By Malin Nilssen I enter the Drama Barn to the smell of smoke and the sound of a female rapper producing a chill ambience. As I round the corner I feel as though I have walked into a student flat after everyone has left a party. This set the tone well for the cacophony of emotions and outbursts that were to follow in four people’s drunken, late-night talks. After a while, the play starts to feel like an extended sketch. I do not mean this in a negative way: it’s like someone

By Chloe D’Arcy Polly Stenham’s That Face first hit the stage in 2007 to great acclaim,  especially impressive considering it was Stenham’s debut. Now DramaSoc’s Ashley Milne has taken on the play for this weekend’s showcase (15-17 February). That Face is a play centred around family dynamics: Martha (Lucia Rimini) is the alcoholic mother spiralling into mental decline; Henry (James Chetwood) is the adoring son who drops out of school to care for his sick mother and gradually

By Isabelle Lepore Make Believe is a bittersweet blend of comedy and regret, a bit like chomping on a sour Haribo: enjoying the sweet acidity, you dive in for another, and another, till the packet is empty and your fingers are left sticky and plastered together with sugary crystals. I’m not saying you want to leave your audience needing a napkin, but you do want to leave them craving more. This is why bittersweet plays are often the most to difficult to pull off. Director Yuv

By Zara Stubbs Laura Wade’s Breathing Corpses opens in a hotel room, where a body is found tucked inside the bed. With the entrance of Amy, played by Jessy Roberts, the black humour that permeates the play is dramatically unveiled. Yet, the combination of a fantastic script and talented actors ensured a genuine thread of emotional vitality underpinned every interaction. The narrative then swings backwards, its non-linear structure excellently managed as multiple strands inter

This weekend’s DramaSoc offering is Alan Bennett’s wildly popular The History Boys, which follows a group of Sheffield schoolboys in their pursuit of knowledge to gain places at Oxford and Cambridge. Ashleigh Thomson’s production, though a little slow at times, is well polished and features a handful of truly great performances. Bennett’s trademark verbosity can sometimes cause performances of his plays to drag as actors gently wade through his text, taking time to really sav

By Catherine Kirkham-Sandy I’m not going to make any jokes about 2016 and 2017 being, shall we say, unusual years, politically. Such jokes have been done to death, resurrected, then done to death all over again. Refreshingly, Yes, Prime Minister includes no heavy-handed references to the events of either year, though that is because the stage play was first performed in 2011. Nevertheless, Yes, Prime Minister is no less relevant to the first buds of 2018; with its funny and i

Sex is undisputably a political tool at the behest of men to denigrate, fetishise, and codify female bodies in order to put some double glazing on that glass ceiling. Ellie Ward’s confident, colourful, and urgent production of Anna Jordan’s ‘Freak’ for Dramasoc is a big ‘fuck you’ to male ownership of female bodies. Well it is, and it isn’t. To characterise the show in terms of, and only in terms of its prominent feminist message is to hold female artistic production up to ye

By Catherine Kirkham-Sandy Students make a lot of bad decisions, but Dr Faustus, a scholar at Wittenberg, really takes the biscuit. And then sets the biscuit on fire. You might have pulled an all-nighter or missed deadlines this term, but at least you didn’t (100% soberly) sell your soul to Lucifer in exchange for powers which you then wasted on pranking people. That may seem a flippant way of looking at Marlowe’s masterpiece, but this all-female production revels in all the

By Bertie Ford To say that Will Adamsdale’s play is of the unconventional sort would be a gross understatement, but in adapting this modern show for the barn, director Leo Clasen has successfully envisioned a quirky and nuanced show that entertains and surprises its audience at every turn. Robyn Aitchison gives an ingratiating and highly likeable performance as Guy, the procrastinating writer who can’t seem to do anything right, contrasting quite hilariously with Jon Derrick’

By Katie Sharp Renowned for being a script not touched with a bargepole by even the most experienced of directors, the announcement that Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis was to be the Week 4 Barn show left me apprehensive, yet nervously hopeful that the outcome of this daring choice would be well received. Kane’s originally ‘free-form’ play contains no directly explicit characters, narrative or stage directions, and explores themes of severe depression, mania, psychosis and abuse;

By Catherine Kirkham-Sandy Returning from a eating disorder clinic, Dani (Sophie Lorraine Parkin) is aimless, hating her school and home life with equal measure, (perhaps a leaf out of The Silver Linings Playbook?) . She starts a tepid sexual relationship online with a well-meaning but charmless basement-dweller, Lewis (Ed Foster). Wanting to walk on the wild side, she starts an unconventional friendship with another man she met online: Tim. Tim was a teacher. Tim loves liter