The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

Things you don’t need to know before seeing 4:48 Psychosis at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon: 1. That this is the original cast, who premiered the play 25 years ago. 2. That 4:48am is the time (pinpointed by a study conducted at Nottingham University) when suicidal ideation is at its strongest. 3. That the playwright, Sarah Kane, committed suicide at the age of 28 after writing it. The question is, does it help to know these things? Does the knowledge that this is not just a creative stab at clinical depression but a true howl from the depths give it a degree of authenticity that it would otherwise have lacked? Does the presence of Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter confer a sense of commemoration on the silver anniversary of the author’s tragic death? The answer, I think, is that the play – and the production – are strong and authentic enough to penetrate the emotional carapaces of the most sceptical of observers, even without the heart-breaking context hovering, u...

Between The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus , two of the most powerful and serious dramas of the late 20th century, Peter Shaffer dashed off Black Comedy , a slapstick farce that lasted just one act and really had just one funny idea. Shaffer himself was so embarrassed at the simplicity of it that he didn't even want to write the play. But National Theatre maestros Laurence Olivier and Ken Tynan insisted. And thank goodness they did, because that one simple idea is so original, so enticing, and so pregnant with the potential for visual humour, it just demands to be written. The idea is: it's a power cut. But light and dark are transposed, so when the characters can see, the audience is staring at a dark stage, and when the characters are groping blindly around, we can see everything. Yes please. The scenario is no more than a plot to explore and exploit the potential of this wonderful idea. Sculptor Brindsley and his fiancee Carol want to impress her Dad and a visiting wealthy...

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...

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...

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...

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...