That you could turn 1984 into a seriously comic story is one surprising aspect of the Blind Summit Theatre’s premiere production of the Orwell classic. That you could play Charrington and Goldestein with puppets and make that make glorious sense is another. And when you add quite the oddest, but possibly most effective, sex scene you’re likely to see on stage in many a year into the mix, then this is a production that delivers the unexpected.

That it also delivers a polished, entertaining, gripping evening is a tribute to director Mark Down, puppet designer Nick Barnes and a fine acting team.

There have been many attempts to stage and film 1984, and few have been successful. Really, this is a book about what goes on in Winston Smith’s head – and that’s not easy to put on the stage.

The challenge is centrally overcome here by the use of a chorus – which sets the scene and carries the stories, and the thoughts, along. It marches for Hate Day, it dances obediently to Big Brother’s tune, it sings patriotic songs, it is the puppet-master – and it never leaves the stage. Even when Julia goes to light a gas flame in Winston’s “secret” room, the “flames” are the dancing fingers of a chorus member. And then there’s that sex scene – Winston and Julia’s first meeting in his “golden country” – in which the chorus manipulates their bodies. It sounds weird, but in fact it is an effective metaphor for the whole story unfolding before us.

Added to that central frame provided by the chorus are some fine, sophisticated conceits. This is – an old trope but in this case an effective one – a production within a production. We meet the cast on the bus on the way to the BAC, and they explain the staging, and announce each scene.

And there’s also a “staging” of Emmanuel Goldenstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by means of moving comic book – playing wittily off the current trend towards “comic book” versions of philosophical and political foundational texts.

The puppetry too is entirely self-conscious and upfront. A cardboard thrush is an odd conceit, so to a Goldenstein of head and hands that pops over a screen, yet both are curiously effective and affecting. And the spookily human-and-yet-not-human movement of Charrington, the junk shop owner who rents Winston a room, is something that will linger in my mind.
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by Natalie Bennett

Frida Kahlo was a wild, tempestous, brilliant woman whose art is truly mindblowing. Whilst I wouldn’t apply quite such strong adjectives to Frida Kahlo, Viva La Vida, Gael Le Cornec’s performance of Robert Robles play, which is based on fragments from the artist’s biography, letters, extracts from her diary and interviews, it captures enough of this explosive personality to make a gripping evening of theatre.

Le Cornec takes her character through the Day of the Dead, conjuring from scraps of cloth, from paper mache skulls and beloved objects characters from her past – above all her husband Diego Rivera — their dysfunctional relationship portrayed here with painful clarity — but also Breton, Trotsky and Rockefeller. Also stunningly portrayed are her love-hate relationships with Paris and New York, and her powerful drug addictions.

Le Cornec throws herself into the part. One second of self-doubt and this would dissolve into histrionics, but there isn’t one: whether she’s conducting an angry one-woman food fight with the soul of her dreadfully faithless dead husband, or cradling one of her unborn babes made from the fold of a scarf. She is a woman at war with her body, as her body is at war with her: scarred by horrific accident, wracked by drug addiction, struggling to hold herself together with the help of a torturing brace.
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by Natalie Bennett

You can do all sorts of things with Twelfth Night; there’s enough gender-bending and sexual innuendo to stir the imagination of the most jaded sociologist. Consequently, it’s often played for deep and meaningful significance, despite its innate “the lover has nipped out through the French windows” nature.

That’s not the case with this production: it’s a sexy romp, a lively rolic, deeper meanings be damned. And that makes for an entertaining evening, particularly in the second act, after the company rushes rather perfunctorarily through the early exposition.

This production is not going to help you much if you’ve got to write a second-year university essay on the deeper meanings of Shakespearean cross-dressing – the boy actor playing a woman playing a man – but you will laugh, will smirk, even if it may be that the most memorable image you’ll leave the evening with is a shoulder-top Don Quixote moment that sees Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Alexander Gunney) jousting the air.

