The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

This review was written for Daily Information , and appears on their website . Dennis Kelly’s 2006 play kick-started his career and simultaneously kicked traditional playwriting in the teeth. This week Love and Money is staged at the BT by newly-founded theatre company Matchbox (tagline ‘a striking new production company’) – and they seem to have struck gold. If you liked Kelly’s 2013 Channel 4 series Utopia (and if you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favour: episode one is 10p to download on Amazon Prime) Love and Money will fill you with joy. It has Kelly’s unique style, where characters are somehow simultaneously larger than life and smaller than human, and where they do bizarre, extreme, disturbing things for apparently no reason, but by the end it all makes exactly the amount of sense that Kelly intended. In other words, it’s a wild ride, but you know you can trust the driver. The structure has all the tortuous logic of a cryptic crossword: divided into eight discrete scenes, t...

This review was written for Daily Info, and appears on their website . Perhaps I should stop reading programmes. But no! They are the places where you can find out who’s acting what role, and what else they’ve been in (which shouldn’t be interesting but for some reason is, like looking in someone else's shopping trolley). Plus it’s always fun to check in on the list of charitable patrons. The trouble starts if the director has decided to offer a mission statement, their vision for the production we’re about to see. That statement is intended to guide the audience’s perception of the show, to clarify the artistic interpretation of the text. Bad idea. It’s a bad idea for two reasons: 1) any production worth its salt shouldn’t need to be explained in advance. It should speak for itself, bold and clear. And 2) it invites the reader to judge the play they are about to watch against the claims made in the programme. In this case those claims include, for example, that making Prospero fe...

Deuteronomy is the last of the Five Books of Moses. It’s the one that repeats a lot of the things that were said in the second, third and fourth books. In fact it’s known in Hebrew as Mishneh Torah , Repetition of the Law. But rather than simply telling the stories, it delves into motivation and self-analysis. So it’s the ideal title for a play that features two characters who analyse themselves, their purpose, and their language repetitively without ever truly getting anywhere new. If that sounds familiar, it should. Deuteronomy is a true, unabashed, full-on absurdist production. It’s an open love-letter to Waiting for Godot , and – against all the odds – it’s a very good one too. The parallels are almost embarrassingly obvious. The characters are two tramps, sitting and talking through a sequence of half-comic routines in an alienated wasteland. One of them comes on dragging a large coffin behind him. They talk about leaving, but they never do. If Samuel Beckett was still alive, he...

We’ve all had the experience of waking from a bizarre dream that seemed to make perfect logical sense whilst asleep, and then spending several minutes clawing our way back to reality, nonplussed at the notion that what seemed so sensible in our subconscious has become total insanity now we’re awake. Imagine if your entire life was like that. That’s the experience of Punk ’s central character Emory: a man who seriously believes that he is turning gradually into a machine; a man who lip-synchs the narration of his life through a faceless stand-up comedian; a man who relives his parents’ deaths through illicit videos exchanged with mysterious women on park benches. In Punk we see the world through Emory’s eyes, and it’s an unnerving, viscerally challenging, but ultimately unique experience. At the start of this play I found myself on the outside looking in. Why were all these characters behaving so weirdly when they seemed quite normal at first sight? For example, at one point two of Emo...

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website . I never managed to see Fleabag in the theatre. But the experience must have been something like watching Gabriel Blackwell’s first staged play, the astonishingly vivid, allusive and life-enhancing monologue, Cruelty . It’s essentially a 70-minute poem, as captivating as a brilliant dancer caught in the flashing lights of a club: you may not be able to follow every turn they make, but somehow that makes the movement and the rhythm even more compelling. And in the tradition of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Oli, the central character, addresses us directly throughout, sharing his winks, his moods, his lusts, and ultimately his trauma. As Oli, Luke Nixon accomplishes this not just with a great performance but with truly irresistible charisma. I swear, every member of that audience came out feeling that Nixon had been addressing them personally, eyes gazing into your own with a seductive combination of cheek and charm. W...

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website. Nathaniel Jones scurries on to the Burton Taylor stage, arms full of battery-operated candles and bits of script which he drops as he goes, and nervously tries to arrange his tiny collection of props into something resembling a set while gulping anxiously at the audience and asking Evie the technician to turn the lights up. It’s an act. He knows it. We know it. We know it because he tells us that today is Midsummer (it’s actually February), and with that one statement it’s clear that we are watching a play, and not a piece of live stand-up. This is the sort of confident, clever, light-touch audience manipulation that marks out Thamesis as something a bit special. Last week Leah Aspden was acting in the disarmingly fourth-wall-breaking Every Brilliant Thing . Now she’s back directing Thamesis , and it’s another play that tickles and tugs at the boundary between performance and confession. Written and performe...

This review was written for Daily Information and appears on their website. Two illustrious actors, married to each other, get home one night after their latest Shakespearean performance some time in the 1970s, and proceed to have a row about acting, fidelity, fame and long-buried secrets. I can’t think of a more appropriate premise for a play mounted in, of all places, the Burton Taylor Studio, named for one of the most tempestuous relationships in the history of stage and screen, that of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. In writer-director Anna Stephen’s script there’s a definite flavour of the famous Burton-Taylor turbulence. Sylvia and Harold have grudges against each other that go back years, wounds too deep to heal, too painful to probe, and it’s all crusted over with a façade of affection that slowly crumbles before our eyes. Stephen’s dialogue is realistic. The characters constantly revolve around the points they are desperate to come out with, but always shy away from stati...

I guess the warning signs were there from the start. In his programme notes (two full pages of tight text headlined THE HISTORY OF THE PLAY) Noah Wild tells us that ‘everyone’ describes his production differently. Some say it’s about a confused boy, others that it’s about eating disorders, coming of age, masculinity or an exploration of life writing… as if all of these interpretations and more are to be found in the multifaceted work that is I Will Delete This Story . He says these different interpretations reveal as much about the watcher as the writer. The truth is not so universal: it’s about a confused boy who writes poetry and comes of age as a man while his sister has an eating disorder. Wild also tells us that he sensed the material would work ‘like a teenage version of Sarah Kane’. OK. Stop. First of all, writing about vaguely Kane-like subject matter does not make you a ‘version’ of her. Kane’s genius lies not just in her material, but in her writing and her dramatic presentat...