growing up, my Dad would ask me that all the time, a casual riddle in answer to anything asked too earnestly or too impatiently. “How long till we’re there, Dad?” “How long is a piece of string?” Witty, if a little maddening, definitely watered down by the frequency with which he said it. I think he mainly pursued that line of enquiry for the 10 minutes of peace it afforded him while I pondered the impossible question. Impossible questions (and pondering) is also the name of the game for Deja Vu Productions’ newest show, as one may guess from its provocative, rhetorical title: “Are You Sure?” Penned by writer-director-actor F.C. Zeri, “Are You Sure?” struck a chord with me, obsessed as it is with similar imagery: string, fathers, unanswerable questions. Although here we are not preoccupied so much with the length of a piece of string as we are with cutting it (in half, and in half, and in half again), the puzzle is the same. The answer is either infinitel...
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