been seeing: riverrun

Riverrun (The Shed, 19th March) is an extraordinary experience. It starts with Olwen Fouere silent and barefoot walking to the microphone and then begin the words; the voice of the river in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. It's so sudden it takes a couple of minutes to adapt to the language but then without noticing you find yourself immersed. Fouere gives a body to Joyce's language, her interpretation feels powerful, natural and above all authentic. It's a testament in itself that she is able to bring emotion and understanding to a text that is almost exclusively regarded as academic. It's an exhilarating 60 minutes that passes by in a flash.

been seeing: Single White Slut

Tim Key is the master of deliciously unsettling comedy. Glib musings follow unexpectedly moving observations and an occasional audience rebuke.  Yet it is all, somehow, balanced in perfect harmony. Single White Slut (Arcola Tent, 10th March) was slightly different. Perhaps sitting in the round didn't quite suit the schtick or maybe it was the audience participation often stunting the show rather than adding to it; while trying to keep up with Key's nonchalance any audience offerings came off as rude rather than funny.  Whatever it was, the show felt more drawn out and less slick than previous years. The jokes are all still funny and the stories are still smart and cringingly brilliant but there was something about it that felt less exciting than previous shows. Still, there's nobody else out there that comes close.

been seeing: A Taste of Honey, Analog.Ue

I had a complete internet meltdown recently (literally, I think the wires melted or something) so I'm a bit late with my round-up.  Mercifully I've only seen a couple of things in the past two weeks so there's not much catching up to do.  First up is A Taste of Honey (Lytteton, 21st February) which is arguably now mostly known for being a huge reference point for Morrissey and, I confess, the reason I wanted to see it.  Time has eroded its shock value but what stops it from falling into an outdated period piece is the remaining, sometimes poignant, portrait of the relationship between mother and daughter.  They are a frenzy of contradictory emotions; bitter, flippant, self-deprecating, serious, dependent, disappointed and under it all, really just wanting more for and from each other.   

Analog.Ue (Lyttelton, 26th Febuary) is Daniel Kitson's return to the National Theatre.  There are clear shades of Beckett, in particular Krapp's Last Tape; 46 tapes spinning fragments of a yarn.  It's an ode to memory, loss and old recording machines.  But it's also about storytelling, about how we piece tales together from remnants of our past and how they live on in into the future, the bits that are kept and the bits that are scrapped.  It's great but to explain it any more than that would be spoiling it.  

been seeing: Mojo

Two performances really stand out in Mojo (Harold Pinter, 3rd February); Daniel Mays as smart, cocksure cockney Potts, juggling bravado and twitchy fear and Ben Whishaw's strange, fidgety and increasingly pained Baby.  Mojo skittle-skattles with Jez Butterworth's now signature lyrical dialogue and Ian Rickson's direction has echoes of Jerusalem with the loud, sudden opening and closing of acts that invoke a seedy and violent 1950s Soho.  The language is its strength; hypnotic, it sings, bouncing around the stage, passed on from one person to the next in a non-stop rally of bickering, blame and outright fights.      

been seeing: The Light Princess, The Weir

I generally shy away from musicals and saw The Light Princess (Lyttelton, 29th January) almost by accident.  This is a feel-good, pretty little thing with a fantastic central performance from Rosalie Craig as the princess who floats but overall the songs are too sugary and immemorable and it lacked that dark wit that is expected from a fairytale. I found myself astonished by the brilliant acrobats and cute puppeteering more than the show itself.  


In The Weir (Wyndham, 1st February) four people in a small pub in rural Ireland start to tell ghost stories and in doing so expose something profoundly human and real about themselves.  We see their empathy, their fears and their loneliness as one by one, buoyed by whiskey they gather the confidence to tell their tale.  The small details in Conor McPherson's story are beautiful; Jack's remark about his house being away from the through road gives a sense of the men being caught in time and tied to the past.  This is a quiet play on the surface that finds comedy in the familiar but it is what's not said that has the biggest impact; it is compassion and love for each other that bind the men.  When mysterious newcomer Valerie shocks them with her story she isn't ridiculed or appeased, instead they offer her tale respect and we know that here she's found a safe home.                      

been seeing: Blurred Lines, The Body of an American

In a short 70 minutes Blurred Lines (The Shed, 20th January) brilliantly weaves a collage of brief sketches detailing everyday sexism. Largely devised by the cast, it ends up sounding unnervingly accurate and meshes the less obvious, throwaway sexist remarks found in the workplace with the truly horrific reality of violent assaults, showing them to all be endemic of the same problem. The real stand-out scene is at the end; an outrageous, staged Q&A with a dominant male director and timid female cast member that perfectly puts it all into perspective.

Another short play that lithely explores a myriad of ideas is The Body of an American (The Gate, 25th January, matinee). On the surface it is a conversation between playwright Dan O'Brien and Photojournalist Paul Watson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his photo of the body of an American soldier and is left haunted by the soldier in every sense. A three year email exchange culminates in an Arctic meeting and Dan and Paul find an unexpected commonality. The result is a complex play full with the idea of guilt, consequence, loneliness, family, duty, and otherness.