Arifa Akbar

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Arifa Akbar

There is never a time when Arthur Miller’s play about a world turned upside down by collective hysteria and scapegoating does not bear some resonance. But the present moment – of dangerously disputed truths and lies – is an especially pertinent moment to revisit Miller’s analogy between accusations of witchcraft and McCarthyist terror. This production is faithful to the original 17th-century setting, amid the heat and panic of the Salem witch trials.

2 weeks ago | msn.com | Arifa Akbar

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2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Arifa Akbar

Ibrahima Balde’s life story is just extraordinary on the page. Brought to life in a bestselling memoir written with Basque poet Amets Arzallus Antia, it follows his trek from Guinea, west Africa, as a teenager, across the Sahara and Mediterranean to Europe as he goes in desperate search of his runaway younger brother. A story about the horrors of migration, it has so many gut-punch moments alongside flashes of levity that it should make for dramatic viewing on stage.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Arifa Akbar

Three men are gathered in an online forum to speak of women as cunts, bitches and “Beckys”. These are “incels”, who boast a coded vocabulary of hate and valorise male celibacy. That is, until a fourth man among them has sex. The opening scene is the morning after and the woman he spent the night with stands hovering behind his laptop. Cuckboy (Fiachra Corkery) and fellow incels Ghost (GoblinsGoblinsGoblins) Crusher (Jackson Ryan) and Einstain (Jimmy Kavanagh)are volubly and virulently anti-women.

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Arifa Akbar

There is nothing like impending death to concentrate the mind on life. Certainly not for Harold Fry, the Bunyanesque modern-day everyman who goes out to post a letter to his terminally ill, long-lost friend and ends up hiking 500 miles to say goodbye to her in person. Harold (Mark Addy), middle-aged and mournful, leaves his Devon home and his distant, disenchanted wife, Maureen (Jenna Russell), to go to the post office.