Indeed, it is the physical high-jinks that the most memorable. Amelia Clay as Viola doesn’t make much impression in character or comedy, but her early vault onto the top of the grand piano that forms the curious but effective centrepiece of this production (turned around and about in ways to make a pianotuner wince) is notable.
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by Natalie Bennett

I’ve seen Macbeth in many guises: there was a space-age one set on a rocket in Sydney decades ago, a traditional production at the Sydney Opera House that used so much dry ice we nearly choked in the front row, and a terribly faithful in costume work set in the trenches of the Great War effort in London some years ago.

But I’ve never seen a Macbeth set in Depression-era America that started with a dance competition. There may be a reason for that – it just doesn’t quite work. Yes, there are a lot of plays at the moment dealing with the banking crash, the economic crisis et al, but trying to turn Shakespeare’s dramatic masterpiece to that subject really isn’t going to fly.

Overall, however, more goes right than wrong in the TheatreTroupe’s production at the White Bear Theatre. The Scottish play can go terribly astray, but here, leveraged around a strong performance by Matthew Jure in the lead role, is a show that generally grips, compels, engages.

It takes a little while to get used to a bearded, physically less than dominating Macbeth, and Jure never quite convinces as a warrior, but as a man teased, tormented and overwhelmed by temptation, he’s a powerful onstage force.

The other aspect of this production that’s outstanding is the witches – so often played to stereotype, but here conveyed through more-than-lifesized masks and puppetry. The menace is curiously uncartoonish, despite the manner of its production, and definitely has the audience shrinking back in their seats.
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by Natalie Bennett

If you were to categorise The Backroom as a play, “edgy romantic comedy” might well do it. It’s about emotions, about relationships, both sexual and platonic, and you could easily imagine it in many different settings. This one, however, just happens to be set in a gay brothel, focusing entirely on a small group of workers there, which does, you’d have to say, give it a certain edge…

Still, if you ignore that, what you have is a pretty standard storyline, of a new boy arriving into an established group. He upsets old alliances and allegiances, knocks off the top-dog, and generally causes a major realignment of relationships.

The new boy here is Charlie (Daniel Sharman), the young public schoolboy who has adopted the pseudonym Sebastian and is determined to make his way in the new world, along the way upsetting the strutting pretentions of the dim bodybuilder Dallas (Benedict Fogarty), who’s small fragments of brain would appear to be located in his biceps, possibly driven their by steroid intake.

The brainy one of the bunch is Sandy (Miles Mlambo), who’s also the most balanced, while also being vulnerable, desperate to a serious relationship.

Indeed it’s only Sandy and Charlie who are fully developed characters, the others being more sketched stereotypes, a trend most pronounced in Will Stokes’ Madonna, who’s heading further each day into crossdressing and maybe more.
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by Natalie Bennett

The names are familiar, more or less. The plot is that familiar mix of slapstick farce and dramatic magic. Yes this is certainly The Tempest, but it’s the Bard’s work with a twist: the embittered exiled former ruler of Milan is a duchess, not a duke.

For this is a woman’s world — the rulers, the sailors, the court are all female. The only male presence that of Mirundo: the soft, tender virgin flesh being offered here for a mother’s own purposes is male.

It’s an ambitious attempt by the young Good Night Out Presents company in the debuting venue of the Cock Tavern Theatre to find something new in the familiar. If the alchemy doesn’t entirely come off, it’s still a brave and interesting effort.

The greatest fault lies perhaps in the enormous ask being made of Prospera (Karen Paullada). To call on a young and inexperienced actor to play an embittered matriarch wielding magical powers who gradually rediscovers her humanity is asking rather a lot. Much more might be done too with Bella Westgarth’s Gonzalina in attempting to convey some real sense of age.

In the early part of the play I found myself almost grasping something deeper and more difficult in the work of adapter and director Simon Beyer – asking if it was me or society that was finding a “female Prospero” difficult? That’s not, however, a question that this production manages to sustain.
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