Cindy Marcolina

There’s nothing like a good comic horror to keep you warm in the wintertime, but you will find no such thing at Southwark Playhouse. The Grim is a badly paced, maladroit absurdist situational thriller that tries too hard to ease its nonexistent suspense with shallow laughter. Mid-60s, London has been seized by a series of murders. Shaun has taken over his family’s funeral home with plenty of imposter syndrome due to his father’s brilliance. His assistant, Robert, is all over the place. Chaos ensues when they take in the corpse of the most violent criminal in Britain, Jackie “The Guillotine” Gallagher.

This is Ivo van Hove’s triumphant return to the West End. He reunites with Bryan Cranston (whom he worked with on Network at the National theatre in 2017) for Arthur Miller’s All My Sons – famously, the playwright’s last attempt at writing a commercial success. Van Hove assembles a tremendous company (Cranston, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Paapa Essiedu, Tom Glynn-Carney, and Hayley Squires) to dissect the exploitative nature of the American Dream, giving a jarring picture of family and loyalty. This is, on the surface, quite the stylistic departure for van Hove. The director decided that less is more here and the result is astonishing.

Housed in a purpose-built venue in Canary Wharf, it’s a behemoth. Adapting it for the stage was always going to be a Herculean task, not only when it comes to pleasing a very passionate fandom, but when we consider the scale and magnitude of the story too. Written by Conor McPherson and directed by Matthew Dunster, it’s an unquestionably impressive achievement with great technical value. The actors are tireless athletes, the theatre is an imposing arena, and the stagecraft is often remarkable. Unfortunately, it’s also a soulless incarnation.

Directed by Miranda Cromwell, it’s a mixed bag: invigorating and galvanising on one hand, sermonic and overly explanatory on the other. Exquisite performances deliver generally mid songs that have a tendency to come up short on poetic narrative, but overdo it on the clichés. A more decisive tonal approach might have made the message hit harder. The continuous reiteration of the piece’s political beliefs and the doubling down on its feminist slant by telling rather than showing us slows the show down dramatically and narratively.

If there is one message that those who were in attendance at More Than One Story LIVE on 9 November absorbed through their skin, it is that “The arts don’t belong to a few, they belong to everyone.” The sentiment was declared proudly by Rory Kinnear in his opening speech and echoed warmly by co-host Shahab Awad, actor and member of Cardboard Citizens. It was sprinkled, allegorised, and spoken boldly throughout the monologues that were presented.

A life coach and his struggling daughter embark on a journey to find their Irish roots. Each of them is running away from something. Joy, who is exceedingly against the idea of leaving for an unplanned trip with her father, is going through a bad breakup; Winston, overly chatty and intrusive, is trying to forget the lawsuit that threatens his so-called career. Nancy Farino’s debut play tries hard to be profound. It looks into how our need for connection is the answer to many of our problems, but – much like its characters – it doesn’t know how to communicate its ideas. Directed by Tessa Walker, Fatherland might as well be a pedestrian radio drama.

Artistic Director of Papatango George Turvey presents the winner of their 2024 New Writing Prize: The Meat Kings! (Inc.) of Brooklyn Heights. Hannah Doran’s debut play thrives under Turvey’s enticing vision, alternating spells of emotional introspection with devastating blows to the gut. 

Cindy Marcolina’s journal. (Not kept in shorthand.) 30 October. London. Left Warren Street Station at 6:42pm, arriving at Camden People’s Theatre at 6:47pm; should have arrived at 6:45, but the streets were busy. Countess Dracula was waiting. Joanna Holden and Jack Kelly team up for a brash look at ageing and menopause in the shape of a quirky adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic novel. There’s a grotesque vaudeville aura to it, with the duo using meta-performance as the supporting framework for their jolly 45-minute show.

The Barbican has the perfect Halloween show. With a multi-media production devised by Elisabeth Gunawan, Daniel York Loh, and Jasmine Chiu, it will destabilise and provoke you. In Chinese mythology, the greedy, selfish, and envious get reincarnated into “hungry ghosts.” Forced to relive their actions until they learn from them, their insatiable, unfulfillable hunger drives them to ingest anything on their path, turning it to ashes. Talk about allegory!

Something wicked this way comes: it’s another exciting high-concept Shakespeare. Director Daniel Raggett moves the action of the Scottish Play to a safe-house pub in the midst of a racketeering war. Succession meets Sons of Anarchy with a hint of The Sopranos in this daring, new production. With a hypnotic tempo that’s almost cinematic in nature, Raggett leaves you on the edge of your seat, gasping for air, mouth gaping and eyes wide. It’s Macbeth like you’ve never seen it before. Is it an extravagant idea on paper? It sure is. Does it work? Flawlessly and explosively so.

