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"The Forsyte Saga" Parts One and Two. The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

The words ‘Forsyte’ and ‘Saga’ have powerful connotations: the first with the late Bruce Forsyth, avuncular catch-phrase king of Saturday evening TV; the second with the kinds of interminable Norse epics beloved of JRR Tolkien; or, more recently, package holidays for the elderly. In short, this play’s title, though resonant, is scarcely enticing. Not having seen any of the TV incarnations of John Galsworthy’s nine-novel chronicle, I came to the RSC’s ambitious, two-part production anticipating some kind of decades-spanning period piece peopled by interchangeable, stiff-collared chaps with moustaches, and endless ladies in crinolines. Buttock- and brain-fatigue were due to set in at around the four-hour mark. But nothing could be further from the truth. Never mind Brucie: these Forsytes are playing their own traumatic intergeneration game. It’s spellbinding, tragic, redolent of an entire age, and yet at the same time deeply personal. The word that comes to mind is hamartia . Every GCSE ...
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"Circle, Mirror, Transformation". Pilch

If there is such a thing as the afterlife, then Harold Pinter must be looking down from it now, and spluttering with rage. The master of the dramatic pause has been outdone. US wunderkind playwright Annie Baker doesn't just use pauses between sentences. She crafts silence into entire sections of mute dialogue, like an invisible sculptor. Baker forges silence into eloquent, internalised language. And in this practically perfect production, silence is golden. Every time the characters can’t think what to say, or feel inhibited from saying what is really on their minds, a humiliating stillness envelops the stage, populated by unspoken accusations they can’t bring themselves to utter. It’s amazing. Circle, Mirror, Transformation follows four participants and their teacher at a six-week Creative Drama course in Vermont, USA. Over a series of vignettes, we see them move from puzzlement at the awkward drama games teacher Marty makes them play, through frustration at how meaningless the g...
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"The Merchant of Venice". Jesus College Shakespeare Project

If there’s one festival in the calendar that you wouldn’t normally associate with The Merchant of Venice , it’s Christmas. For a start, there’s the Jewish protagonist. But even on top of that, this play is conspicuously lacking in any form of seasonal cheer and goodwill. College traditions, however, stop for no man. The Jesus College tree is up in the dining hall, and it’s squatting right in the middle of the set. What to do? Director Peter Sutton has found the answer, and it comes in the perversion of Christmas into a celebration of commercial transactions. The Jesus Merchant of Venice starts with a boozy seasonal office party in the early 2000s. The partygoers are in full voice, but they aren’t singing Good King Wenceslas. Carols about charity are the last things on their mind. No, they’re singing The Twelve Days of Christmas, a song all about the obscene, mountingly extravagant presents given from one supposed true love to another. And that’s exactly what this play is about: love e...
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W.A. Mozart: The Chamber Concertos: 12, 13, 14. Holywell Music Room

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Mozart yawned, shivered, and reached for his brand-new notebook. The morning of Monday 9 th February 1784 was bright but freezing in Vienna. It was (and still is to this day) the coldest winter on record in Europe, with temperatures dipping below -20C, and the ice on the Danube was four feet thick. It had been like this since November. The Laki volcano that erupted in Iceland the previous year was the cause, but Mozart wasn’t to know that. In his and Constanze’s modest apartment in Judenplatz they had almost run out of wood to burn, and the ice on the river meant that boats carrying new stocks of fuel couldn’t reach the city. Nevertheless, this was the morning that Mozart finished composing his 14 th Piano Concerto. We know this because it was also the first time in his life that he had bought a notebook to record his compositions, and this concerto is on page one. He blew on his fingers. The keys on his fortepiano felt like slivers of ice, and the only way he could stop the ink in h...
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"Doctor Faustus". Keble O'Reilly

Poor old Johann Georg Faust (1466-1541) had no idea what he was starting. A hard-working, itinerant mountebank, he trekked around Germany reading horoscopes, doing magic tricks, and selling fake medicine (once being denied entrance to Nuremberg on the basis that he was a ‘great necromancer and sodomite’). He died when one of his own experiments exploded in his face in a pub near Baden-Württemberg. But somehow the legend got started that he’d sold his soul to the devil. And now look. The Faust parable – a pact that exchanges earthly success for eternal suffering – reaches into our psyches, shows us temptation, and warns us of its consequences. And Western culture has two great dramatic works that tell the story: Goethe’s vast epic Faust and Marlowe’s rather sprightlier five-acter, Doctor Faustus . Of the two, I prefer Goethe. His Dr Faustus has noble ideals: he seeks a moment of perfect transcendence that will elevate him from the drudgery of mankind, and this leads to ruin and horrifi...
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"The Players". Burton Taylor Studio

When I first looked at the programme for The Players  I was a trifle sceptical. "We are a theatre collective and artistic community", it claims, and "We strive to remodel the way that drama is traditionally structured." Really? Give me a break, I thought. This is, after all, Splinters Productions' first ever show. How many times have I read overblown statements like that, only to find they're so much hot air?  But then I looked closer. And I realised that this was that one in a hundred cases where it's all actually true. Co-creators Sasha Ranawake and Camille Branch really did write two different versions of their scenario, and then compile and debate them over the summer. They really did get four separate editors to expand, enhance and deepen their ideas. They really did invite a cavalcade of artists, poets and essayists to respond creatively to their script, and they've gathered all this ancillary work together in a gorgeous, thought-provoking, col...
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"Squat". Pilch

Squat would be a great name for a nightclub, and heading into the Pilch this week that looks like what it is. Clubbers off their faces accost you on the way in asking for a light, red-necked bouncers demand ID, and once inside there's a scuzzy, stained, chequerboard dance floor, some monumentally cute disco lights and a thumping rave track that has all the early arrivers nodding their heads in mute rhythm as they check their phones. It's the closest I've got to a nightclub for years, but things don't seem to have changed much since the days of The Hitman and Her (look it up) . Except... it's not a nightclub. It's a memory of last night's nightclub. And as the cold light of day cruelly illuminates the filthy domestic setting of Juliet Taub's phenomenally enjoyable, sinfully pleasurable new play, we realise that our cast of five frenemies are in fact living in a squat. As with Orla Wyatt's A&E , playing this week at the Burton Taylor Studio, Squa...
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