The Point of No Return follows BeFrank‘s tradition of verbatim theatre, based on real-life interviews with a range of people on all sides of modern stories of conflict. This show tackles the recent events in Ukraine, pre-empting the current crisis, in which Ukraine’s position as the geographical and ideological pivot between Russia and the West divided the country.
In the last few years, Idle Motion have been taking the world by storm with their particular brand of physical and visual storytelling, and their newest show, Shooting with Light, is the latest, and most mature, in their exceptional canon of work.
Shooting with Light began as a piece about photography, but came alive during the research period when the company uncovered the remarkable story of Gerda Taro, the pioneering war photographer who has been almost forgotten by history, largely because of her gender.
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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.
Rhum and Clay have been one of my favourite companies ever since I saw the amazing A Strange Wild Song a year and a half ago. Formed at the world-famous l’Ecole Internationale Jacques LeCoq by three students before they graduated, Rhum and Clay are supremely talented storytellers with a sense of the theatrical which employs any and every device possible to sweep its audience along with the story.
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.
Sex Idiot was first created four years ago and, before the performance, Bryony was at pains to remind me that it is part of her earlier canon of work which has matured significantly since then. But I am in haste to make up for lost time and Bryony’s work has been on my ‘must-see-but-haven’t-managed-to-yet’ list for too long, so it seemed fitting that I started with the earlier stuff and can work my way forward from here.
David Byrne of the New Diorama Theatre, wrote an open letter in response to the latest NPO funding round. It’s one of the most positive, refreshing and exciting letters I have ever seen about arts funding, and I think it’s worth preserving for posterity. The letter was published in The Guardian, but here is the text in full:
Watching the Arts Council’s funding announcements, celebrations and commiserations fizz on my Twitter timeline last week, I was reminded of a panel I sat on just a year ago. I was next to an artistic director of a very well-subsidised London theatre who said the line that I’d heard many times before: “If our NPO grant, our Arts Council subsidy, gets cut, salami sliced any further, we will no longer be able to afford to take risks.”
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Belka Productions is dedicated to presenting rare Russian and European texts, and it was therefore fitting that my first encounter with their work was a fusion of both – an adaptation of three stories by Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian emigré who lived for a while in West Germany. The play is a strange Russo-German amalgamation: evoking Isherwood‘s Berlin, as interpreted by Ebb and Fosse, and combining the detachment of Brecht with the lack of moral finality of Chekov, which would leave you unsatisfied were it not for the perfidious, yet magnetic central character.
There are too few comedies on the small-scale scene these days, mainly because it is one of the most difficult genres to get right, but PIT are masters of it and Kubrick3 (tongue-twistingly pronounced ‘Kubrick cubed’) is the latest gem in their canon.
As PIT shows so often are, Kubrick3 is inspired by a true story – that of Alan Conway, described in the publicity as a “failed businessman and unsuccessful homosexual [who] decides his life might improve if he just tells people he’s award-winning film director Stanley Kubrick.” And from that premise comes a fast-paced, roller-coaster ride of hilarious proportions.
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Night Light Theatre is a devising company and Rift Zone is their latest show, directed by Rich Rusk (Associate Director of Gecko), and based on the company’s experience during a trip to Iceland.
The set is the first thing that strikes you as you wait for the performance to begin, dominated by coloured light bulbs on pendants, some of which hang at different levels over the playing space, and some of which are tangled together to decorate a crude throne at the centre of the back wall. Music is playing, live, as you enter the space; strange, unearthly music which, as the lights go down, is swelled by three vocalists, trying-out sounds which, at first, present a cacophony of meaningless syllables, but which gradually come together to create harmony and the beginning of a narrative. And this is a glimpse of the show to come.
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