Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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Brief lives brave lockdown
MARY CONWAY recommends a touching short drama on people trying to connect during the pandemic
REAL: Miriam Margolyes
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
Watching Rosie
Original Theatre Online
SHORT plays are catching on at a time when brief snippets of other people’s lives add colour and vigour to enforced domesticity and Watching Rosie — a miniature close-up of life in lockdown — is a little gem.
Written by Louise Coulthard and benefiting from a star cast, it’s a gentle, touching conversation between Rosie and her dementia-prone Gran. While the former is anxious and strained, Gran is coping, in a bemused sort of way, with an enforced lockdown imposed on her by a government who see her as a prime Covid risk.
Only when the doorbell rings and Gran leaps to the door for company, is there a sense of her desperate aloneness, otherwise masked by disconnected chit-chat interspersed with startling moments when her grasp on reality takes a sudden nose-dive.
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