Cindy Marcolina

Life doesn’t stop when 15-year-old Ollie’s mum dies suddenly. Ollie Maddigan’s autobiographical one-man play returns to London after a shower of praise around the country. The Olive Boy tells the story of a young boy attempting to navigate grief and an estranged father against a tsunami of adolescent hormones. Forced to move to the big city and change schools, he decides that his next step is to get a girlfriend. Directed by Scott Le Crass, Maddigan delivers an intense 75-minute rollercoaster of a performance.

London, 1970s. The media explode: a vampire roams the streets of Highgate. Bag of Beard Theatre bring their own brand of dark humour to one of London’s most baffling 20th-century frenzies. They reimagine the events, teaming up a bishop and a tobacconist – purity and sin – in a crusade against evil.

Co-Artistic Director of the RSC Daniel Evans brings to life one of Roald Dahl’s most darkly beloved children’s books in an utterly thrilling adaptation by Tom Wells. 

Considered the first Irish “state of the nation” play, it’s now turned into a historical vignette imbued with hoarse black comedy. Its long placid rests are interrupted regularly by blazes of humorous energy: it entertains, but the pacing is slightly too slow for it to be full-on engaging. It’s a worthy curiosity.

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.