The Mountain Bluebird is ragingly current, yet disconnected. It is a seemingly complicated play that, when you break it down, becomes a simple one. It is the debut of playwright Jamie Eastlake and posesses that charming thing first plays often have, over-ambition.
The atmosphere in the Courtyard bar before Brendon Burns’ gig feels similar to waiting in the queue for a roller coaster: there’s a distinct feel of people who are excited for what they know is about to happen, and people who’ve never seen Burns and are bloody terrified. The location is certainly different: a student union bar as the venue for an award-winning international comedian. It’s all part of Burns’ latest tour, Outside the Box. Following in the footsteps of Doug Stanhope and Neil Hamburger, the tour deliberately avoids large arenas and opts for secluded or intimate venues, off the beaten track of the comedy circuit. What follows is a unique night of comedy unlike any other I’ve seen in York.
Adapted from the 1998 Oscar winner, Shakespeare in Love is the latest screen to stage production to hit the West End. The story imagines William Shakespeare writing Romeo and Juliet. In auditions for his new play he meets and falls in love with Viola, who disguises herself as a boy so that she can fulfil her dream of acting. It is a warm romantic comedy of errors come drama. The merits of the film version make it clear to see why it would make an excellent transfer to stage.
With the 100th anniversary of the start of World War One last year, it seemed a natural choice by the Theatre Royal Stratford East to revive the dark musical that re-examines the established view of ‘The Great War’. Following this revival last year, the same production started on its six month national tour last month where I saw it, on its first leg.
Dark Side is the latest in Artful Badger’s Wild World series, a confusing anthology of shows that will leave you scratching your head. It‘s mad, it‘s beautiful and it will get you on your feet.
The name Dara seems to me closer to Dublin than Delhi, but the show that opened at the Lyttleton this week marks one of the National’s first engagements with Islam. The script follows a classic formula: the beloved eldest son, Dara, the foolish father whose favouritism provokes the vengeance of Aurangzeb, a son who, despite his legitimacy, is a right bastard.
32 Rue Vandenbranden is part of the London International Mime Festival and is a UK Premiere. The production was created by the Belgium company, Peeping Tom, in 2009 and has already received several awards.
Using a very particular Japanese art of painted screens and puppetry, American puppeteer Basil Twist presents an hour-long piece – Dogugaeshi, as part of the London International Mime Festival. Blending music and art on top of puppet work, Twist effectively makes this style his own, with a seemingly endless amount of hand-painted screens opening and closing, and some modern music thrown in (who knew Ethel Merman’s classic “No Business Like Show Business” had a place within a Japanese puppetry piece?).
Noodles may well be the wackiest show I have seen in London for a very long time. NoFit State Circus, a UK company, yet presenting only foreign performers, created this contemporary circus piece around noodles and five bizarre characters obsessed with it. These strings that look like noodles are everywhere on stage, almost as if one is entering Noodle land.
Touring this year after a successful run at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival is The Paper Birds with their verbatim show Broke. The show was created using interviews and questionnaires about money, debt and consumerism. Although it doesn’t come to any solid conclusion on the matter of money, it does offer many different viewpoints and insight into how we view finances today.
