An unexplainable claustrophobic nuisance gradually pervade my untested frail limbs when the stage sparkles to life, diverting me from my dreamy yearning for white wine and Madagascan-vanilla ice-cream at the interval. The sordidness of the rocky and craggy scenography anaesthetises me from the glamorous formality of the auditorium, with blinding torches on robust helmets remorselessly stinging my confident imperturbability like a treacherous mosquito. I am catapulted, descending anxiously underground via a wobbly and unstable lift, in the surreal reality – if you pardon my jeu de mots or, in other terms, wordplay – of the gritty life of 1980s miners.

From the moment this production of Equus begins, it succeeds in engulfing its audience into the world it creates. Peter Shaffer’s text returns to the London stage in a co-production between Theatre Royal Stratford East and the English Touring Theatre and it’s a production that delivers on every level. It conjures up disturbing imagery in its staging choices that echo the characters feelings, as well as pay detailed attention to every movement made by the actors. This all results in creating a world that both fascinates and repels its audience for all the right reasons.

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” Anyone who’s ever had a parent can relate to Philip Larkin’s famous opening to This Be The Verse. Larkin goes on to write “but they were fucked up in their turn”, a line that drips with the stark reality that damage is quite often an inherited gift. I mention this because bequeathed melancholy is pertinent to French playwright Florian Zeller’s work.

Courtesy of Marc Brenner.

Iskandar R. Sharazuddin’s Silently Hoping taps into the topic of ‘duality’ – being of mixed raced heritage and questioning cultural identity. The concept of identity is a complex one, something that will continually be explored within wider conversations. Drawing from his Southeast Asian-British identity, Iskander looks to explore this crucial topic. Ahead of Silently Hoping‘s run at this year’s Vault festival, Iskander talks to us about his approach towards creating the show, working with director Mingyu Lin and the show’s plans beyond Vault festival.

Currently on a UK tour, The Isle of Brimsker has captured the imaginations of many. A tale of a lone lighthouse keeper joined one day by a mysterious runaway, Frozen Light’s mission to create accessible work rings true. Having met in 2006 whilst studying the Applied Performance Masters course at the University of Kent, both Lucy Garland and Amber Onat Gregory created their very own form of multi-sensory theatre for audiences with profound and multiple learning difficulties (PMLD) and this would become the blueprint for their theatre practice today. Mid-tour, Lucy talked to us about how her time as a support worker has shaped her practice, creating the The Isle of Brimsker specifically for audiences with PMLD and what audiences can expect from the show.

You’d most likely associate the world’s of Augmented and Virtual Reality with gaming – a form of entertainment enjoyed by gaming enthusiasts worldwide; these technologies allowing for participants to escape the real world for however long they so choose. In order for that to happen, hours of content and various scenarios are programmed to make no 2 gaming experiences the same, AøE’s Whist channels into this lucrative world of gaming, a maximum of 10 participant donning 3D glasses and headphones to experience an auditory visual reality like no other.

In the now infamous words of Brenda from Bristol ‘not another one!’ was exactly my reaction when hearing the season announcement that Tartuffe would be making its way to the Lyttelton stage at the National Theatre. But, you can never have too many plays by dead white guys, so off I went to Molière’s comedy classic that flirts fact with fiction and pokes fun at the bourgeoisie.