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Review: THE AUTHENTICATOR, National Theatre
Eccentric artist Fenella Harford (Sylvestra Le Touzel) inherits her family’s stately home and uncovers a cache of hidden diaries that may rewrite its history. She recruits ambitious academic Marva (Rakie Ayola) to authenticate them, who in turn brings in her overlooked mentor Abi (Cherrelle Skeete), a meticulous expert with sharper instincts than she lets on. As the three women probe deeper into the documents, the house begins to yield uncomfortable truths about its colonial past. Personal histories begin to intertwine with national ones, tensions rise between the trio, and what starts as scholarly inquiry spirals into a confrontation with buried trauma, ownership, and the ghosts of Britain’s slave-trading legacy.
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Review: LIFELINE, Southwark Playhouse Elephant
Lifeline is the kind of play that feels as though it was composed with the help of a mindmap with one word circled in the centre, around which all parts of the drama must orbit. In this case, that word – or phrase, in fact – was ‘antibiotic resistance’.
