By Katherine Baird The performance festival SLAP is a brilliantly accessible opportunity to express new and exploratory art, and The Faun Project certainly does both. A collaborative work between choreographers (award-winning Beth Cassani and Joseph Mercier of the performance company PanicLab) it succeeds in being cognitively and aesthetically engaging, a sociological spectacle that seeks to speak with you rather than at you. As the audience files into the intimate studio spa

By Aisling Lally According to the show’s description, Ali Matthews (the solo performer and creator of The Ballad of Isosceles) “weaves participatory experiences out of text, song and scenographic environment that are designed to play with certain ‘difficult affects including intimacy, distance, desire and alienation”. Delivering a new myth explaining the origins of the forgotten tenth muse Envy, Matthews does just that in a short 30-minute piece. She performs original songs f

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 Rose Mckean With Doll on the mic and Ted on backing vocals, Epic Love and Pop Songs tells the intertwined narrative of two lost teenagers, caught in a storm of lies and familial disorder. Armed with a carefully cultivated attitude and a baby bump that demands attention, Doll drags us through her unravelling tale. What begins as a comedic spin on the familiar teen pregnancy trope gradually unfurls into a more nuanced depiction of internalised trauma. Director Eleanor Hibber

By Heather Reeve Not a play for the faint of heart, this week’s Dramasoc production was as good as it was depressing. Death of a Salesman centres around the lives of Willy Loman (Caidraic Heffernan), his wife Linda (Yasmin Roe), and their two sons Biff (James Melville) and Harold, “Happy” (James Chetwood), specifically Willy’s mental decline; as he lies and deceives himself in order to conceal his disappointment and guilt about his life and his sons. Meanwhile, his family str

By Chloe D’Arcy Sophocles’ Antigone is one of the most well-known Greek tragedies. The play features the aftermath of the incestuous union of Oedipus with his own mother, Jocasta: in Antigone, Creon (Jocasta’s brother) takes over as King of Thebes after Antigone’s brothers Eteocles and Polyneices both die fighting each other for the throne. Creon decides to properly honour Eteocles with burial rites, but leave Polyneices out “for the dogs” in an act of public humiliation. Thi

By Malin Nilssen Hekabe is Anne Carson’s translation of Euripides’ tragedy Hecuba, a story that takes place just after the Trojan War as the Greeks head home. It depicts Hekabe, queen of the fallen city of Troy, grieving for the many losses she suffered in and after the war, with the last loss of her son Polydorus setting her up for revenge. Carson’s translation gives women as a group and their choices the stage. TFTV’s production focuses on the suffering of the play’s women

By Catherine Kirkham-Sandy Bob (James Chetwood) and Jeff (Cullum Ball) are partners in both love and work. Problem: Jeff has no relatives, and Bob has too many, all of them eccentric. His mother Vera (Ellie Walpole) is tactless and, if not a full blown citizen of Cloud Cuckooland, at least a regular visitor. As you might expect in a play from 1992, she has no idea that her son might have a permanent reason for not wanting a girlfriend. Bob’s shrewd, sarcastic sister Lois (Lau

By Nayomi Karthigesu Without a word of warning, the piece by Fizz Margereson jumps straight into a performance about sexual harassment. A fluid fusion of dance, drama and direct activism it recounts “one character’s” tale of sexual harassment through day and night. It is poignant, it is emphatic, and most importantly it is relatable. The piece can be split into four distinct parts, the structure of which resembles the formatting of a pop song – perhaps to mimic the commonalit

By Alexander Smith This compelling double bill in the Friargate Theatre brought the audience in close contact with the actors and produced an intimate performance experience. The first on the bill was ‘The Yorkshire Tragedy;’ a concise piece often attributed to Shakespeare, that recounts the descent of a greedy father into madness. Its culmination in the heinous murder of his infant sons is offset by the morally virtuous characters surrounding him and attempting to sway him f

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 Ellie Ward Halloween is nearly upon us. Pumpkins are waiting to be carved, daylight hours are diminishing with frightening frequency, and on every token costume rail that has sprung up in most corner shops and supermarkets, there swings a pair of plastic, glow in the dark fangs. Of course, these fangs are emblematic of the vampire, one of the most  prominent figures in the collection of creatures our culture deems seriously spooky. Just think of the success of the netflix

‘About walls’ would be selling Amphibious a bit short on numerous levels. As part of TakeOver Festival 2017, it technically was about the theme of walls, but Julia Levai’s increasingly distinctive and consistently enjoyable style paired with a talented cast and crew has made an ebullient piece of theatre that avoids being pinned down quite so simply. And, to put it bluntly, it was a great time. The play generally followed the fictional Amphibious Company’s ‘Guide for Interns’

By Lucia Rimini ‘Imagine rolling the dice 6,000 times’. This line, delivered by Marianne, one of the two central characters in Nick Payne’s Constellations, perhaps best encapsulates the central idea of this play, in which the two characters live out multiple possible versions of various instances in their lives, each prompting the audience to consider the infinite possibilities of each scenario. Directed by Thomas Leadbeater and Amy Noriko Ward for the Squabbling House Theatr

By Joe McNeice It seems that in recent times, contemporary plays by young writers have regularly occupied The Barn’s weekend slots. Whilst there is a lot of merit in seeing current texts performed with the youthful charge of university students taking on these roles, the change in tempo offered up by Playhouse Creatures, an historical comedy by April de Angelis and this weekend’s DramaSoc production, was a rare treat that far too seldom gets a look-in. It might be true that a

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

By Ellie Ward As I settled into my seat in TFTV’S black box theatre yesterday evening, I had a flick through the programme that had been carefully placed on my seat. Apparently, David Barnett has a confession to make. He is not a great fan of “The Crucible”, Arthur Miller’s 1953 play. Despite this, or rather, because of this, “The Crucible” is the very piece of theatre that Barnett has chosen to direct as part of his ongoing Brecht in Practise project, supported by actors and

We caught up with Caitlin Burrows and Leo Jarvis mid-rehearsal,to ask about their experience of playing leading roles in this unique, Brechtian production of Woyzeck. Who do you play and you can tell us a little bit about them and their relationship to each other? Leo: I play Woyzeck, the main guy who is completely mental. He’s a soldier in the army and is slowly going insane after the experiments the doctors have done on him. He has quite a stormy relationship with his partn