Cindy Marcolina - Page 22

My Father’s Nose is a surprisingly heartwarming show about death and moving on. Douglas Walker’s comedy is shaped with hilarious non-humour and eccentric irony. His sorrow is mirrored by the stranger’s sympathy in a well-rounded journey into irrational fears and comical anecdotes. Walker offers a poetic view of life and dementia, comparing Alzheimer’s disease to a locked cupboard in an astonishing image. Everything is in there, his dad just can’t open it.

All in all, it’s not a great play, but it’s also not a particularly bad one either. It’s tentatively poetic but commonplace, with a dash of humdrum personal reflection in the mix. Jealousy, love, pain, bereavement, it’s a to-do list of life.

What seems like a silly little comedy about millennial dread at first becomes a pointedly anti-Tory invective in Louis Rembges’s Chatham House Rules. It’s a production for the chronically online, anti-Brexit internet addicts, and those who simply want to have a laugh before they’re thrown into a vortex of political revenge. The zillennial experience is summed up with funny videos that ease its constant doom. Full of viral references and deliciously cynical, the monologue deftly handles poetic interiority and iconic dark humour.

Box Tale Soup adapt MR James’s ghost story into a play that has the same dark feel of a Penny Dreadful episode. Elegantly directed by Adam Lenson and featuring impressive puppetry and stage tricks, it’s a production of outstanding craft and storytelling.

Zach Hawkins is incredible with Ryan’s exuberant resignation. He waltzes through the flowing stream of consciousness with ease, handling the final shift in tone with depth and reflection.

Funny and distinctively Beckettian, Deuteronomy is about everything and nothing. The two men tackle the meaning of life, eternal damnation, and heavenly salvation the same way they discuss the differences between apples and peaches.

Ambling between cheaply crafted stock characters and expanding only the lesser interesting ones, the project needs work desperately. The topic has the potential to make for a provocative and arresting comic drama about the fallout of the system, but, so far, it doesn’t show it.

At this stage, it might be a bit wobbly, but promises great potential. It’s a portrait of toxic masculinity and female empowerment, a personal reflection of the horrors experienced during the regime. Mostly, it’s genuinely amusing. Alminas spins a yarn full of peculiar characters and relentless social commentary. She just needs to tinker it appropriately.

Written and directed by Luke Thornborough, this production hails from New Zealand with wit and charm, offering a bleak look into survival. After empty chit-chat about embarrassing music and food, the two characters dig into spirituality and science. Kat Glass and Courtney Bassett give stellar performances in a production that could be trimmed slightly for the benefit of its pace. It’s a contemporary space Odyssey.

It’s so rare to be surrounded by the complete absence of light, that part alone is a treat in itself. Truthfully, it’s slightly alarming at the start, but once you relax into it, you’ll come to appreciate all the different elements that make the production and the absolute brilliance of the company. To be able to tug at a person’s deepest instincts is an astounding success.

A collection of funny characters accompanies Sophie as she discovers her where she comes from. Directed by Rob van Vuuren and boasting a number of awards in their native country, Île is a good-hearted look at what makes us, us.

Abridged from Eileen Atkins’s play, the four-hander shows the visceral longing shared by the two women. With strands of personal letters and diary entries, they cross the thin lines between admiration, affection, and attraction.

The Titanic has been in the news quite a lot this year with its endlessly fascinating, tragic story. When a third-class passenger accosts the chairman of the White Star Line as he tries to spot his family on the quay before the crossing, an unlikely friendship starts. One a reverent from Scotland, the other a well-bread gentleman who’s proud of the work he’s done.

Pretentiously meta and absolutely bland, the piece is a paceless trudge. While the character alludes to sexual misconduct, by the end we still don’t know what happened. It’s not suspenseful, it’s merely frustrating.

Truly Siskind-Weiss’s father died when she was ten years old. Since then, her life has been divided by that watershed. In a tender monologue where she tries to make sense of death, Siskind-Weiss mourns the person she could have been. Grown up too quickly but still treated like a child, she now yearns for a simpler time when she could simply be reliant on someone.

It’s all a bit chaotic and disorganised narratively, with an unfortunate lack of poetry in the text itself. While Malseed takes an individual approach to her story, she doesn’t really say much of what lies behind the events. Belfast is painted like a dangerous city, but the causes for that are left up in the air.

What did our critic think of OH MY HEART, OH MY HOME at Summerhall?

It’s Midsummer’s Eve, and a young man is ready to plunge into the Thames to make his sacrifice. As we stand alongside him, we dive into British mythology and pagan beliefs as he goes on a journey defined by backhandedly bitter irony. Nathaniel Jones writes an ancient fable suspended in time, addressing the lies we tell ourselves in our attempts to romanticise our memory.

A deeply intimate performance by Robyn Hunter peels off the layers of bereavement and explores the reactive coping mechanisms we get wrapped up in. With effortless observational humour and a sadness only broken by bitterness, the piece unravels the fragmentation of the grieving experience through the eyes of a young woman.

It’s a very American coming-of-age story. The script follows all the correct beats and the direction tackles the necessary points for it to be a well-paced and flowing piece of theatre, but the characters are walking clichés. Everything is done abnormally by the book, including the performances by the budding actors. It’s high-energy and quick, but it doesn’t say much. Szymkowicz covers angst and anger, attraction and pettiness, grief and overcoming it.