A Midsummer Night’s Dream with its self-punishing nobility making non-sensical and unmotivated cruel decisions towards their own children, its sickly sweet world-building of the fairy kingdom and the inevitable dishing up of the umpteenth clever clever twist on the play-in-the-play-in-the-play can be a hard text to like, if pure entertainment is not necessarily the reason […]
Tag archives: Reviews
The Encounter
This is just a quick note after reading some of the reviews for The Encounter. There are at least two pieces and quite a bit of social media buzz accusing Simon McBurney’s piece which he loosely adapted from Petru Popescu’s book Amazon Beaming of white blindness for colonial issues. One is Michael Billington who in passing […]
Oog
A figure on a chair. The right hand belongs to the right knee. We’ll get there in stages. First place the elbow but then it slips off the knee. Try again. Elbow onto the knee. Wait. Will it hold? No. Again. Again. Again. This is ugly and disturbing to watch in a way that means […]
Hangmen
Did you find that funny? Heaving a collective sigh of relief after the recent by-election in Oldham (the place just north of Manchester in which Martin McDonagh’s new play is set) there is, with some, still the bad aftertaste of having only narrowly avoided a renewed surge of ugly UKIP-led chauvinism. And it is indeed […]