For her debut, playwright Jessica Norman leans into the singular speculation that “the people in power” keep us humble citizens from the truth. It’s fascinating stuff. Long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting and directed by Imy Wyatt Corner, This Little Earth is a thin exploration of the debris of grief at a time where reality flickers. It’s alright, but it could be so much more.

It’s an extensive rumination on family, Jewishness, marriage, and the boundaries of emotional infidelity, but it neglects the nuances and peculiarities of the characters, who ultimately remain two-dimensional figurines with very little identity. The narrative is severely self-indulgent, without as much scope or aim as it believes it's offering. It exploits womanhood for the benefit of its male protagonists and under-analyses the consequences of their actions. The direction and company are remarkable, but each element suffers the material.

Miriam’s 15-year-old son is nowhere to be found. How does a mother cope? This life-altering event buries in the cracks of their family dynamic and blows it up. Years on, with his case remaining an unsolved mystery, Miriam firmly believes he is still alive. Nick Payne returns to writing for the stage, debuting a play that’s not quite as groundbreaking as Constellations was, but that brings all the excitement of a well-executed and nimbly staged time fracture. The Unbelievers proposes three crucial moments: we see the chaos of the immediate aftermath, the lingering despair of the first anniversary of Oscar’s disappearance, and, finally, the restless hope Miriam still holds seven years later. But this isn’t a show about a missing kid.

In early 1974, American actress Patty Hearst was brutally abducted from her flat in California by the Symbionese Liberation Army, deemed the first far-left terrorist organisation. Faced with the choice of being released or joining the militia, Hearst decided to stay and fight with the dissidents. She was arrested over a year and a half later, after a series of serious felonies that included a bank robbery. Her 35-year sentence was reduced to 7, then pardoned altogether. Inspired by Hearst’s trial, Katherine Moar writes a look at fame and crime for the #MeToo age.

Kimmings propels the plot with meta-theatrical orchestrated chaos. She toys with tone and pace, which results in an engaging rhythm of information and contemplation. It couldn’t be further from being preachy: Kimmings doesn’t judge. She refuses to employ her own anxious attachment to capitalism as a weapon of comparison or opinion, nor does she use her own experience as a cautionary tale. The fable lies in the covert complexity of the storytelling.

Keelan Kember writes a morally compromised microcosm where art is money, status, violence, and power. It’s a shame it doesn’t fulfil its potential. Instead, it’s tasteless, continually slipping into a vicious circle of stereotyping and triteness. Directed by Merle Wheldon, it doesn’t rise above commonplace comedy even when it’s at its best.

Branded as “366 Daily Inspirations for Writers & Artists,” this compendium of prompts contains an abundance of inspiration. Many books like this exist already, yet award-winning writer and director Jessica Swale has compiled an exciting list of ideas that sets her apart from the rest of the flock. Interestingly, this isn’t aimed at writers of any specific technique or level. A newbie can pick it up, a novelist can decide to test their short-form. A poet might choose to compose in verse; a playwright might concoct a dialogued vignette.

Now that days are getting colder and nights are getting longer, it’s time to get spooky. When a viral video asked women if they’d rather choose to be alone with a man or with a bear last year, the internet exploded. To this day, more than half of the women in the 18-29 range who took part in the online discussion chose the bear, citing fears of violence and lack of safety around male strangers. It’s alarming. Riding that wave, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm has written a revolutionary take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula with a twist that redefines the original. Forget everything you know because nothing is what it seems: it’s time to follow Mina Harker on her own quest.

With a cast as starry as the Ibsen’s Norwegian skies, The Lady from the Sea is adapted into a thrilling, biting comic drama by Simon Stone. It features the theatrical return of Andrew Lincoln alongside the stage debuts of Academy Award winner Alicia Vikander, Brutalist actor Joe Alwyn, and rising star Isobel Akuwudike. This is not the play for you if you’re looking for steady auroras and sad prose. Ibsen (Stone’s version) is surprisingly funny, but not thoroughly convincing.

Have you ever wished to have the same auditory experience as a deer? Or maybe a cow? Now you can. Katie Mitchell partners with playwright Nina Segal and sonic artist Melanie Wilson to explore the world from the eyes – or, more accurately, ears – of the titular animals. It’s a crude reproduction of a day in their lives that de-centres humans from its narrative altogether. Cow | Deer is entirely wordless, unique in its genre and unlike anything you’ll see on a main stage. The leaflets handed out before the start encourage the audience to close their eyes and relax while they listen to “moments of a summer day in England”. You could do that, but you’d be missing all the fun of seeing live foley artistry.