Clementine Scott - Page 3

Like much science fiction, US playwright Matthew Gasda’s Doomers has to contend with one crucial issue – how do we make sure that the dramatic stakes remain high, when nobody yet knows the end result of the technology driving the story? Doomers is concerned with where the balance is between progress in and regulation of AI, vaguely positing this as an issue without coming to any firm conclusions.

Lock a few theatre characters in a room together, sit them around a dinner table and they surely won’t leave without revealing a few hidden resentments, infidelities, or family secrets they thought they’d take to their graves. It’s a tried and tested dramatic formula, and one that’s hard to get right.

Even though the Finborough has been transformed into a lush 1920s drawing room, with emerald green walls and an intricately stuccoed fireplace, cloyingly nostalgic period piece this is not. In fact, AA Milne’s rarely performed 1921 play The Truth About Blayds is refreshingly unsentimental about years gone by, preferring to totally deconstruct the idea that we ever had it better in the past. In Milne’s universe, revered Victorian heavyweights were not the ‘great men’ of history, but complex mortals, maybe even frauds.

There’s something of the early feminist short story The Yellow Wallpaper to the conceit of Vermin – the escape from a marriage tainted by violence is found not outside the house, but inside it. Except, in this variation, there’s not a ghostly woman beckoning the repressed housewife to freedom from within the walls, but a coterie of feral, diseased rats.

So much ink has been spilled on the perilous joy of being young, but this new slice-of-life drama set in a deprived London suburb puts it better than most: youth is about always being “on the precipice of choice”.

‘What do you look for in faith?’ This is the question proclaimed by Italian performer Elena Mazzon in The Popess, before she launches upon unsuspecting audience members in search of individual responses. In a city where nearly a third of the population identify as atheist or agnostic, the reaction is as about as stone-faced as you would expect.

If you happen to be strolling around Piccadilly in the next couple of weeks, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled upon an arcane cult ritual – or perhaps an unusually urban episode of The Traitors.

‘This is Illyria,’ bellows the sea captain conveying the shipwrecked Viola to shore, in what is surely one of Shakespeare’s most straightforward opening lines. In Robin Belfield’s new production, that triumphant declaration serves as an introduction not just to Twelfth Night’s fictional Balkan setting, but also to the rich visual universe Belfield has conjured up onstage.

Marisha Wallace, Broadway’s current Sally Bowles, has had a career in New York and London marked by starring roles in musicals about women surviving tough circumstances. As we find out in her debut live recording, Live in London, her own life hasn’t been much different.

There’s a make-or-break moment towards the end of The Publicist, where Julia Pilkington’s titular PR professional stands trapped on a phone call between two rails of clothing, a TV producer and former friend berating her on one side, her client trying to severe their professional relationship on the other. It’s an inventive bit of staging, and emblematic of this work of new writing’s approach to portraying the incestuousness of the media industry, the way it eats itself from the inside.

This is a great opportunity to hear the breadth of Beethoven’s work performed in a novel way, and the drama does have its flashes of brilliance. In order to preserve these fleeting moments of conviction, though, Beethoven: I Shall Hear in Heaven needs to move away from tired biographical tropes and allow the composer’s music to speak for itself.

Saving Mozart has created an enticing musical and visual universe, and the culture of 18th century court musicians is promising territory for musical theatre. However, the show needs to decide if it’s Amadeus: The Musical or a feminist retelling of a well known story, rather than landing awkwardly somewhere in between.

There are no firm tabloid-headline conclusions to be found in Clive about how technology’s ruining our lives, or how younger generations don’t know how to speak to people, and the play is all the better, and more timeless, for it.

Once reliable Oscar bait, the classic “inspirational” biopic become something of a social media punchline in recent years. They all have the same familiar beats – the humble beginnings, the early setbacks, the internal tensions, and the rising from the ashes – and rarely say anything new or unique to their particular subjects. Maiden Voyage, a new musical charting the first all-female circumnavigation of the globe, is unfortunately not an exception to the rule.

101 Dalmatians is a solid retelling of a classic that feels life-affirming without being too sentimental. It’s a reliable choice for a family evening, that is, if you can get over those freakish dog puppets.

“What is it about this hotel room?” This is the question posed by a cast member of Echo, over halfway through the play, when we’ve been trapped inside a deliciously kitsch B&B, all lilac wallpaper and shag carpets, for over an hour. The effect is claustrophobic, somewhere between the Overlook Hotel from The Shining and the apartment from Rosemary’s Baby, and the horror doesn’t stop with the set design.

Sitting in the grand tradition of the ‘partner swap’ drama, 2015’s Four Play spoke to the LGBTQ+ community post-marriage equality, grappling with the desire to fit in in heteronormative suburbia versus the freedom to explore sexuality in a way that feels authentic. Now, in a new production directed by Jack Sain, the answers to the questions it poses seem more ambiguous than ever.

“Who cares what happened after?” This is the question posed by song cycle 35MM, which takes its structure from a series of photographs, each projected onto the back wall, and giving us a musical insight into a single moment, where nothing beforehand or afterwards matters – a breakup, the tender beginnings of romance, or on one occasion a parent wrangling their Satanic baby.

“What does a woman feel like?” Not an easy question for any woman, cis or trans, to answer, and Ugly Sisters, an Edinburgh Fringe transfer from transfemme production company piss / CARNATION, resists giving us any easy solutions, while also making the issue at hand feel more expansive than any reductive media culture war.

You could be forgiven for thinking that there isn’t much more to be said about Le nozze di Figaro, the most performed opera in Glyndebourne’s history. However, Mozart’s classic role subversion comedy is deceptive in its simplicity: beneath the farce and improbable plot twists is a complex web of power dynamics and social cues upended, and above all a libretto full of dry humour that’s striking in its timelessness.