Clementine Scott - Page 4

This David Copperfield is far more than a cheap facsimile of its source material. There is room here for all the observational humour of Dickens’ writing, but also for all the pains and lessons of growing up.

Few Shakespeare plays have received the ‘updated for the current political moment’ treatment more than Julius Caesar. In Petty Men, though, our Roman dictator-for-life is not a Trumpian autocrat, but a BAFTA-winning actor.

If you’ve ever worked a remote job, and been strapped for cash, you’ll recognise the temptation to take on additional casual work on the side. Isley Lynn and Libby Rodliffe take this concept to its extreme in their one-woman show, Jobsworth.

Here are all the hallmarks of any good Shakespearean comedy: love polygons, gender trouble and a shipwreck to get things going. However, in Handel’s Partenope there is one crucial difference: everyone here is self-aware.

What do we do when the world is falling apart around us? We sing. Cloying though that sentiment may be, in the hands of the team of five devisers behind Precipice, it’s anything but.

You’d be hard pressed to find a more striking opening outfit in a play than #FATKARY: The Corrido of a Tragic Ex-Fat Woman. Performer and writer Caridad Gómez dons a fat suit exaggerated to comical absurdity, her face mostly covered in the manner of a lucha libre fighter and her body obscured by what looks like layers upon layers of Cath Kidston cushions. Clad in something so cartoonish, Gómez encourages us to see her not quite as a real person, but as a caricature or a bogeyman, who can’t quite connect with her audience directly.

There’s something of Heartstopper to the design of Barrier(s), pastel sketches of suburban living rooms and nervous texts to a crush etched out lovingly on the projector. On this occasion, though, those charmingly awkward texts have a practical function as well as an aesthetic one, because Barrier(s) is performed mostly in British Sign Language.

Romeo a Juliet does not make any of its political points overtly, and this is an occasion where some things are better left unsaid, without cheap gimmicks. With nothing made explicit, the audience comes away reflecting on their own use of language and dialect in their daily life, as well as on how over 500 years later, new eyes on Shakespeare can still make desperately overdone texts feel brand new.

In Sheffield, the self-proclaimed “lesbian capital of the North”, a revolution is coming. The freedom fighters in question are a group of lesbian mechanics, loosely based on the real life Gwenda’s Garage, a lesbian-owned garage named after pioneering racing driver Gwenda Stewart that became a hub for 1980s feminist activism.

If you’re one of the lucky few to be seated on the stage during new one-hander Wyld Woman, you’ll be treated to a close-up of US writer-performer Isabel Renner acting out some of the worst sex you’ve ever seen (one particular metaphor about Covid tests sticks in the mind). You’ll also hear her delivering, to you personally, the kind of heartbreaking confessions usually only reserved for the closest of friends.

During the interval at Crocodile Fever’s London premiere, we’re all rushed out of the Arcola auditorium a little quicker than we would be normally. This is because the set needs to be doused in blood in preparation for the Tarantino-esque revenge fantasy in the second act, where two sisters deal with the aftermath of hacking off the legs of their abusive father.

Many a recent headline has luxuriated in Gen Z becoming one of the largest demographics at church services in the UK – we’re the ones who made the papal conclave go viral, after all. Fitting then, that the latest voice-of-a-generation one-hander to transfer from the Edinburgh Fringe is about a young woman who becomes a vicar.

Both director and designer have slightly too many ideas about what the show could be, and what is left is unresolved potential.

Some Soho Theatre audience members at My English Persian Kitchen over the next month may be more enticed by what comes after the show than by the show itself. That’s because Hannah Khalil’s one-woman show has the distinction of featuring onstage cooking.

Lee Krasner has now received her flowers, with major retrospectives at the Barbican among other European galleries in recent years, but it wasn’t always that way. Cian Griffin’s new play Lee does more than merely drag her out from behind her husband Jackson Pollock’s shadow, but uses her story to inspire compelling reflections on the notion of artistic legacy.

Once the provocative point has been made, that violence against the planet and against women are one and the same, Uprooted seems unsure of where to go next.

This is rich, layered writing on mental illness which avoids tired cliches of germaphobes forever washing their hands.

A biracial actor stands in the harsh glare of the spotlight, about to recite the St Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, clad in a bulletproof vest. Her gaze defiant, she unfurls the flag of St George’s Cross. English Kings Killing Foreigners is a play largely about probing the complexities of that image.

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.