ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
Latest editorial
Lack of edge disappoints
The play’s quaintness makes it an odd choice for innovative theatre, writes MAYER WAKEFIELD
Barbara Flynn and Robin Soanes as Grandad Bert
[Alex Brenner]
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, and John Luther Adams
GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
We Started to Sing
Arcola Theatre
DALSTON’S Arcola is one of London’s last fringe theatres to reopen its indoor space after two dark years.
They welcome back writer, and in this case also director, Barney Norris to his theatrical home, having had his debut Visitors and its follow-up Eventide staged in the old paint factory in the mid-2010s.
His latest work is perhaps the most evidently personal play I’ve ever seen. In it, he reimagines interactions between his parents and grandparents — “a study of the people whose lives led to mine,” as he writes in his intro.
Similar stories
WILL STONE is frustrated by a performance that chooses to garble the lyrics and drown the songs in reverb
MAYER WAKEFIELD is gripped by a production dives rapidly from champagne-quaffing slick to fraying motormouth
MAYER WAKEFIELD recommends a musical ‘love letter’ to black power activists of the 1970s
MARY CONWAY revels in the Irish American language and dense melancholy of O’Neill’s last and little-known play