October 2013 Theatre Picks

6th-25th October

Vibrant 2013 A Festival of Theatre Playwrights at the Finborough Theatre, London. In it's fifth year, with a great range of plays from an alternate reality musical to a new verbatim translation. See them here before they get hit the big time.

Joy!

It was Brecht, the incorrectly labelled poster boy of all things serious and educational who said that 'theatre needs no other passport than fun, but this it has got to have'. I very rarely find myself seeking out unadulterated fun or joy at the theatre. In this cynical, recession dipped world, joy feels a bit naive and irrelevant or, in the hands of the middle classes, a bit smug, much like a Richard Curtis film.

Why are we so embarrassed about talking about art?

We are sat in a circle in the beautifully cavernous Brighton Dome corn exchange, the survivors of a long day of talking, listening and exchanging. We were there for Devoted and Disgruntled, Improbable Theatre's established Open Space conference, to ask and answer the question 'What are we going to do about theatre?'

A Doll's House - Duke of York Theatre, London (Young Vic Theatre Production)

This morning, I was sent a link to a razor sharp blog post by Australian broadcaster, Helen Razer entitled 'We do not make change by asking for praise about our twats, mams or makeup-free faces'. Within it she complains about feminism's change in direction, or as she calls it feminism's 'mutant daughter'.

Biding Time (Remix) - Summerhall, Edinburgh

This review was first published on The Public reviews.

Now that music as a product has been made redundant, live performance has reclaimed its rightful place as music’s home. Which makes the concept behind Biding Time (remix) seem necessary; a  hybrid between a gig and theatre, devised by a Band called Quinn, fronted by the ridiculously sexy Louise Quinn and director and writer team Ben Harrison and Pippa Bailey.

Breaking News, Summerhall, Edinburgh.

This review was first published on the public reviews.

Iceland has a reputation for producing art that is a little whimsical in nature, not to everyone’s tastes, but this reviewer is a big fan of Icelandic design, music, people and the accent. Not that there were any accents in Breaking News, created by London and Reykjavik based visual theatre company VaVaVoom.

Hag - Underbelly, Edinburgh

This review was first published on the public reviews.

We all know the rules of fairytales. You can’t have light without dark, you can’t have a hero without a villain. Baba Yaga, the narrator of The Wrong Crowd’s new show, Hag is certainly a villain. She likes to eat children, in fact she likes nothing better than tucking into a plate of child’s intestine.

Squally Showers - Zoo Southside, Edinburgh

This review was first published on the public reviews.

‘Isn’t it rich? Isn’t is queer?’, Sondheim once pondered, his lyrics ringing out from the soundtrack of  kitsch classics and dynamic synthesizers accompanying Little Bulb’s new dance show Squally Showers. He could certainly have been talking about Little Bulb, for what they lack in traditional dance skills they make up for in quirkiness.

The Islanders - Underbelly, Edinburgh.

This review was first published on The Public Reviews.

If you were a teenager in the nineties, the world of The Islanders will be familiar to you. A time when digital watches were cutting edge, making mixtapes was the meaning of true love and you shopped at second hand shops, not vintage stores.

The Love Project - Underbelly, Edinburgh

This review was first published on The Public Reviews.

If your favourite bits of the film When Harry met Sally are those gorgeous idiosyncratic scenes when the old couples reminisce about how they met, then you will thoroughly enjoy The Love Project, a charming verbatim play about love.