This is a perfect extraction;  after outsourcing a part of my mind into my book, I have now outsourced my body, too, and can let it do tours and all the unpleasant stuff.

Tonight writer Thomas Melle is holding a lecture on instability. However, the speaker is not Thomas Melle himself but a copy in the shape of a humanoid robot. Stefan Kaegi of Rimini Protokoll, an award-winning  company focusing on documentary theatre, explores the consequences of putting a humanoid robot on stage. What are the reactions of Thomas Melle himself and of the audience? Can this kind of performance still be described as “theatre”?

Courtesy of Gabriela Neeb.

Kinky Boots, currently on its UK & Ireland Tour tells the story of Charlie Price [Joel Harper–Jackson] and his determination to turn around his failing family shoe factory by tapping into a niche market; stiletto heeled boots for drag queens. Meanwhile Lola [Kayi Ushe] overcomes the prejudices of Charlie and his fellow co-workers, helping them to accept men in frocks. It all ends harmoniously in Milan, where the business gets a glamorous reboot.

The rights of women and young girls will continue to be a talking point and an issue continually fought for until equality has truly been achieved. Roughly ’15 million girls are married every year before they reach 18 years old, 1 in 3 girls in the developing world are married by age 18 and 1 in 9 married by age 15′ (stats provided by charity Girls Not Brides). These stats are horrifying to be reading in 2019 but sadly, a disheartening reality globally.

Director Christopher Rüping had always felt detached from ancient Greek drama. The chorus, the language, and the role of fate created an artificial world that had nothing to do with our reality. When watching Greek drama, he found that he began to be engaged by the play only when it was almost over. When those dramas were written, they were presented at the Dionysia, a drama competition (Agon) that went on for five days. Dionysia were ecstatic festivals with free wine and free food, starting early in the morning and going on until late at night. Christopher Rüping knew he could not recreate the Dionysia but he decided to be bold and to present a tetralogy, composed of three dramas and one satyr play. Ten hours of theatre would allow his antique drama to unfold.

Courtesy of Julian Baumann.

There’s more than just euphemism to unpack in Ellie Kendrick’s Hole at the Royal Court. Featuring an electric line up of actors, burlesque babes and music artists- fierce, fabulous women are aplenty. Running at 60 minutes, Kendrick’s writing debut bubbles with rage and spits in the eye of patriarchy.

Courtesy of The Other Richard.

An indulgent dinner with Dionysus is always going to be a hard invite to turn down but I really did get lucky – proverbially – when I picked one of the show’s two clothing optional dates in November.

Out in an abandoned back alley, four girls play in the muck. They inhabit different eras across the twentieth century but through the gap in a wire fence they’re born again into a timeless no-man’s land as their childhood selves. This is the wasteground of Charlotte Keatley’s play, an abstract and non-linear setting where all four characters can see themselves as equals. Their camaraderie is discarded here, forgotten in the main action of the play which pits women against one another.

For every ridiculous scrape P. G. Wodehouse’s hapless hero Bertie Wooster lands himself in, the ever resourceful Jeeves is able to fish him out. That’s the premise that’s kept Wodehouse’s most well-loved double act entertaining readers for generations- but how to translate it to stage? It goes to follow that just as Wooster seems almost too nonsensical to function, this adaptation of Code of the Woosters would require a little suspension of disbelief. Jeeves’ ability to conjur up a number of solutions is akin to high society fairy dust, and the result is a pretty magical.

The hints of a troubled city create a current under-running Rona Munro’s 1991 play Bold Girls, not so much dominating the action rather than leaking through.