Pop and quirk; bright lights, electric costume and pink hair, welcome to the contemporary Eastern theatre company, Theatre Margot. The stage is bare, bar a black door at the back; the door that symbolises a bleak view from the Cherry Orchard.
The Grimeborn Festival at the Arcola Theatre is back for its ninth year. Offering reimagined classics, obscure masterpieces, and interesting new work, Grimeborn is one of the summer festival highlights in London, taking opera aficionados on a journey of discovery. One of the productions definitely worth seeing is Gariné by Dikran Tchouhadjian, the first opera composer of the Ottoman Empire and known during his lifetime as “the Armenian Verdi” and “the Oriental Offenbach”.
Will they, won’t they? The question that plagues every sitcom as audiences dedicate their evenings to watching the sexual tension between those two characters you just know will get together eventually. James Fritz takes the well-known trope and strips it of its television environment, suddenly isolating the eponymous “greatest love story of our time” couple from a world in which it’s acceptable to break up and get together again across ten years. We’re faced with characters doubting themselves and each other, forcing the audience to consider the flaws behind the perfect TV relationship.
DugOut returns to the Fringe with this new devised show, about a group of small town nobodies, who take on the local property-mogul casino owner Mickey, to save their favourite local boozer “The Sunset”. Punctuated by slick music and lightning fast movement sequences, The Sunset Five is exactly the sort of show you want to fill your days with at the Fringe.
Bruce is essentially a square sponge, a little bigger than a human head, with a slit two-thirds down creating the crease for a large, gaping mouth. He has circular ping-pong ball eyes, in an expression of ambiguous surprise. His life force is comprised of the actors/puppeteers Tim Watts and Wyatt Nixon-Lloyd, who are part of Weeping Spoon Productions, based in Perth, Australia.
Danny Braverman’s one man show, Wot? No Fish!! is one of the most thoroughly endearing pieces of theatre you’re likely to see this summer. It portrays the marriage of Braverman’s great aunt and uncle, Ab and Celie Solomons, which spanned from 1926 to 1982. Beyond the biographical content, the play provides a broader view of life in the Jewish community, as London passed through seismic, societal changes brought on by war, its aftermath and modernity itself.
Down and Out in Paris and London is a brand new theatrical take on George Orwell’s autobiographical novel, with a modern twist. It is in collaboration with PIT and Greenwich Theatre, with supporting funds from Arts Council England. Written and directed by the New Diorama Theatre’s artistic director, David Byrne and co-directed by Kate Stanley, it is now experiencing sell out performances at the Pleasance Theatre, Edinburgh.
Baila, which translates as ‘dances’ in Spanish, could not sum up the Southern American landscape any better! Dance is an integral part of the continent’s culture, it’s an alternative language that allows for the articulation of expression, restoration of history, socialisation with members of the community… It is one of the life forces of the continent.
The Clown of Clown‘s is part of The Arcola‘s annual Grimeborn Festival, a series that showcases some of the more experimental offerings from the world of classical opera and ballet. Historically, the clown and the melancholic have always been close relations, particularly in literature. Whether Shakespeare’s fool, hounding Lear with intimations of mortality or Heinrich Böll’s clown, an alcoholic squandering his talents and pining after his ex wife, the jester has often been deployed as a powerful, ironic symbol for the unattainability of human happiness. Constella Ballet & Orchestra‘s production taps into this dark heritage, exploring the sinister side of the mythical fool, their experimental approach yields thrilling results.
You know as soon as you enter into the world of My Beautiful Black Dog – where Brigitte Aphrodite welcomes her audience members in sparkly shorts and even more sparkly platform heels – that this is going to be a distinctive and very personal performance. From the outset Brigitte addresses her crowd directly, and continues to respond to them throughout. At times it feels like a party rather than a production, but that seems to be half the point. Because the more intimately we connect with her, the closer we come to understanding the very real origins of Aphrodite’s show.
