Clementine Scott - Page 5

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.

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.