Dzifa Benson - Page 2

New English Ballet Theatre, founded by artistic director Karen Pilkington-Miksa, has been on a mission to nurture and showcase young dancers and emerging choreographers since it launched seven years ago. In the intervening time, it has become synonymous with a visionary and thoroughly modern approach to making original touring pieces to present to the widest possible audience. This year, it returns to the Peacock Theatre with a double bill of sensitively pitched but contrasting pieces in Four Seasons and Remembrance.

If you go to see Alan Fieldan with JAMS' (which presumably stands for the names of the four actors, Jemima, Alan, Malachy and Sophie), Marathon at the Barbican, you'd do you well to remember an illuminating part of the blurb about the show:

It's been a long minute - over two decades, in fact - since acclaimed director Peter Brook, who is now 93 years old and has been called "our greatest living theatre director", helmed a play at the National Theatre. So this new production of The Prisoner which he has co-directed with his long-time collaborator Marie-Helene Estienne, has been long and hugely anticipated given that it may well be the last chance ever to see a Brook production at the National Theatre.

The boundary razing two-hander created and performed by Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R Sheppard Underground Railroad Game doesn't give too much of its own game away in the pre-show literature. From the first two words of the title, we can surmise that it has something to do with slavery but what does the word 'game' imply?

It isn't often that the trifecta of the writing, directing and acting of a play harmonise perfectly into a deeply satisfying whole, but when that happens - as it does in Milly Thomas's award winning one-person play Dust - it makes for a very thrilling 80 minutes of pure theatre.

The will-they-won't-they trope of the Beatrice/Benedick relationship in Much Ado About Nothing is so familiar to audiences that, even though it's staged repeatedly (the last time this reviewer saw it was at Shakespeare's Globe in March), the joy in watching it again is to see how much sparkle a new production can bring to the witty wordplay (these days that's called banter) of the warring lovers in Shakespeare's sunniest comedy.

As the lights fade up on stage in the Royal Festival Hall, nine figures lying supine and inert are revealed, along with a rack of clothes, rocks, silver pails of what appear to be soil and, most curiously, a suit of armour. Suddenly, everything comes to life, including the suit of armour.

The Dorfmann Theatre within the National Theatre complex is proving to be an even more versatile space than promised when it reopened after refurbishment in 2014.

Thirty years after composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and director Jonathan Moore's trailblazing opera Greek premiered at the ENO, it's apparent from this new production, part of Arcola Theatre's Grimeborn Opera Festival 2018, that it's lost none of the punchy, punk attitude that made it such an innovative tour-de-force.

In the programme notes for her darkly disturbing new play Spiral, Abigail Hood quotes a plea she discovered at the bottom of a free London newspaper: "Dear Steven, we love you, we miss you. We hope you found what you were looking for."

"What's the earliest memory you have of your father?" This is the question, among many, that sets off a process of enquiry into the state of the nation's masculinity and its concerns through the prism of fatherhood in the verbatim play Fatherland. Thrillingly staged, it muscles beyond its documentary origins to excavate beneath the surface of a typically reticent, bloke-y nonchalance with great aplomb.

The couple at the heart of the award winning writer Tim Cook's new play - Adam (Lee Knight) and Eve (Jeannie Dickinson) - inevitably calls to mind its biblical counterpart. They are a young, naive and aspiring couple who fell in love at first sight and who move to a countryside idyll in order to realise the full expression of newlywed bliss through the purchase of their first property together, raising a family and living happily ever after in their own version of Eden.

The programme notes that accompany celebrated choreographer Hofesh Shechter's latest production, Show, are just as sparse as the title is nondescript. The most that can gleaned about what the performance might constitute is contained in three small words: comedy, desire and murder.