#Haters is the first professional play by Odd Eyes Theatre, written and directed by Artistic Director, Emilia Teglia, and takes at its subject the real-life incident in 2014 in which a young Hackney man was stabbed and staggered into a local bar, covered in blood. The bar owner called emergency services, saw to the victim’s needs and, afterwards, in an effort to lighten the tone, tweeted about the incident with the hashtag #Welcome to Hackney. The backlash on twitter was immense.
From the publicity, it’s difficult to anticipate what this show is going to be before you see it. Its billing, as “part-silent film, part-thriller”, based on the case of the Hong Kong Serial Dog Killer, promises a dark and dour production which belies its engaging, comic and whimsical nature. Performed by four actors, who each take two parts – one of a dog owner and the other of a dog – it weaves the stories of four disparate souls whose commonality (if you excuse the pun) lies in the fact that they all walk their dogs on Hampstead Heath.
Silent Uproar are a Hull-based, New Diorama Emerging Company and, as such, presented their latest production Pig at the London venue in September 2015.
Pig is a clever title for a clever production. It’s a show about cops and robbers: Ted and Coral are jobbing cops, beat-bobbies who want to rise through the ranks and know all too well the downside of policing in the UK in the twenty-first century. Gaz is a likeable career criminal, who names his pet pigeon in hommage to the way in which the young hero of the Ken Loach film names his pet kestrel, hence the title of the piece.
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has been on my must-see list of shows for quite a while, so when I found out it was going on tour, I happily headed out to the New Theatre in Oxford to cross it off the list.
Based on the autobiographical book of the same name by Mark Haddon, the show concerns autistic teenager, Christopher, whose mother died several years previously, and who lives on his own with his Dad. When a neighbour’s dog is murdered with a garden fork, the body left on the front lawn for all to see, Christopher sets out to act detective and find out who committed the heinous crime, becoming more and more determined as the world tries to convince him to leave well alone. What transpires when he finally discovers the perpetrator and motivation for the crime, changes his life forever.
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There isn’t much to link these two pieces, other than that they are showcases for students graduating from Central. Push, directed by Catherine Alexander and Grainne Byrne is a devised piece based on the novel of the same name by Sapphire. Citizen Puppet is also devised, in collaboration with acclaimed puppet company Blind Summit, and is a whimsical piece of (allegedly) verbatim theatre centring around the events of a well-known fairy-tale.
The Talented Mr. Ripley is something of a departure for The Faction, being more modern than their usual source material, and also an adaptation, by Faction Artistic Director Mark Leipacher, of a novel by Patricia Highsmith. But the choice of subject is not the only departure for this New Diorama Associate Company. One is used to seeing The Faction perform on a bare stage, but in this production the space is dominated by a raised square platform, painted white and filling the black box space, with only a small corridor around the outside and a square pit in the centre. Gone, too, is The Faction’s fluid, shifting ensemble – the whole weight of this production rests heavily on the shoulders of Christopher Hughes, who plays the creepily obsessive Ripley.
I have wanted to see this show ever since it first began to create a buzz, and the perfect opportunity presented itself when it came to my local theatre, the Wycombe Swan, this week. I was, however, a little worried that my expectations were so high that the show would never live up to them.
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He Had Hairy Hands is billed as ‘a brand new tale of supernatural slaughter’ and the show is a manic whirlwind of fast-paced physical comedy, hilarious one-liners and stunning animations. It takes as its setting the sleepy village of Hemlock-Under-Lye, whose legend of a benign werewolf suddenly takes a turn for the macabre when the bodies of well-loved residents are found, disembowelled and mutilated, resulting in a storm of hommages to Victorian melodrama, Hammer horror and classic detective films, raining down upon the audience at a furious pace.
This co-production by Birmingham Repertory Theatre and Hackney Empire ought to be a sure-fire success, written by Danny Robins, who penned the popular Radio 4 comedy series of the same name, and starring the talented Lenny Henry. Sadly, however, it was the most disappointing piece of theatre I have seen in a very long time.
This year, The Faction have departed from their usual Spring repertory season of large-scale ensemble plays, to produce an extra series, or rather three series, of short, one-person performances, adapted from original classics. On 16th September, I saw one of those sets: The Man with the Flower in his Mouth by Luigi Pirandello, Medea, adapted by Emily Juniper from Euripedes and Metamorphosis, by Faction-regular Gareth Jandrell, from the original Kafka.