The Flying Roast Goose melded charming storytelling and aesthetic experimentation, but ultimately lacked bite. Conceived by Paula Siu in association with Out of Chaos and Yellow Earth Theatre, the production followed the story of a Cantonese street-food stall owner and her pet goose Yong Yong through the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in the 1940s. Playful and very watchable, The Flying Roast Goose was certainly a good entry into a topic that some audience members may know little about, with Eastern stories often being neglected on the Western stage.

Continue reading

Today marks the beginning of one of the most talked about sporting competitions of the last 4 years. As the world gears itself for a summer of heartbreak, triumph and union, it’s fair to say to say that the next month will shape up to be quite an interesting one. Located in the heart and soul of one of the most celebrated footballing nations in the world, Brazil will welcome the world’s media to revel in the pitch side dramas of the tournament, but whilst the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi are admired the world over, it may become very easy to forget about the important issues such as homelessness, and the millions of young people that face this as a reality…

Continue reading

Following a highly successful run first at the Nottingham Playhouse then at London’s Almeida theatre, Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s Nineteen Eighty-Four transfers to the West End’s London Playhouse Theatre, in collaboration with Headlong.

Continue reading

“I don’t want to have to think about race.” Young Jean Lee says about her latest production, ‘The Shipment’, which is being performed for the first time in the UK as part of London’s LIFT festival, opened to a predominantly white, middle aged, upper middle class audience.

Continue reading

The vampire and the awkward teen. At first glance, Let the Right One In is befitting of a genre that has captured the nervous hearts of teenagers worldwide, probably because its pointy-toothed protagonists reflect the typically tween- and teenage gripes of alienation and otherness that muddle the path to the adult world. Let the Right One In explores these themes, but opens them up to a much wider social context, successfully including us all in the question of ‘otherness’ and what it means to be human.

Continue reading

A shy hero. Grizzled older hero that is far more important than he initially seems. Schoolgirls in uncomfortable-to-watch attires. Cyclical storytelling. Your Mother. Pyramid head. A plot that defies expectation and ends comfortably unsatisfyingly. Prophecy.  The good people at Fuel Theatre have just staged a japanese video game, but that description by no means does The Roof justice.

Continue reading

In Good Company, is a production composed of six new works by the dancers of the Hofesh Shechter Company: five live contemporary dance pieces and one film. Maybe it’s because I’m not a dancer. Maybe the only way you can enjoy, or even understand what is happening on stage is if you’re a dancer.

Continue reading

“Welcome to Rome ” is how Octavius Caesar frostily receives the long-absent Mark Antony on his return from Egypt, where he has since forsaken his responsibilities as a triumvir of Rome – and as a husband – for the love of Queen Cleopatra and the sensuous and lavish decadence of Egypt. Antony and Cleopatra is a play of two civilisations, indeed two different worlds, and Jonathan Munby’s production serves this conflict well, flitting seamlessly between the austere and definitively masculine world of Rome and the impassioned and restless Egypt that is Queen Cleopatra’s.

Continue reading

“No specific words can express the meaning of tonight’s performance. Rather, these pieces are permeated with our conceptions of ‘the body’ and physical practice. So what your eyes perceive is exactly what our hearts hope to express.” This quote from Tao Ye expresses exactly what has been achieved in his creations ‘4 and 5’. It was impossible to encapsulate a single moment or meaning as separate from the whole, such was the fluidity of the piece. Thoughts, feelings, associations would spring to mind but none could define or describe the entirety of the dances.

Continue reading

Close your eyes. Imagine you are back in time, a young child again, sitting on your grandfathers’ knee whilst he slowly drinks his whisky, savours every deep breath from his roll up, and tells you a story, a story you have heard a thousand times before, his favourite story of the Wild West that you’ve grown to love over the years just as much as he. That is what watching ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ felt like; an overwhelming sense of familiarity, but unique in its presence in the Western field.

© Jethro Compton Ltd

Continue reading